Even as Phoenix grew taller, it grew wider: From the beginning, when the downtown was confined to a 320-acre, 98-block area, people were building homes beyond the border.

Land would be measured out and divided into lots and sold. The first such was a tract immediately to the west of the townsite, called Neahr's Addition. It was annexed by the city in 1885.

Developers would buy a 160-acre quarter section and subdivide it, selling lots and offering to build houses for the purchasers.

"There were real-estate companies that would develop a field into a subdivision and they would sell lots," says architect Don Ryden, a historic preservationist. "You could buy one personally and build a custom home, but sometimes a builder would buy six on a block and maybe offer homes with two floor plans and five elevations."

To sell that real estate, boosterism went into high gear. Growth became the region's most important product.

The Valley was called "paradise on earth" in press releases. One ad proclaimed, "A person coming to the Valley of the Sun is fascinated by the thousands of acres of green and gold citrus groves, marvels at the date gardens with their graceful swaying palms, and the soft, gray-green olive trees."

It's a dry heat

As for the summer, one writer explained "although quite warm, it is not oppressive or debilitating." Another wrote, "while the heat in summer is high, its peculiar dryness prevents any injurious effects, and sunstrokes are rarely heard of in Arizona."

Initially, the city expansion extended westward along Moses Sherman's trolley line on Washington Street, but developers paid Sherman to expand his tracks north to open up more land to home construction.

The pattern became one in which a developer bought a quarter section, subdivided it, paid for a trolley extension and road construction, and when the houses were complete, the city would annex the subdivision.

Those "additions" as they were called, became what now are the city's historical neighborhoods, such as Willo, Encanto, Coronado and Garfield.

By 1914, the trolley lines went as far north as Indian School Road on Third Street, and to Glendale Road along 12th Street. Other lines went up Fifth Avenue, 10th Street and Grand Avenue.

By 1920, there were 80 real-estate offices in Phoenix. In 1925, the city annexed 12 subdivisions, by 1928, it had annexed 74 more. What had been 320 acres grew by the start of World War II to 9.6 square miles.

The boosterism also extended to tourism. If you weren't going to stay here permanently, at least you could bring your money here for vacations.

A local writer in 1929 wrote that boosters "saw the possibilities in the place and determined to sell Phoenix to the world."

They looked for new ways of bringing people to the desert, and they "found it among the elderly gentlemen who look to play golf all year around, and among the ladies of all ages who like to applaud them."

In 1921, the Chamber of Commerce and The Arizona Republican held a contest for a tourism slogan. "Rich, Resolute, Ready, Phoenix, Salt River Valley" won, although without quite the memorable sparkle of runners-up "Where sunshine turns your efforts into gold," or "Harvest prime, health sublime, where Old Sol works overtime."

By 1929, tourism brought $10 million to the local economy for the first time. However, it wasn't until 1934 that a local advertising company came up with the nickname "Valley of the Sun."

"The stimulus from the injection of these tourist dollars into the veins of our economic being have been felt by every person doing business in this area," Barry Goldwater said. "The farmer has sold more produce. The hotels have filled more rooms. The merchants have sold more goods. It is easy to see, therefore, why businessmen are so unanimously enthusiastic about the continuance and enlargement of a proper advertising campaign."

The city was becoming what the boosters envisioned: a "modern" American city.

What were the badges of that modernism?

By 1920, there were 11,539 cars registered in Phoenix.

"The people in this town have forgotten how to walk," one city official said. "If they have to go two blocks, they get in a machine and drive."

In 1924, The Arizona Republican reported that "no farmhouse is over two miles from a paved road." In 1928, a fully paved road opened between Phoenix and LA.

By the end of the 1920s, there were 53,000 cars in Phoenix, one for every three residents.

Two radio stations began broadcasting in 1922, eventually given call letters KOY and KTAR. When the latter joined the NBC network in 1930, the newspaper claimed, "We are learning the new dance steps less belatedly than of yore. The radio keeps our fingers on the pulse of New York. We are making merry with all the gusto that, we take it, is the manner in Chicago, Syracuse and points east." Syracuse?

After a 10-year campaign by the Arizona Gazette, which ran a banner every day on its front page demanding "Phoenix Must and Will Have a Main Line Railroad," in 1926, the Southern Pacific mainline is rerouted through Phoenix. Four transcontinental trains passed daily through the city.

In 1927, regular flights began from Phoenix to LA. In 1929, Sky Harbor was dedicated, replacing several smaller local airfields.

Boom goes bust

The 1929 stock-market crash is a fulcrum in time: Before it was a boom era; after it came the Great Depression.

We all have an internal picture of the Depression: soup lines, migrant workers, closed factories, stock brokers stepping into the empty air from Wall Street windows.

Yet, in Arizona and the Valley, those myths don't tell the real story. The Depression hardly put a dent in the eternal boosterism.

A third of the city's banks failed, salaries shrank and few new buildings were begun, but by and large, things went on as usual.

"Our schools go on, our movies remain open, our shops do business," wrote one observer in 1933. "Our girls and boys skim about in motor cars, marry and have babies - our world still moves. . . . If money has been scarcer than before the depression, then bread and sugar and shoes and rent have been lowered in price, too."

By October 1933, there were close to 10,000 people receiving some kind of relief in Phoenix, but it was never quite as bad as elsewhere.

Arizonans have a sense of themselves as independent and self-reliant, yet, from the very beginning, it has been government policy that has helped the city grow, and during the Depression, it was government - and the federal government in particular - that kept the city going.

By 1932, even the conservative Arizona Republic admitted it was no longer "socialistic" to accept aid when it would help keep public peace and prevent unemployed workers from demonstrating.

"Under no circumstances must we run the risk of public rioting in Phoenix," wrote Charles Stauffer, the newspaper's publisher.

And by 1935, the federal government was Maricopa County's biggest employer and purchaser, employing nearly 6,000 residents earning salaries of $6 million, with an additional $4 million spent on materials, equipment and supplies.

From 1933 to 1939, the federal government spent $342 million in Arizona, while the state paid only $16 million in taxes.

"There is the mythology of rugged individualism, but our state has grown because the federal government helped them out," historian Philip VanderMeer says. "You cannot tell the story without that. The federal government is an indispensable part of city and state growth."

He points out that Western development happened because of wise federal planning, whether it was the transcontinental railroads, the Homestead Act, the building of dams and even the Louisiana Purchase.

"The next step for me," VanderMeer says, "is the rise of home developments in the 1930s, with the FHA (Federal Housing Authority), which had a huge effect in restabilizing the economy and allowing people to build homes.

"You have public housing, which comes through the federal government. You have a whole series of WPA projects, North High School, and so many construction projects with roads, bridges and all sorts of other things."

The federal government is hugely important in the growth of the city, he says.

"In the early 20th century, they understood this full well. It is only much more recently that the myth of Western individualism grows up."

Reach the reporter at richard.nilsen@arizonarepublic.com

or 602-444-8823.