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 IN THESE DAYS of the El Niño rains, the land at the eastern foot of A Mountain is even more desolate than usual. A damp wind blows across the barren flats, ruffling the colonies of weeds that thrive atop the buried trash dumps. The breeze sails on over the Santa Cruz, a river so dead it's wet only when it rains, then hits the tacky motels on the other side before disappearing into the ungainly elevation of the freeway. And if the river is dead, so is the land. Beyond wild grasses and a few scraggly trees, there's hardly a living thing to be seen on this beaten-down patch of dirt. Everywhere, though, there are shards of glass, survivors of countless beer parties, and the noise of the glass crunching underfoot punctuates the monotonous roar of the highway. Welcome to the birthplace of Tucson. "There's a spirit in that piece of earth," says Daniel Preston, vice chairman of the San Xavier District of the Tohono O'odham Nation. "The spirit of my ancestors that have prayed and used the land in a respectful religious way."
For more than three millennia, Chuk-shon, Place of the Black Spring, sustained human life. It was a desert oasis, full of cottonwood trees, marshes and ponds, a place where wildlife was abundant and where nomadic desert dwellers had the luxury of not worrying about water. Those who lived here over the centuries--archaic people, Hohokam, Pima, Spanish, Mexicans, Apaches and Anglos--drank from the spring and the river, and they used river water to irrigate their fields in the fertile flood plain. As late as the turn of this century, 15 different species of ducks were recorded among its reeds. The site is remarkable and possibly unique. "For 3,000 years, there's been continuous human use and occupation at the base of Sentinel Peak," says Linda Mayro, cultural resources manager for Pima County. Some historians believe it may be the longest continually occupied site in North America. Yet less than a century and a half after the U.S. became steward to this land, the river's run dry and its lush shores have been denuded and trashed. Long gone are the cottonwoods and the ducks. An 18th-century adobe Convento abandoned by Spanish priests crumbled to dust, making way for trash dumps. A 20th-century brickyard came and went. (Preston says the remains of his ancestors, quarried from the site's mud, went into the bricks). A boxing gym and a supermarket followed the brickyard into oblivion. A homeless camp at the southern end, on the A Mountain Landfill, was emptied out by force by city workers. Apart from a recreational river park snaking along the dry channel, the forlorn survivor on the vast tract of 90 acres is the Citizen's Auto Stage bus barn. In the late '80s, the whole place--archaeology, history, ancestors and all--was scheduled to be buried forever under a new four-lane highway. Clever protesters, including some guerrilla activists who concocted a makeshift shrine by night and orchestrated a highly publicized religious ceremony by day, sent the road plan down to defeat. Nothing much has happened there since. Meantime, day in and day out, the buses bounce past the ancient graves. "My parents are back in this earth," Preston maintains. "People putting trash on it put trash on my parents." LATELY, TUCSON HAS begun to think again about its trashed birthplace. The long hoped-for Mission San Agustín del Tucson Cultural Park, a history and archaeology interpretive park planned since 1991, is at last gaining momentum, with the city and Pima County working to acquire the final patches of privately held land at the tract's center, along Mission Lane (see accompanying story). A group from the nearby Kroeger Lane neighborhood has enlisted a team of architecture students and professors to help design a proposed park on the A Mountain Landfill, which the city owns. And Preston delivered his mournful remarks by invitation at a meeting last month of the Santa Cruz River Project Citizens Advisory Commission. This group of eight local bigwigs and neighborhood leaders, appointed last October by City Manager Luis Gutierrez, will make a recommendation for what to put on Rio Nuevo South, the 44 acres of city-owned land at the northern end of the tract. This piece of long-vacant land may well prove the trickiest to develop. Burdened by landfills and archaeological treasures alike, it's nevertheless enjoyed a flurry of proposals in recent years. A baseball park, a campus for the "new university"--the school that became Arizona International Campus of the University of Arizona--and even a Colonial Tucson theme park have all had their champions during the 1990s. Right now city leaders say they're determined to come to a decision, and soon. The commissioners have been holding hearings to entertain any and all proposals for Rio Nuevo South. (Their larger mission is to come up with ways to better the dispiriting condition of the dry river.) Eventually, maybe even this summer, they'll tell the city council what they think is the best use of the land.
