It’s 1948.
Published in
10 min readJun 25, 2016
Dig Quincy Jones.
Naw, not the jazz cat — he’s still in high school in Seattle. This dude, his love is for form, not sound. He studies architecture. Something is changing in American shelter.
First there was the Prophet F. L. Wright, coming up into the desert, proclaiming that the crooked shall be straight and the rough places plain.
He attracted a discipleship of refugees — Shindler, Neutra, van der Rohe, all the Bauhaus boys bailing on Berlin before the brownshirts beat them.
They fled to a nation that had just his its pubertal stride and they watched from the Coast as America destroyed Europe’s ticky-tacky twee from the bomb bay of a B-24. In the apocalypse, anything could happen. No more rabbit hutches — people wanted space, wide open space. Living rooms like Nebraska. Modernism found its home in the sagebrush hills of the American West.
Mr. Jones spends the war building quonset huts for freedom, working as an architect of democracy. When Truman drops the A-bomb he lands back in America’s futurescape, in Lost Angeles, footloose and open-minded. He wants to do his thing, make his mark, change the landscape.
And oh man he will.
He meets up with a like-minded soul named Paul Williams. Naw, not the pop dude — he’s in grade school in Omaha, dreaming of his Rainbow Connection. So two cats named after musicians who are not yet musicians hang out their shingle. It’s an austere shingle, with clean lines and lots of glass, designed to fit into the environment instead of perching upon it. In a decade, the rich and famous will be throwing money at them. But a decade’s a long way away and first they have to go to Tucson.
Dig Howard Hughes.
He’s losing his shit.
He crashes a plane into Lake Mead, killing people and gashing his head open. He crashes a spy plane into a house in Beverly Hills, crushing his ribs, collapsing his lung, and forcing his heart to the right side of his chest. He claims that orange juice is the key to his survival.
The man isn’t well. He sorts his peas by size and collects his urine in bottles. He watches movies for four months straight and purchases every restaurant chain in Texas. He installs an aircraft air filtration system in the trunk of his Chrysler. He buys RKO and shuts down film production for six months so he can try and find any commies in the work force. He injects codeine. He longs for the desert.
Hughes is a war profiteer, making bank off of phantom aircraft. He procures for the Pentagon procurers — wine, women and song. Ava Gardner can’t reach him. Kate Hepburn can’t help him. Joan Fontaine, Betty Davis, Ginger Rogers all tell Howard to take a hike.
Howard wants to build missiles, but he’s afraid to build them in LA. It’s too close to the Coast and the commies in their submarines. So he builds his missile factory out in the desert. He builds it on the outskirts of the Old Pueblo.
Dig Del Webb.
He’s building the Flamingo, the first place on the Strip. Vegas is dust and old-timey saloons with creaky slots, but Bugsy Siegel wants to make it classy. The Flamingo is modern, open, like the houses those weirdos are building out in LA. Bugsy has Dell Webb build him a secret escape hatch from the penthouse to the garage so he can run from his enemies.
Bugsy loses his cool and screams and threatens but he tells old Del not to worry. Gangsters only kill each other.
Del Webb made bank building concentration camps for Americans of Japanese origin. He constructs the third-largest city in Arizona, and it’s just razor wire and machine gun towers and windy barracks and seventeen thousand sad, bewildered, angry Issei and Nisei.
Del Webb goes golfing with Howard Hughes.
The government has shut down Webb’s concentration camp and shipped its survivors back to the Coast. Bugsy is riddled with bullets on his girlfriend’s couch. Del needs a new gig. In a decade, he’ll build Sun City and become the Moses of the Midwest, leading the middle-class elderly to their final sojourn on the edge of Phoenix. But in the meantime, Howard’s gonna build missiles in Tucson, and there ain’t no way that rocket engineers won’t need a place to lay their heads.
Del Webb is gonna build houses, and he’s gonna do it in a whole new way.
Dig Pueblo Gardens, then.
The squares are lining up.
Square jaws. Square haircuts. Square station wagons. They came from Poughkeepsie and Schenectady and Walla Walla to work for Mr. Hughes. The old adobes of the Old Pueblo aren’t for them. They’re houses made of mud, Mildred!
But out on the edge of town, they’ve scraped away the cholla and the palo verde and they’ve built this modern new place. Houses with glass curtain walls. Houses oriented to produce shade and keep the sun it its proper place. Clerestory windows. Vaulted ceilings. Swamp coolers and cactus gardens and courtyards made of decorative brick. Little houses, not expensive. One bedroom for the button-downed bachelor. Duplexes for the young couple working on baby. Two and three bedroom places for two point three children.
Back east, William Levitt is throwing up cracker box colonials on Long Island for the families fleeing Fred Trump’s tenements, and supposedly inventing the suburb along the way. But Mr. Jones has beat him to it — not only is this a new kind of neighborhood, but it’s a whole new way of life. One minute you are inside, and the next you are outside!
But man, does it get hot out there on the floor of the Sonoran desert.
Dig Joseph Eichler.
The man rents a house in the soon-to-be-Silicon Valley. The house was built by the Prophet F.L. Wright. Eichler GETS IT. He wants everyone to live like this. He starts building new houses, modern houses, clean houses. He’s in a magazine, Architectural Forum, for Subdivision of the Year. Also in the magazine, A. Quincy Jones for Builder’s House of the Year. Mr. Jones has built a new hood in Brentwood, chi-chi LA. Called it Crestwood Hills. Movie stars and millionaires take note. Eichler thinks, let’s take some of that magic and spread it around. Eichler rings up Mr. Jones. A partnership is born.
