Phoenix, Arizona

• 1. Introduction

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  Phoenix, Arizona stands as the fifth-most populous city in the United States, home to over 1.6 million people as of the 2020 census. It is the most populous state capital in the country, and the metropolitan area surrounding it holds an estimated 5.19 million residents. But the numbers alone do not tell the story of how a desert farming settlement founded in 1867 became one of America's most consequential cities. What draws people to a place where the thermometer regularly climbs past 110 degrees Fahrenheit? How did a city built from the ruins of one ancient civilization become the engine of an entire region? And what happens when explosive growth collides with a desert that has already seen one civilization collapse from drought? Those are the questions that follow Phoenix wherever it goes.

• 2. The Hohokam and Their Heirs

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  For roughly 2,000 years before any European set foot in the Salt River Valley, the Hohokam people made the desert bloom. They engineered approximately 135 miles of irrigation canals, turning arid land into farmland capable of supporting a complex civilization. Their reach extended well beyond the valley: they traded with the nearby Ancestral Puebloans, the Mogollon, and the Sinagua, and maintained connections with far more distant Mesoamerican civilizations. Then, sometime between 1300 and 1450, a combination of severe drought and catastrophic flooding is believed to have driven them out. The land did not stay empty for long. Groups of Akimel O'odham, known commonly as Pima, along with the Tohono O'odham and the Maricopa, moved in to work the valley that the Hohokam had abandoned. The Akimel O'odham maintained their own well-defined irrigation systems stretching across the Gila River Valley, from Florence in the east all the way to the Estrellas in the west. Their crops included corn, beans, and squash, along with cotton and tobacco. The Maricopa, who had migrated east from the lower Colorado and Gila Rivers in the early 1800s after falling out with other Yuma peoples, allied with the Akimel O'odham against raids by the Yuma and Apache. The paths of those original Hohokam canals, abandoned for centuries, would later form the physical foundation for the Arizona Canal, the Central Arizona Project Canal, and the Hayden-Rhodes Aqueduct.

• 3. Founding a City from Ruins

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  Jack Swilling, a Confederate veteran of the Civil War who had been prospecting near the mining town of Wickenburg, rode through the Salt River Valley in 1867 and saw potential where others saw only desert. He noticed the eroded mounds of earth that betrayed the presence of old canals, evidence that someone had farmed this land before. That same year, Swilling formed the Swilling Irrigation and Canal Company, dug a major canal drawing water from the Salt River, and planted crop fields in an area that now lies within the eastern portion of central Phoenix near its airport. Lord Darrell Duppa, one of the original settlers in Swilling's party, proposed the name Phoenix, arguing it described a city born from the remnants of a prior civilization. On the 4th of May 1868, the board of supervisors in Yavapai County formally recognized the town. Swilling himself became its first postmaster the following month. By October 1870, the valley's growing population needed more room. Residents chose a new site three miles to the west, and lots began selling under the Phoenix name in December of that year. That decision established the downtown grid that has defined the city's layout ever since. On the 12th of February 1871, the territorial legislature carved Maricopa County out of Yavapai County; the first election for county sheriff that year produced a result only Phoenix could manage. The two opponents of winner Tom Barnum fought a duel, Chenowth killed Favorite, and both challengers were removed from the race. By 1875, the town had a telegraph office, 16 saloons, and four dance halls. On the 25th of February 1881, Governor John C. Fremont signed the Phoenix Charter Bill, formally incorporating Phoenix as a city with roughly 2,500 residents.

• 4. Water, Steel, and Statehood

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  President Theodore Roosevelt signed the National Reclamation Act in 1902, and the first dam built under that law was Salt River Dam No. 1, begun in 1903. When Roosevelt attended the official dedication on the 18th of May 1911, he was looking at the largest masonry dam in the world at the time. It supplied both water and electricity, becoming the first multi-purpose dam of its kind. The dam was renamed in Roosevelt's honor in 1917, and the lake it formed would follow suit in 1959. Phoenix became a state capital on the 14th of February 1912, when Arizona was admitted to the Union as the 48th state under President William Howard Taft. The timing carried a particular irony: just six months earlier, Taft had vetoed a congressional resolution granting Arizona statehood because he objected to the state constitution's position on the recall of judges. In 1913, Phoenix switched from a mayor-council government to a council-manager system, placing it among the first American cities to operate that way. The railroad had already transformed the city's commercial reach in the 1880s, and the arrival of the Santa Fe, Prescott and Phoenix Railway in 1895 tightened Phoenix's connections to communities throughout the northern territory. The Phoenix Chamber of Commerce had been organized on the 4th of November 1888, moving into new city hall offices on Washington and Central that same year along with the territorial government, which had just relocated from Prescott. Eight years after statehood, the population stood at 29,053.

