The Main Street of the Phoenix, Arizona area - the Apache Trail


If you live in the Phoenix area, it's hard to imagine just one road that goes all the way through the entire area, from Wickenburg to Apache Junction, but there is one, and it's still there. It goes by many names, but originally it was just 60. And if you go back further in time, Highway 60 was the Apache Trail.

If you start from the east, it's still called the Apache Trail. It becomes Main Street in Mesa, Apache Boulevard in Tempe, crosses the Salt River as Mill Avenue (originally at Ash), goes through Phoenix as Van Buren, then goes north by northwest as Grand Avenue and on to Wickenburg.

The Ash Avenue Bridge in Tempe

Old postcards tell the story. Long before freeways, the route through Phoenix was lined with motels. For those motels that were in the east valley, the confusion as to whether the main street was Apache Boulevard, Main Street, or Apache Trail, was solved by just using numbers. The main number, of course, was U.S. 60. In fact, before the late 20th century, there really wasn't any way that you could go far wrong, that was the trail. Anywhere else was just desert and small roads. If it had good pavement, chances are you were on 60. And since it was the only road through the area, it was also highway called 70, 80 and 89.

Take a look at the motel in the photo at the top of this post. In the 1950s, do you think that you would have had any doubt that you were on the right road? This motel, called The Sand Tanks Motel, gave its address as six miles east of Apache Junction on U.S. 60, 79, 80, 89. You can't miss it.
Become a PhD (Phoenix History Detective) with Brad today on Patreon!

Click here to become a Patron!
History Adventuring posts are shared there daily including "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, videos, and super high-definition photos of historic Phoenix, Arizona. Discounts for seniors, students, teachers, and veterans.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more