Hey folks,
Do any of you guys have any stories or tales or pictures of Phoenix's old "Deuce" neighborhood, our very own old Skid Row?
It was named I'm guessing as by its two locations on 2's--2nd St near Van Buren and 2nd Ave and Madison. Had the area reasonably gentrified, it perhaps could have been our own Mill Avenue--an organically grown, mixed-use, pedestrian friendly neighborhood. In fact, Mill and various other Phoenix neighborhoods were its contemporaries, but obviously took different paths in their ultimate redevelopment.
The staple of The Deuce was basically "Single Room Occupancy" flophouses a lot like the Hotel Windsor, the 2-story building next to the Hotel Monroe construction site, and the image on the last scene of the
1960's Phoenix transition video, which we figure was shot near 2nd St just south of Van Buren. Gritty bars, restaurants (there's a story about the author finding somebody passed out in a bowl of menudo), liquor stores, immigrant cafes rounded the rest of The Deuce out.
We don't talk about it much, but The Deuce's demolition was Phoenix's very own rotten "urban renewal" project--losing an entire urban neighborhood at a time for a highly utilitarian, non-urban use like Civic Plaza. I wondered why Civic Plaza was built in its current location in the center of downtown as opposed to the periphery, but it appears Civic Plaza *was* on the periphery of what was then the respectable part of Downtown Phoenix.
Sure, the grittiness of The Deuce may have made its destruction obvious, but if we followed that mantra everywhere it appeared an easy solution, this country would have few great places left. It is unfortunate we followed it here.
The Deuce was torn down en masse for the North Building and Symphony Hall around 1972 and again for the South Building in 1982. The other 1970s wastelands in the area, Chase Tower and Hyatt, came from the same broken, destined-to-fail thinking--renewal by isolation. The massive walls and moats for projects built around this time were probably no accident--architects probably didn't want anything to do with the street scene at the time.
The 1970s for downtown Phoenix was an ironic turning point in our post-Park Central Mall decline. Downtown was booming with the things that were purported to renew it but in fact that which was constructed made our modern problem that much larger. It's when downtown started turning from being a collection of neighborhoods to a collection of uses. Many of the last stands of what could have given us a modern street scene were torn down, even tho demolitions in the area were well on their way by the 1950's.
I haven't found many articles (yet) that give more than a cursory description of the area... but some things I'm finding out about the neighborhood:
The homeless problem downtown may very well have originated in the Deuce's final destruction--on a cold rainy November night in 1982, some 300 were found camped making fires in Patriots Square. Many of the Deuce's residents--those folks in the flophouses had no place else to go.
Don't like the Matador? I was hearing a story of the Matador in its old location--a better place, a better vibe, better food, way cheaper before it corporatized to the hotel convention market with a move to the Regency Garage. Sing High Chop Suey is another restaurant that survives relocated from the Deuce.
Ernesto Miranda actually died from a stabwound received at a Deuce-area bar.
If you folks have any stories or pictures or anything from Phoenix's "The Deuce" part of town I would *love* to learn more about it!