With roomy kitchens and big kid-friendly yards, the homes were built during Scottsdale’s boom. Soldiers were returning home from World War II and Motorola came to town. People needed a place to live.
“Everybody around here worked for Motorola,” said Darlene Petersen, 76, a longtime community activist.
Forty-seven years ago, she and her late husband moved from Davenport, Iowa, into their home on Wilshire Drive near 73rd Street. She was a registered nurse. He was a printer displaced by a strike.
They both found jobs in the boomtown. Darlene spent more than 30 years as an operating room nurse, and her husband got a job as a printer.
The Petersens paid $11,000 for the 1,500-square-foot house that came with concrete floors and no cooler. Still, they were enticed by its Midwest-style front porch and the wide covered patios across the back. And there was the generous backyard, where geraniums and vines flourish under the shade of a very senior mulberry tree.
“People say it is so relaxing back here,” she said.
The name of the neighborhood is “Scottsdale Estates 4.” That by itself tells you that these are production homes, neither historically distinctive nor esthetically distinct. Properly speaking, it’s a neighborhood of tear-downs awaiting a higher and better use.
But the Valley of the Sun is so afraid of being looked down on by older cities that it races around adopting all the silly policies that make those older cities sclerotic and uninhabitable. We won’t be satisfied until more people move out than move in, just like the cities celebrated in all the hip urban planning books.
But, even so, it’s cute and charming and funny that, in order to have “historic districts,” we have to make hallowed museums out of homes that would be considered fairly new anywhere else…
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