"The mayor and council have directed that the city look to use the property in a sensitive and careful way," Gutierrez says. Any new project for Rio Nuevo South has to "enhance the revitalization of downtown, to provide direct benefit to the adjacent neighborhood in the form of job opportunities, and to reflect the history and culture of the community." IT'S A TALL order, certainly, but developers sniffing around for opportunities have not failed to materialize. After all, as Carol Carpenter, a downtown specialist in the city's Office of Economic Development, points out, it's rare to find such a huge tract of land ripe for development so close to the heart of a growing city. "There's no doubt," she says, "that the development community wants this 44 acres in the worst way." Plus, the value of whatever goes in there can only be enhanced by the cultural park that will go in at its southern flank. Dreams are not in short supply. Among the contenders:
"Whatever happens in Rio Nuevo South has potentially a great impact on the Convento site and the park," Elias says. "We have some unanimity here. We don't want Disneyland. We want only what's culturally appropriate and respectful." THE ELEGANT NOTION to bring the Arizona Historical Society museum to the place where Tucson was born has been around at least since 1991, when it was suggested in a city concept plan for the cultural park. Right now considerations more practical than philosophical are pushing it. "We're out of space," says Jerry Kyle, director for the Southern Arizona Division of the AHS. "I can't take care of the kids who sign up for our summer programs. Our collections are bursting at the seams." The AHS now is in a fine building by the university; it houses public exhibitions, a library, storage and offices. What Kyle would like to see is a new building in the historic birthplace of Tucson where he could offer lots of exhibitions; the research and storage would stay back at headquarters on Second Street. The prehistoric ruins near Rio Nuevo South "would be perfect for us. We would build sensitively to the features found on the land, and deal with them interpretively. The (restored) Convento would be a perfect neighbor for us."
To promote the idea of the museum campus, Kyle has joined forces with Flandrau officials and with Paul Lindsey, a Tucson real estate broker most recently in the news for his part in a deal to put apartment buildings east of historic Armory Park. That project stalled after neighbors protested, but Lindsey has a new one. He's been working to get a museum in the Smithsonian affiliate program for Rio Nuevo South. Lindsey half jokes that the site is riddled with enough woes to scare off the most intrepid of developers: "It's got environmental problems (from the landfills), flood plain issues, archaeological resources: It's got everything but spotted owls." Nevertheless, he's giving it a go, aiming for a museum that would showcase western life from the early Native Americans to the cowboy. Though both Kyle and Lindsey maintain that their plans are preliminary, they've already done quite a bit of legwork, trucking around rough architectural drawings to assorted members of the city council, to the Santa Cruz River Commission and to the Menlo Park Neighborhood Association. Lindsey paid a visit to Smithsonian officials in Washington, D.C., last summer. So far their diligence seems to have borne fruit. While everybody insists the Rio Nuevo South selection process is still wide open, the city has been taking action that could help pave the way for the museum complex. City lobbyists have been up in Phoenix, working to revamp legislation that would allow for a "cultural and museum improvement district." It would permit an additional property tax, which supporters say would cost the average taxpayer an additional $3 a year, and raise about $15 million a year for museums and cultural institutions all around town. Some of that money, says Council member Steve Leal, Ward 5, would help pay for the new historical park, "We need money for capital to rebuild it, to hire staff to oversee it." A new museum complex could also dip into those funds. On March 2, the council passed a "memorial" backing the idea of the Smithsonian affiliate at an unspecified location downtown, and sent the beribboned document off to the Smithsonian's governing board. In a background memo he wrote to the council, City Manager Gutierrez enthused, "A Smithsonian National Museum of the American West in downtown Tucson would provide the kind of regional and national draw this city has been seeking for some time. Smithsonian facilities typically draw an estimated one million people each year to an area, and are an incredible economic engine for other commercial enterprises." But the Smithsonian doesn't exactly see the project in the same light that Tucson boosters do. Spokesman David Umansky cautions that "there will not be a museum that can call itself the Smithsonian Southwest, there will be no building whose first name is Smithsonian, no new museum named Smithsonian Something. It's a lot less than people think. The media always talk about the Smithsonian coming. Museums have sometimes exaggerated in their fundraising. The wish is the father to the thought." And Tucson is far from being the first or the only city to tap into the Smithsonian's new affiliate program. In point of fact, program coordinator Tracy Goldsmith says her office has received about 100 inquiries from existing and potential museums. The Smithsonian's secretary, I. Michael Heyman, announced in the fall of 1996 that his institution would allow long-term loans to carefully selected museums. The Smithsonian has more than 140 million objects, in an infinity of subject areas, and on any given day displays less than 1 percent of its holdings. The idea is to take some of the artifacts out of storage and share the wealth in museums around the country through renewable 10-year loans. The recipient museums foot all the bills. So far, the Smithsonian has signed "memos of understanding" with eight different museums, meaning that they're working toward a "collaboration in the long term," says Goldsmith. The Tucson group has yet to sign anything. None of the eight museums who have signed have advanced to the final stage of a loan deal, though the National Museum of Industrial History, to be housed in the old Bethlehem Steel plant in Pennsylvania, apparently is