The Rise and Fall of the Atomic Era Architecture Called Googie
Searching for history, beauty, and my future on my desert city’s street of broken dreams.
By the time I recognized their gaudy beauty in 1995, the 1950s and ’60s motels along Van Buren Street had largely turned into rent-by-the-hour sex dens and the haunts of drug users. Those buildings that had ceased operation sat fenced and boarded up, colonized by squatters and pigeons, pending future demolition. In the thirty years since its heyday, Phoenix, Arizona’s “Motel Row” had degenerated from class to kitsch, and finally into one of my hometown’s most crime-ridden corridors, a parched vacation-land graveyard desiccating in the same desert sunlight that once drew its customers. I wanted to photograph the vernacular architecture before the ’dozers arrived: the funky fonts, Polynesian huts, upswept flying-to-the-moon roofs and signs that said “Coffee Shop” in baby blue. I’d already shot the fronts of maybe ten motels, both functioning and condemned, and had collected from local antique stores all the vintage postcards featuring their images. The time had come to venture inside. So I jumped the fence one morning at the condemned Newton’s Inn and Prime Rib.
I was cornered by the time I heard claws on the pool deck. I spun around from the boarded office window I was about to photograph and there it was: a Dalmatian…
