KNOWOL

Stone Avenue in Tucson, Arizona. 1930's. The Pioneer Hotel and Valley Bank can be seen in the distance.

You're looking south down Stone Avenue, toward Congress Street. The cream-colored building on the left is the Pioneer Hotel, at 100 N. Stone. The tower straight ahead is the Valley National Bank at Stone and Congress.

Both buildings were the result of a building boom in 1929. The bank was Tucson's first skyscraper and the Pioneer, at eleven stories, immediately became another feature of the skyline.

The Pioneer opened in 1929 and became one of downtown Tucson's major social landmarks. The surviving hotel business records give a sense of the scale of the business: bars, a beauty salon, smoke shop, and later a coffee shop and parking operation.

Harold Steinfeld, from the family behind one of Tucson's important department-store businesses, built the hotel, and Harold and Margaret Steinfeld eventually lived in the building.

The tower at Stone and Congress was constructed in 1929 for Consolidated National Bank. Its architects were Walker & Eisen of Los Angeles. It later became the Valley National Bank Building.

The pair of lines running down the middle of the street are remnants of Tucson's old streetcar rails. Tucson had horse and mule-drawn streetcars beginning in 1897, electrified them in 1906, and shut down the electric system on December 31, 1930. replacing the streetcars with buses. This image is from around 1935-1940, so you are seeing a street that had recently undergone the American transportation transition from streetcars to automobiles.

Cars are everywhere. Curbs are lined with them. Downtown is being built around motorists. The giant vertical neon signs are designed to be visible farther down the street. Stone Avenue itself became an important automobile corridor; farther north, its alignment fed into the U.S. 80/89 highway corridor and Tucson's famous motel-and-neon "Miracle Mile."

The awnings are another interesting feature. Almost every storefront has a big awning. That's desert architecture at its finest. Before air conditioning became the norm, preventing direct sunrays into your store was very important. Deep awnings kept the sun off plate-glass windows and shaded pedestrians.

This was the "new" Tucson built on top of a much older Tucson

Mexican-American neighborhoods and Sonoran adobe architecture remained especially prominent south and west of downtown. City historic research notes that Tucson's Mexican-American population became increasingly concentrated south of present-day Broadway and west of Stone Avenue as the city developed. Tucson also had a substantial Chinese commercial community; Arizona Historical Society collections document Chinese businesses and families in the city from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century.

So you're looking at a highly selective image of Tucson.

It's essentially the corporate downtown placed on a postcard, while a Spanish/Mexican/Indigenous borderlands city existed around and underneath it. It's easy to imagine Arizona as mostly ranches and dirt roads, but 1930s Tucson would have been quite urban. Stand where the postcard shows and you would have been surrounded by department stores, banks, hotels, movie theatres, cafes, offices, taxis, buses, railroad passengers, neon signs and crowds.

Congress Street just ahead was Tucson's traditional "Main Street." Down the road was the Fox Theatre, Hotel Congress, the Rialto, the courthouse and the Southern Pacific depot. Pima County calls the Congress/Stone area the historic "epicenter" of downtown Tucson.

And a wonderfully weird piece of American history happened a few blocks east: in January 1934, a fire at Hotel Congress helped expose members of the John Dillinger gang, who were then captured in Tucson. The Dillinger incident would have been recent history at the time this postcard was produced.

Then World War II changed Tucson enormously. The postcard catches Tucson right before its great population explosion. City historic-preservation research puts Tucson at approximately 35,000 people in 1940 and 212,000 by 1960.

The compact city shown here consequently spread outward. New subdivisions, highways, shopping centers, motels and houses made it easier to live farther from downtown. It was an astonishing change: roughly a sixfold increase in twenty years.

So there's a historical irony in this picture:

The automobiles that demonstrate downtown Tucson's prosperity would eventually help undermine downtown's dominance because people could drive to newer commercial districts instead.

That means a photograph taken from roughly this location thirty years later would document not just growth, but the erasure of a significant portion of old Tucson's physical fabric.

The Pioneer Hotel itself has a very dark ending. On December 20, 1970, a catastrophic fire swept through the Pioneer Hotel. Twenty-eight people died immediately and a 29th victim later died from injuries.. Harold and Margaret Steinfeld were among the victims.

Sixteen-year-old Louis Taylor was convicted in connection with the fire and spent more than four decades in prison. The arson claims later became deeply controversial as modern fire science raised questions about whether the blaze had intentionally been set; Taylor was released in 2013.