closest. But Arizona may already be moving toward a surfeit of Smithsonians. Of the eight museums to have already signed the memos, two are elsewhere in Arizona. The Bisbee Mining and Historical Museum is getting a new Bisbee Mineral Hall, expected to feature some 200 minerals from the Smithsonian collections. It will be "an environmental exhibit, not cases of minerals," director Carrie Gustavson says with delight. A replica of a mining "stope," or cave, the exhibit will be adorned with life-size historic photographs and embedded with minerals. Possibly of more tourist-stealing potential to Tucson is the Scottsdale Museum of Progress, an ambitious undertaking planned for the Galleria, a 600,000-square-foot failed mall with atrium. It already hosted a popular traveling Smithsonian show last fall. Though director Hal Becker is still in negotiations to buy the building, he's collaborating with the Smithsonian to figure out just which artifacts will illustrate the museum's large theme of progress. "We're going to track change, through naturally occurring events, hurricanes, volcanoes, asteroids," says Becker, "and change through human interactions, agriculture, the Industrial Revolution and the Information Revolution." ON A SMALLER scale, back in downtown Tucson, the change that's coming to Rio Nuevo South has some folks worried. If city officials hope the new development, whatever it turns out to be, will be the "economic engine" that revs up downtown, the merchants on East Congress fear it will be more like a sputter. Isolated behind the elevated highway, the new historic park may well teem with tourists, but those same tourists may well do all their shopping and lunching in the restaurants at hand in Rio Nuevo South. Even with the trolleys that have been proposed to carry everybody from the attractions on the west bank to those on Fourth Avenue and downtown, many believe that tourists will jump back into their cars and drive off. "It's not gonna take business away from us," says James Graham, owner of The Grill restaurant. "But it's another missed opportunity for downtown....Trolleys? Please give me a break...the trolley is not going to work. People drive their cars. This is the West." Hazel Rugg, proprietor of Yikes/Picante on Congress, discouraged by the current downswing in business downtown, agrees. "By the time all this stuff gets done, I don't know whether I'll be here. Retail is bad all over...I like the idea of a museum complex. But it's too far away to have a positive influence on me." Even Carpenter, the relentlessly optimistic downtown specialist in the Office of Economic Development, says, "I share their concerns. If we are not careful, there will be an imbalance." Elected officials voice the same fear. "I don't want to detract from the merchants," says Ward 2 Council Member Janet Marcus. Jerry Anderson, Ward 3, and Leal favor minimizing stores and restaurants at Rio Nuevo South, to encourage visitors to hop on the shuttle and go downtown to lunch and shop. José Ibarra, whose Ward 1 includes Rio Nuevo South, says the scary Congress Street underpass at I-10 needs to be redesigned to be more pedestrian-friendly. Designed in a coherently historic fashion, it could lure tourists over to the new Visitor's Center to be built on the east side of the highway and thence to downtown.
"What are you going to do with the core?" she asks. "Why does everything require a new building on the periphery? And why does it require my tax support?" The city is not yet publicly talking finances, but there have been rumblings about a public subsidy that has the potential to undercut private merchants. Supposing, restaurateur Graham says, the museums end up getting the land for a dollar a year, as they're hoping. Does that mean that their accompanying retailers making a great haul would get a free ride too? Shelton, the developer interested in providing the retail component to the museum complex, says he would not shy away from paying a fair price for the land--but it's not clear is his stores would be the only ones. Some passionate Convento supporters say anybody who wants to locate on the land ought to pay for it: The cash could be applied to the heavy costs of the Convento restoration. Lillian Lopez-Grant, the feisty head of the Menlo Park Neighborhood Association and a Santa Cruz River commissioner, thinks any developer, private or nonprofit, should get the same financial deal. Why should the museum complex basically get free land, she asks, when private developers most likely will be required to pay for the privilege of locating there? Lopez-Grant's top priority, she says, is jobs for the neighborhood, a working-class district of mostly Hispanic families, some of whom have lived there for generations. A fan of Shelton's former Colonial Tucson plan, she says, "I still favor the Shelton project. He's the only one of the developers who would like to join forces with the museum people. That's the best of both worlds." Bob Rodriguez, vice president of the Menlo Park Neighborhood Association, and a father of three young children, says, "Jobs are important, but the museum proposal seems the best to me...Our area needs mental stimulation." With the local public school plagued by low test scores, "this would offer all kinds of advantages; kids could walk over and learn about astronomy, oceanography, history. The Smithsonian has everything...These kids need to know they can go up and up." Apart from museum internships that might set teens on a career track, Ibarra acknowledges that most jobs at Rio Nuevo South, whether the place goes retail or educational, would ordinarily be minimum-wage. "But this is a lucrative parcel," he argues. "There's a reason people are coming in. They see it as a moneymaker. The city needs to stand tall and to force them to pay a living wage, not minimum wage." WHILE EVERYONE ELSE has been loudly debating the merits of the assorted ideas, Daniel Preston, the Tohono O'odham leader, has been consulting a higher authority. He returned to the Place of the Black Spring. "I went over to the area and said a prayer to those relatives," he told the Santa Cruz commissioners. "I told them even though all those bad things happened to them there, I hope we can turn a negative into a positive. Whatever it is that's going to be built out there, I want to see the spirit of my relatives kept. I hope one of your religious people can say prayers over your project."
