Category: Travel

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.

The Grand Canyon is so big. Now you’re supposed to say “How big is it?”, but I don’t have a witty punch line, it’s just big, on a scale that’s a bit hard to grasp. The 10 mile view to the other rim, for instance, was so clear and seemed so close, but it was 10 miles away. When I built a deck in the back of my house in San Francisco, I was required to put up a guardrail because the drop was a little more than 3 feet. The balusters had to be no more than 4 inches apart so that a child couldn’t tumble through and fall the 3 or so feet to his or her unsupervised death. There are only a few guardrails around the Grand Canyon, at various points, but the rest of the rim is dizzyingly vertigo-inducingly open. And with a mile drop to the floor. A San Francisco building inspector would make them take it out. Or fill it in.

On the way back to Phoenix, we stopped for dinner in Sedona, just in time to see the city’s backdrop of red sandstone rock formations gloriously illuminated by the setting sun, a spectacular show, like stepping into a hyper-saturated Maxfield Parrish painting of a John Ford vista.

The next day we visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home and school, Taliesin West. It’s set amidst the Scottsdale lunar landscape, on the “brow” of a hill. Taliesin was a renowned bard who sang at the courts of several Celtic British kings a very long time ago. His name in Middle Welsh translates to “shining brow.”

Wright’s design abstractly incorporates visual references to the surrounding landscape, the hills, even the cacti. The whole venture was meant to function as an experiment of sorts, except, it seems, for water- and weatherproofing, which seem to be the most obvious challenges of the new caretakers. Wright, 5’8″ tall, is quoted as saying something about buildings for people over 6 feet tall being a waste of material, so anyone requiring this extra material has to stoop upon entering any room. I like the feeling of being squeezed through a narrow entry that opens into a larger space, like wiggling back into the womb.

I’m in Arizona, with Big Chris and his jaunty relatives. The landscape here is beautiful, like the moon with shrubbery, and Republicans. Our hosts have books—hardback books—by Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and Bill O’Reilly. Unironically.

Tonight we went to a local sports bar and ate fried things: onion rings, cheese. Fried cheese! And the best turkey burger I’ve had in ages, charred, with so much flavor and juice. Mmmmm… There was a guy sitting at the table across from us who looked exactly like Mr. Johnny Cammareri in Moonstruck.

I just want you to know no matter what you do, you’re gonna die, just like everybody else.

Tomorrow we get up early to drive to the Grand Canyon, so I’m not providing much in the way of exposition, you’ll have to tune in later, my dears.