11,000 houses later, Eichler has changed the way Californians, and thus Americans, live. All of it an echo of that first little hood in the desert on the edge of the Old Pueblo.
Dig Tucson.
Adobe and saguaro. Swimming pools and strip malls. A/C and A-10s. A Spanish city being swallowed by AMERICA. The City Fathers [and aren’t all fathers prim white men in ties] want Bright, Shiny, New. They rip down the city’s oldest hood, a comfortable bramble of mud brick row houses and corner bodegas, so they can put up a shiny new convention center. Everything must be born again! The crooked made straight, and the rough places plain!
Everything must be whitewashed.
Eisenhower wants to run Interstate 10 through the city, and the Fathers, they know what that means. Let’s put it to the South, closer to Mexico, along the railroad tracks. Let’s create a Here and a There, a Right Side and a Wrong Side, a White Side and…
The “FREEWAY”. All across the country these cement ramparts rise. The 101, 90, 15, 95. Parkway. Turnpike. Express. The 10 will divide the Righteous from the Unwashed in LA, in NOLA, El Paso and Houston and Baton Rouge and San Berdoo. If you have a mind to motor West…
Oh hey there Pueblo Gardens, don’t worry! You’re north of the freeway! But, hum, not by much. Gee. Oh, and you’re south of the railroad yard. Bad luck there sport. I mean, isn’t that part of town, well…
Hey all your square folks, look at this new development, and it’s even closer to where they make the missiles!
Dig Mid-Century.
That’s what they call it now, those crisp, clean designs.
They were tearing mid-century down until about a minute ago. LA, ground zero, saw one masterwork after another leveled for stucco and fake Spanish tile. Everywhere on the coast in the 1980s wanted to look like the Old Pueblo in the 1880s. But as the century turned, Americans grew nostalgic for their golden age, that one moment when they were the Colossus astride the world, facing off against their worthy Soviet enemy, strong and righteous, the snake of European fascism under the heel.
A certain type of person started collecting these houses again, finding ways to restore and renovate them, geeking out over original details and furnishings in the way that only disposable income allows. They became hot, white hot, desert sunshine hot. From Portland to Palm Springs, from the New York suburbs to Miami Beach, anything post and beam, open layout, big windowed and unadorned became the rage. Houses once listed for their teardown price start bidding wars. Unrestored Eichler pads in unfashionable suburbs of SF and LA bring in seven figures. People write books and blogs about the cats that made the world modern. Schindler. Neutra. Eames. The Prophet F.L. Wright and his Taliesin Dream rising up in Phoenix. The Case Study Houses.
A. Quincy Jones and Paul Williams.
Dig Pueblo Gardens Now.
It’s right there in the name “working class”. It works. This ain’t no hipster Disneyland, kids. This is a place where people live, and not just on Instagram.
Some of Mr. Jones’s houses are well kept and original. Some are well kept and modified beyond recognition. Some are poorly kept and original. Some are poorly kept and modified beyond recognition. But you wander around Pueblo Gardens and you see it. The high windows. The curtain walls of decorative brick. The straight modern lines.
They sell for 80, 90, 100, 110. If you could pick the whole hood up and drop it in Marin, you’d make yourself an aristocratic fortune. But this is Tucson, a city where you might spot a late 60’s Jaguar E-Type rotting under a tarp in someone’s back yard.
No one in Tucson talks about A. Quincy Jones. They’ve started to talk about Tucson modernism, though. There’s a modernism week, and an historic preservation group, and a Facebook page. The New York Times talks about the fantastic facades along Broadway and the Miracle Mile.
This love of post-war Tucson not without controversy though. Everyone remembers the City Fathers. Tucson’s mid-century self was built on eradicating the older, browner city. Now we work against that, right? Now we argue over authenticity and race, tradition and transplantation, appropriation and irony. The trendiest hoods in the Old Pueblo are the old adobe barrios. Parts of Tucson have become Santa Fe, without the ridiculous money and artistic pretense.
But this fresh wave of nostalgia-driven reclamation has yet to crest in Pueblo Gardens. No one calls it gentrified. No one talks provenance in the real estate ads. The flippers are at work, as they are all over Tucson — the recession is over. But they are Home Depot-ing the hell out of these little houses, not meticulously restoring them. Pueblo Gardens is Latino working class, and it’s not going to change anytime soon.
Good.
For 66 years this neighborhood has been a home for families punching up, hustling to raise their kids and find a bit of the good life. The elementary school has a new building. The Boys and Girls Club is busy. People are using the architecture, not worshiping it. The philosophy of modernism, the philosophy of building cheap, light-filled houses for everyone, it works here. Not like in the brochure, but it works. It doesn’t need coffee shops. It doesn’t need reproduction furniture from the maddeningly misnamed Design Within Reach. It doesn’t need to be famous. I almost don’t want to write about it.
Recently, a house went up for sale in Pueblo Gardens. No mention of A. Quincy Jones, or Del Webb, or Howard Hughes. A nice combed gravel drive and yard. Pale peppermint paint with a pop of cool pink trim. Corrugated steel siding and a wall of tall glass windows. Not fancy at all, with inexpensive fixtures and durable tile and carpet, but cute as a bug. Southwest Modernism.
This place would run you 750K in Eagle Rock or San Rafael. In Pueblo Gardens? 115. That means that someone who earns the average salary in the city of Tucson can buy this house.
The old City Fathers thought they could remake Tucson into America. Instead, America is becoming more like Tucson every day.
That’s very modern.