The Pioneer never really recovered as a hotel. The building itself survived, however, and still stands at 100 N. Stone Avenue.

The Valley National Bank building survives too.

So more than just a small image to scroll by, this postcard captures an important, brief transition point. Tucson is still small enough that two buildings dominate the entire skyline. The streetcar era has just ended. Automobiles are taking over. The old Mexican adobe city is still nearby. Air conditioning hasn't yet enabled enormous suburban expansion. World War II hasn't yet transformed the economy.

And towering over all of it are two buildings erected in 1929 saying:

Tucson is going to be a big city.

Within one generation, it was.

Anyone have family in California?

Aerial View of the Wigwam, Litchfield Park, Arizona.

A historic resort in Litchfield Park, Arizona, just west of Phoenix, the Wigwam Lodge began as a place to house Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company’s executives who were visiting the area from Ohio.

Goodyear was in the area growing long-staple cotton that was used inside car tires as reinforcement. Litchfield Park itself grew out of Goodyear's cotton operation and named for Goodyear executive Paul W. Litchfield.

What was then known as "The Organization Room" was later expanded and opened to the public as The Wigwam resort in 1929. It remains open today as The Wigwam.

The 1909 children’s parade winner at the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival in New York, with the carriage pulled by a Miss Johnson. The carnival began in 1897 as a winter celebration to break up the monotony of winter. The tradition continues today, more than a century later, with parades, winter competitions, fireworks, and the famous Ice Palace built from blocks of ice harvested from Lake Flower.

In Saint John, North Dakota, a storefront shaped like a giant pair of work overalls stands beside a quiet street in October 1940.

Photo: John Vachon, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress record: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017746338/

This 1963 photo shows astronaut L. Gordon Cooper with his wife, Trudy, and daughters Jan and Cam beside the Faith 7 spacecraft at Cape Canaveral. Faith 7 was built for Cooper's planned 22-orbit mission, the final crewed flight of Project Mercury. NASA launched him on May 15, 1963, and he spent more than 34 hours in space, proving that the program could support a longer human flight.

This 1921 photograph shows President-elect Warren G. Harding during a vacation in Florida, about six weeks before he took office. Standing with him are Senator Albert B. Fall, Senator Joseph Frelinghuysen, Henry P. Fletcher, Dr. Albert A. Ely, and Harry M. Daugherty. Harding became president on March 4, 1921, and promised a “return to normalcy” after World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic. In other words, this is a behind-the-scenes political snapshot, not an official inauguration portrait.

This picture shows Pomeiooc, an Indigenous town in what is now coastal North Carolina, near the Pamlico waterways, as drawn by English artist John White around 1585. The homes are covered with mats or tree bark, and tall wooden poles form a fence around the town. White made the drawing during the Roanoke expeditions, giving us a glimpse of the Algonquian-speaking communities who lived there long before an English colony was established.

A girl with a coloring book sits inside a makeshift lean-to in Belle Glade, Florida, January 1939 as her brothers sit alongside. The shelter was assembled from rusty galvanized tin and burlap. The Library of Congress caption records that the children of migrant packing-house workers were often left alone for long hours while their parents worked. They were left alone all day, often until 3 a.m. while their parents are working.

This photograph was made by Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal agency that documented poverty and rural working conditions during the Great Depression. Belle Glade was part of South Florida's agricultural economy, where migrant and seasonal workers supplied labor for farms and packing houses. The image makes the economic crisis visible not as an abstract statistic, but as the daily reality of a family trying to get by.

Photo: Marion Post Wolcott, January 1939
Collection: Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress
Library of Congress record: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/91793108/

Vintage Map of Long Island from 1933. Made before Long Island became shorthand for malls, parkways, and suburbs, so the Island is shown as lighthouses, ferry routes, old whaling towns, farms, windmills, beach communities, and “Rum Row” offshore.

It even teaches the geography most of us never learned in school, that the backbone of Long Island was formed by glaciers, which is why the North Shore is hillier while the South Shore runs flatter into beaches, bays, and barrier islands.

That’s what makes this map fun to study: you can find your town, then suddenly you’re seeing how Long Island connected to New York, Connecticut, the Atlantic, colonial history, fishing, boating, and beach culture all at once. The Long Island your grandparents loved.