{"id":307,"date":"2010-09-07T19:57:48","date_gmt":"2010-09-08T03:57:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/?p=307"},"modified":"2010-09-07T20:42:44","modified_gmt":"2010-09-08T04:42:44","slug":"arizona_march_24-30_2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/2010\/09\/07\/arizona_march_24-30_2010\/","title":{"rendered":"Arizona, March 24-30, 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another trip to Phoenix in March to visit Mom and Dad . . .<\/p>\n

We saw the Boyce Thompson Arboretum<\/a> in Superior:<\/p>\n

\"Boyce<\/p>\n

\"Boyce<\/p>\n

\"Cactus<\/p>\n

\"Cactus<\/p>\n

We also drove around Superior<\/a>, got Blizzards at Dairy Queen<\/a>, and drove there and back via US 60<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We went to a spring training game at Hohokam Stadium<\/a> in Mesa, where the Cubs play:<\/p>\n

\"Hohokam<\/p>\n

\"Lineups,<\/p>\n

\"Chicago<\/p>\n

\"Chicago<\/p>\n

We ate at several new spots — Binkley’s Restaurant<\/a> in Cave Creek was new for us, and was as great as we had heard it was going to be:<\/p>\n

\"Binkley's<\/p>\n

This is a really really tiny Sloppy Joe:<\/p>\n

\"Mini<\/p>\n

There is a lot of good food in the Phoenix area now, and a lot has opened in the last couple of years. Barrio Cafe<\/a>, Noca<\/a> and Tuck Shop<\/a> are all recommended. We also ate here<\/a> for breakfast.<\/p>\n

Phoenix spends a lot of time tearing down old crappy buildings and replacing them with new crappy buildings, but it was cool to see a couple of nice examples of reuse\/repurposing — Lola<\/a>, a coffee place which we always liked up on Central Avenue, recently opened in one of Downtown Phoenix’s older buildings and St. Francis<\/a> resurrected a relatively nondescript building on Camelback Road (more here<\/a>, but I thought I remember the server telling us it was once a bank — I myself can’t remember what it was). (Tuck Shop above sort of falls into this category, as well.)<\/p>\n

They’re busy obliterating Patriot Square in Downtown Phoenix for a new retail something-or-other. I wish it had occurred to me to take pictures of it a long time ago, because it was a really strange spot — located dead center in Phoenix at the city’s primo 0 East-0 West-0 North-0 South address, it was a space agey-looking horrible little public space. Public spaces in Phoenix, and in the desert Southwest in general, need to be conceived of in a different way than spots in places like the Northeast — it’s like that for a lot of perfectly understandable reasons: people drive, people have backyards, people gather for specific events and not necessarily just to loaf (if you want to see something ridiculous, go to Union Square on a summer weekend and check out all the people in bathing suits), etc., etc. The really nice public spaces in Phoenix are the “mountain parks” like Piestewa Peak and Camelback Mountain, both of which people actually patronize, as opposed to the East Coast-style squares city planners tried building. So suffice it to say, no one used Patriot Square. Or I guess some vagrants did, but as a true public space it was a total failure. (I’m skeptical that what they’re putting in there will be much better — big retail projects seldom seem to “save” neighborhoods and Downtown Phoenix has been slowly coming along through more small scale “organic” development, especially up near Roosevelt.) (On the other hand, it does seem like ASU’s big downtown campus has helped make the area a little more lively, too, so I guess it just depends what large project you’re talking about .) Anyway, I couldn’t get Patriot Square, so I did the next best thing — Hance Park\/Deck Park<\/a> just up the street:<\/p>\n

\"Margaret<\/p>\n

\"Margaret<\/p>\n

\"Burton<\/p>\n

Hance Park\/Deck Park was part of Phoenix’s smaller-scale version of the Big Dig (minus the massive cost overruns) back in the 1980s. People in Boston say they like the strip of park space above the Big Dig — they even sort of utilize it as a park space — but Hance Park in Phoenix just kind of sits there unused and unloved (some good background about the park is here<\/a>). Not sure what can be done to “fix” it, or if anything should be done to fix it, but for now it’s a quirky 20-year-old monument to the final stretch of the mighty cross-continental Interstate 10.<\/p>\n

\"Margaret<\/p>\n

\"Central<\/p>\n

I’m collecting pictures of I-10 — once I get enough of them I’ll post a page, but here’s one for now:<\/p>\n

\"Interstate<\/p>\n

There is something awesome about lighting stores<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Oh, and here are some<\/a> more<\/a> sunsets<\/a> (two with video!).<\/p>\n

And yeah, Arizona has been in the news a lot lately — here’s where all the magic happens<\/a>. And they were setting up for a Tea Party rally, to boot:<\/p>\n

\"Arizona<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another trip to Phoenix in March to visit Mom and Dad . . . We saw the Boyce Thompson Arboretum in Superior: We also drove around Superior, got Blizzards at Dairy Queen, and drove there and back via US 60. We went to a spring training game at Hohokam Stadium in Mesa, where the Cubs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-out_of_town"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions\/311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}