• 5. Growth, Heat, and Inequality

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  Former President Calvin Coolidge dedicated a dam on the Gila River named in his honor on the 4th of March 1930, but the reservoir behind it was virtually dry after a long drought. Humorist Will Rogers, on hand as a guest speaker, remarked: "If that was my lake, I'd mow it." The city had already coined a more flattering label for itself: "The Valley of the Sun," an advertising slogan invented in the 1930s to attract tourists. Phoenix's population nearly doubled during the 1920s and reached 48,118 by 1930. The pace of that growth accelerated dramatically after World War II. Men who had completed their military training at air force fields and pilot training camps around Phoenix returned with their families and settled permanently. Motorola arrived in 1948 to build a research and development center for military electronics; companies including Intel and McDonnell Douglas followed. Advances in air conditioning through the 1950s made the city's extreme summers bearable enough to sustain mass housing construction. More new construction went up in Phoenix in 1959 alone than in the entire period from 1914 to 1946. That growth, however, was sharply unequal. Phoenix's expansion took place almost entirely on the city's north side, a neighborhood that was nearly all Caucasian. In 1962, a local activist testified before a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hearing that of 31,000 homes recently built in that neighborhood, not one had been sold to an African-American. African-American and Mexican-American residents remained largely confined to the south side of town. The dividing line was so hard that no one north of Van Buren Street would rent to Willie Mays, the baseball star in town for spring training in the 1960s. A 1964 reporter for The New Republic described the split bluntly: "Apartheid is complete. The two cities look at each other across a golf course."

• 6. The Desert City's Extremes

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  Phoenix holds a particular distinction in the world of climate: it receives more sunshine than any other major city on Earth, logging 3,872 hours of bright sunshine annually. Average summer high temperatures are the hottest of any major American city. On average, 111 days each year see highs of at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and highs above 110 degrees occur an average of 21 days per year. On the 26th of June 1990, the temperature reached an all-time recorded high of 122 degrees Fahrenheit. July 2023 set a new threshold: Phoenix became the first major city in the United States to record an average monthly temperature above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, hitting a daily mean of 102.7 degrees for the month. That same month, the city endured an unprecedented streak of 31 consecutive days with highs at or above 110 degrees, running from the 30th of June through the 30th of July. The summer of 2024 pushed further still, recording 70 days with highs topping 110 degrees in a single year and a 113-day streak of daily highs above 100 degrees lasting from the 27th of May through the 16th of September. The urban heat island effect plays a direct role: pavement and buildings absorb the sun's heat and radiate it after dark, so the daily normal low temperature stays at or above 80 degrees Fahrenheit for an average of 74 days each summer. On the 19th of July 2023, at the peak of that 31-day streak, the city's overnight low temperature reached 97 degrees, setting a new record for the warmest daily low. Rainfall offers little relief, with an average annual total of just 7.22 inches recorded at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. On the 1st of June 2023, Arizona announced it would halt new housing development in the Phoenix metropolitan area that relies solely on groundwater, citing a predicted water shortfall.

• 7. Sports, Culture, and Crime

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  Sandra Day O'Connor, a Phoenix resident, was sworn in as the first female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court on the 25th of September 1981. The city named a federal courthouse after her, the Sandra Day O'Connor U.S. Courthouse, which opened in 2001 on Washington Street downtown. Phoenix's public life has not always run so smoothly. On the 16th of March 1963, Ernesto Miranda was arrested in Phoenix and charged with rape. The Supreme Court ruling that followed on the 13th of June 1966, Miranda v. Arizona, established the practice of issuing Miranda Warnings to all criminal suspects in the United States. In 1976, Arizona Republic writer Don Bolles was killed by a car bomb, widely believed to be a consequence of his investigative reporting on organized crime and land fraud. Bolles was the only reporter from a major U.S. newspaper to be murdered on U.S. soil because of a story he was covering. Max Dunlap was convicted of first-degree murder in the case. On the sports side, the Phoenix Suns were granted an NBA franchise in 1968 and lost the 1976 NBA Championship to the Boston Celtics in six games. The Arizona Diamondbacks, an expansion team that began play in 1998, defeated the New York Yankees in the 2001 World Series four games to three, making it the fastest an expansion team had ever won the title. The Arizona Cardinals, founded in Chicago in 1898, hold the distinction of being the oldest continuously run professional football franchise in the nation. Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa both visited the valley in 1987. The Musical Instrument Museum opened in 2010 featuring the largest musical instrument collection in the world. And in the spring of 1953, the first McDonald's franchise location to display the now-famous golden arches opened on the southwest corner of Central Avenue and Indian School Road, after Phoenix entrepreneur Neil Fox paid $1,000 for the rights in 1952, two years before Ray Kroc purchased the company.