How Glendale Community College was built around the historic palm trees


If you've ever been on the campus of Glendale Community College, at 59th Avenue and Olive in Glendale, Arizona, you've walked past some historic palm trees that are over 100 years old. Of course, unless you're fascinated with Phoenix history like I am (and a tree-hugger), you really can't be blamed for walking right past them and not seeing them. But once you start seeing them, then some pretty cool history of Glendale starts to appear.


Walk with me. It's 1899 and we're going to pay a visit to William Bartlett at his ranch, which is a few miles north of the little settlement of Glendale, Arizona. As we get closer, we begin to see the entrance, which is lined with tiny little palm trees. Bartlett is a pretty wealthy man, so he had a lot of seedlings sent over from California to line his driveway, which was just west of where 59th Avenue is nowadays, at Olive. No, they're not date palms, they're simply California fan palms. They don't produce dates, they're just decorative. And they were planted there just for show, just like his rose garden, which is also still there in front of the house at the Sahuaro Ranch.


Time-travel to the 1960s now. Those palm trees are now pretty darn tall, and since there isn't much else out there, they've become important to the people who have seen them for over fifty years. And when plans were being made to build a campus there, you can bet that people were worried that the bulldozers would just knock them down. But they didn't, the historic trees were carefully transplanted.


Walk around the campus with me today. The trees that were planted that led up to the Sahuaro Ranch are still there, marching right now through the center of campus. The ones that weren't moved, by the way, are over behind the fire station. If you want to see the original trees in their original position, that's where they are.

Thank you for walking with me.



If you liked this article, and would like to see more, please consider becoming a patron of History Adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! You make this happen!

 Click here to become a Patron!
History adventuring posts are shared there daily. The basic tier is a dollar a month, and the PhD tier, which includes "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, videos, and super high-definition photos, is five dollars a month, and is discounted for seniors, veterans, and students.

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