They may just need to.
The Santa Cruz River Commission will next meet at 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 15, in the Public Works Building, 201 N. Stone Ave., basement conference room C. A neighborhood task force meeting will be at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 16, at the Ward 1 Council office, 940 W. Alameda St. For more information call 791-4372.
Restoration DedicationPICTURE THIS AT the base of A Mountain: Instead of barren earth, towering cottonwoods. Instead of dusty rubble, a restoration of the 18th-century Spanish Convento and chapel and a Pima Village. Instead of Brickyard Lane and bus traffic, an ongoing archaeological dig into graves of "archaic" peoples who lived some 3,500 years ago. Instead of wildcat partiers, schoolchildren learning about the unbroken chain of habitation over three millennia. That's what Mission San Agustîn del Tucson Cultural Park could be, an "historic, interpretive park displaying multi-period historic and archaeologic resources in a dignified, culturally sensitive, authentically restored environment," as a 1991 planning document puts it. "We need to honor the birthplace of Tucson," says Linda Mayro, cultural resources manager for Pima County. The park, conceived as a joint county, city and probably private enterprise, would be a good way to do it.
The voters did not, however, agree to pay enough to buy the whole site, particularly the plot where the priests' Convento and chapel and granary and other outbuildings stood. So the city is working on a land trade with the proprietors of Citizens' Auto Transfer, the tour-bus business that now stands on the hallowed ground. The deal might not be struck for another year, though. As John Updike, a staffer in the city manager's office, explains, "We are exploring trade opportunities. There wasn't enough money in the county-based project. We're in the early stages--I hope in the next year we can identify a location." The park's proponents are keeping a careful eye on proposals for Rio Nuevo South. They worry about huge parking lots disrupting the visual peace of the park. "It must be done sensitively, it must be compatible, it must not overwhelm the site," says Marty McCune, historic program administrator for the city. Meantime, Mayro says there's plenty of work to be done, including archaeological and historical research, and the tricky search for funding. Mayro believes that the cost of rebuilding the Convento alone could reach $10 million. And she worries about "the question of authenticity. We don't have a real good description of the interior. It was already a ruin by the late 1880s." City Council Member Steve Leal has argued long and passionately for a reconstruction of the Convento. He says that the city of Santa Barbara is reconstructing some of their early Spanish ruins with far less information than Tucson has on the Convento. And Leal has an idea, borrowed from Santa Barbara, that would at once reduce costs and help to heal the wound made by the neglect of the place. "In Santa Barbara, they got different neighborhoods to come out and make adobe bricks. If we think of this as Tucson's birthplace, and if we think about the cultural geography of the city, think about the various parts of Tucson coming back to make bricks here, there's something profound about that, something healing." --Margaret Regan
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Nowadays one would be hard pressed to find a respectful spirit
toward the big tract of riverfront land just west of downtown,
south of Congress Street. Tucked between the sacred mountain and
the once flowing river, this exhausted patch of earth is an urban
eyesore, home only to a bus barn and a bunch of landfills that
were closed in the 1960s. There's a small neighborhood, though,
Barrio Sin Nombre, that still clings to its western edge, and
its inhabitants are the latest in a long line of people who have
lived on this spot for at least 3,500 years.
Gutierrez, a Tucson native, explains that the mission of the commission
is fourfold.
Likewise, Flandrau is cramped within the university campus, says
Joe Ruggiero, director of exhibits. The planetarium and science
museum serves 20,000 schoolkids a year, he said, adding, "One
of the problems with Flandrau is it's buried within the university.
We have parking problems."
Anne Lawrence, president of the Armory Park Neighborhood Association,
isn't buying it. She sees a giant new complex, whether commercial
or educational, as just one more peripheral development that will
help sap the life out of a downtown increasingly isolated by bigger
and bigger highways.
Last May, after years of collective neglect of the historic
site, the citizens were persuaded of the same thing. In a bond
election for open land and parks, the voters agreed to foot the
bill for buying some of the land necessary for San Agustín
park. Mayro said the county is using the approved $500,000 to
buy Mission Gardens, the five-acre plot at the intersection of
Mission Lane and Mission Road, where in the late 18th and early
19th centuries the priests and Pima villagers grew figs and apricots,
peaches and grapes in a walled garden.