In the series Last Resorts, The Show is looking at the history and future of resorts, and the Valley as a resort community. Visit some of the Valley’s oldest and newest resorts. Hear how they’ve impacted the region — from art and architecture, to how people all over the world view the West.
Step back into the 20th century, when a stretch of Van Buren Street was the place to stay. At its peak, my next guest says there were up to 200 hotels and motels, mostly clustered between 16th and 40th streets — although they could go as far east as 52nd Street and as far west as about 11th Avenue.
Steve Schumacher is the Phoenix Mayor’s Office official historian. The Show met up with him at Burton Barr Library to look at a collection of vintage postcards depicting many of these early hotels.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: I started our conversation by asking when they started popping up along Van Buren.
STEVEN SCHUMACHER: Well, I think a little bit more of a back story is that, Van Buren has always been a very important road all the way back to the very beginnings of Phoenix.
I mean, when Phoenix was initially surveyed and platted, the original town site, Van Buren was a northern boundary. But probably in the 1920, when cars became more prevalent and more available and price wise, they were more affordable. That's when Van Buren really started taking off. Because in 1925 the federal government started taking over the highways, and they designated Van Buren as highway 80, 89 — 60 and 70 came a little bit later.
And so those designations as highways brought people right down Van Buren, whether they were going north, they were going south or they're going to California or back East. Those four roads converged and led people right through the heart of Phoenix, starting in the 1920s.
BRODIE: That would seem to make Van Buren a natural place to put a place for people to rent a room and stuff.
SCHUMACHER: Absolutely. Absolutely. Made sense. Made total sense. It was kind of like Route 66 back in the old days.
BRODIE: So at what point would you say was the peak of, maybe, you know, 150 — upwards of 10 places to stay on this stretch of road.
SCHUMACHER: Well, I would say after World War II ... when World War II was going on, the whole Phoenix area, there was a lot of, Air Force bases and there was a lot of training and soldiers came through. And so when the war ended, and they got back to Des Moines, Iowa, or Omaha, wherever. And they said, I really don't like shoveling snow anymore. That was a pretty good couple of years in Phoenix. So they would come back. And the population boom, a lot of it happened because of that. And the same thing with the motels and the success of Van Buren. A lot of travel after World War II. Oeople had cars and they were traveling cross country on their own.
So I would say if you had to look for one specific period of time that really launched Van Buren, I would say right after World War II.
BRODIE: Well, to your point, people had cars, they had time and they had money and they, many of them had been here and wanted to come back and visit.
SCHUMACHER: Exactly. And then the federal government in the mid-'50s — 55 or so — they created the interstate highway system. Dwight Eisenhower was president, and he wanted connecting roads. Some people think it was an escape route from the Cold War. Who knows? It may have been. But it put that in place to create the interstate highway system and Van Buren was a big part of that.
BRODIE: So, what did it look like? I mean, I'm imagining the stretch of Van Buren that you're describing with, you know, more than 100 motels. Like, was it just like motel after motel after motel, next to each other on the street?
SCHUMACHER: Pretty much pretty much you can see some pho old photographs of, you know, they're trying to get the whole length of Van Buren. And that's exactly what it was one neon sign after another. And the fact that there was anywhere 100, 150 motels of different sizes and prices and amenities created the need to differentiate. They had to come up with different gimmicks, so to speak. So that was the that's what they needed to do. How do you catch a driver's eye coming down Van Buren at 25-30 miles an hour?
BRODIE: So we have some postcards here of some of the motels on Van Buren. And I wanna ask you first off about this collection of postcards, because the idea that motels would have postcards is not necessarily unique. I mean, a lot of places have them that you can send. But this is ... an astounding collection here.
SCHUMACHER: It's amazing. Breathtaking actually.
BRODIE: All right. So the first one that we have here is for a place called Utopia Motor Hotel and Tourist Court. I mean, it lists the highways and looking. It's an aerial shot. This first postcard, it almost looks like what we think of now is a suburban master plan community.
SCHUMACHER: It really does. I hadn't thought about that, but you're right. Well, this is one of the first lodging places in Phoenix. It was on Van Buren. It was built in 1929. And at that time, the idea was just to give people a place that was close to their home, wherever that was. So these had garages, they had like little kitchenettes ... it was like a self contained little building. And that was the idea initially.
BRODIE: So, if this was built in the 20s, this must have been one of the first Van Buren.
SCHUMACHER: It was. Absolutely. It was one of the mass lodging draws on Van Buren. Absolutely.
BRODIE: All right. So the next one is the Highway House — sleep is our business. And one of the things that's interesting about this one is there's a train on the property that apparently used to take guests to their rooms.
SCHUMACHER: Yeah. Again, that train and the massive size of this was one of the — we talked about it early on. They had coffee, they had breakfast and they had swimming pools and then they had — this is an example where it was an entire resort spread out through a huge property. Del Webb built this. It was the very first of his chain of highway houses that he had around the country. So this was the very first one at about 32nd Street and Van Buren. And that train, yeah, it took people to their room. It was also provided entertainment for the kids.
BRODIE: So you mentioned how there were a lot of photos at the time taken of this area of Van Buren at night. What must that have looked like?
SCHUMACHER: Oh ... it was before my time, to be honest. But well, it's been characterized a lot, a lot like Las Vegas, without the gambling.
BRODIE: I was thinking about the strip of Las Vegas, with all the neon signs, and the big buildings.
SCHUMACHER: Exactly. That comparison has been made numerous times. They've even called Van Buren sometimes the "Funset Strip." And so yeah, it would be a lot like seeing the the lights of Vegas for the first time. Which, you know, I remember flying into Vegas at night for the first time and seeing the strip with all, all lit up like that. So Van Buren was probably not too dissimilar, where Vegas had probably a lot more high-rise places to stay. Van Buren was filled more with little bungalows in the early days. But yeah, from a neon sign standpoint, it was probably pretty similar to the strip in Vegas.
BRODIE: So at what point did the stretch of Van Buren stop being such a, a haven for hotels, motels, resorts, places like that?
SCHUMACHER: Well, you know, Van Buren really took off when — well, the San Carlos and the Westward Ho and the Biltmore and the Camelback Inn — those are full-fledged resorts. Pricey places people would stay for weeks at a time. When interstate 10 was completed going through Phoenix, that was the death knell, in the '70s of Van Buren. It started going downhill from there —
BRODIE: Because people no longer had to drive through.
SCHUMACHER: Right, you didn't you have to drive through ... on I-60 anymore to get to Los Angeles. You could use the I-10. But that was just one factor. I mean, people, the, the affluent people in Phoenix started moving north, you know, up towards the Biltmore and Arcadia. So where Van Buren had been the hub — not only of motels and, and downtown Phoenix and living — but it's like Park Central is a shopping mall kind of killed downtown shopping and things. It's the same thing. People started moving to the northern part of Phoenix. And so the combination of I-10 and people moving further north in town, that kind of signaled the end of Van Buren.
