Posh Ruins, Architectural Trysts & Cowboy Love

Continuing our exploration of architectural Phoenix, Big Chrissy and I visited the Biltmore Hotel, designed by Albert Chase McArthur and opened in 1929. It’s a gorgeous building, let’s call it Streamlined Aztec Moderne. Frank Lloyd Wright consulted with the builders about the masonry, briefly, over a four month period, even sold them a patent for a concrete block system that he didn’t own. The current owners of the property have capitalized on his more popular reputation, and named several of the restaurants after him, placed sculptures made for Wright’s Midway Gardens Project on the property, and scattered reproduction Wright furniture here and there. Even our tour guide mistakenly described the bricks as representing a Wright design of stylized palm trees, but in fact they are based on Albert Chase McArthur’s signature stamp. I asked the tour guide if any of Warren McArthur’s furniture had survived, and he said that he never designed any furniture for the hotel. Warren indeed designed thousands of pieces of furniture for the hotel, which were removed by an owner who thought the design of the building to be Wright’s. As a record of the McArthur brothers’ design and architectural collaboration, sadly, the Biltmore is a posh ruin.

Our next stop was the old Jefferson Hotel in Phoenix. Currently, it’s the Phoenix Police Museum, but as featured in the opening scene of Hitchcock’s Psycho, it was the site of the lunchtime tryst of Marion Crane and Sam Loomis, played by Janet Leigh and John Gavin. Much of the detail of the building has been stripped, and unlike the bullet-braziered Leigh in that scene, not very stimulating architecturally.

Our final stop of the day was The Sunflower RV Resort and Age Qualified Community, where Chris’ mom and her husband winter. RVs and double-wides are parked next to each other in neat sardine can rows that fan out from a delightful central social space built around a glistening pool. There’s not much relation to the desert or outside world, just isolation from shivery midwest and northern latitude climes. And of course lots of fun activities.

Big Chris’ family and I went to dinner in Cave Creek, at a mexican restaurant where I saw a pair of real cowboys. They were bowlegged, with full white beards, ten-gallon hats, and sort of clanked when the walked, even though they weren’t wearing spurs. They didn’t speak to each other at all, they just radiated an incandescent virility at each other. Of course I imagined them an old gay couple, just rustling up some grub after a long day of roping and lassoing. I wish I had taken a picture of them toddling off into the sunset, clanking, their arms sticking out from their bodies as if in preparation to draw. As such I was left with only an image that I snapped with one of them in the background, and one imagined picture of them arriving at their ranch, taking off their hats and finally those beautiful beards entwined.