Yoohyun Jung

The Republic | azcentral.com

I'm trekking through the concrete jungle that is downtown Phoenix.

I feel mighty and with purpose, my shoulders lifted high. But it takes mere minutes for me to feel less enthused.

As the trek continues amid the urban heat island, so does the dead space of uninspiring cookie-cutter apartment complexes, empty roads plagued by perpetual construction and dozens of unoccupied parking spaces. There's not another soul to be found, and the impact of the mid-day heat amplifies with no other stimulation for the mind to fixate on. This noble quest is beginning at a low point. I'm feeling kind of hopeless.

I'm a reporter on a mission — the nebulous, unpredictable and perhaps impossible quest to figure out whether this city has a collective, commonly agreed-upon, identity. In other words, does Phoenix have a soul?

Whatever that means. Is the soul a thing? A feeling? An iconic building or landmark? A neighborhood, maybe?

Phoenix is the sixth-largest city in the U.S. with about 1.5 million people, four major sports teams and a state university with some 60,000 students (OK, much of Arizona State University is based in Tempe, but close enough). Forty percent of its population is made up of Mexicans, according to the 2012 American Community Survey. There are also sizable communities of other ethnic groups, including the South Sudanese, Chinese and Honduran.

Arizona's capital, though still in its adolescence, ought to have something that is uniquely its own. But how long does it take for a major, culturally diverse city to build a collective, vibrant identity — a soul — and what are the markers of success? When can Phoenix brag that it has arrived?

After all, Phoenix hasn't the cachet of its older neighbor to the south, the Old Pueblo Tucson, with its unabashed celebration of Mexican culture. It isn't New Orleans with the rows of colorful watering holes, delicious beignets and jazz music on Bourbon Street. The Valley isn't San Francisco with its iconic Golden Gate Bridge, trolley cars and chic restaurants, or San Diego with its endless beachfronts.





Phoenix is larger than all of those cities, yet it's nearly impossible to name its chief attraction. The best golf and resorts are in Scottsdale. Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon are hours away. Nogales is in another country.

"Our identity and our character are really coming into question now," said Matthew Salenger, architect at Colab Studio, a Tempe design firm.

Some community leaders and social scientists theorize that a city's soul lies in the diversity that embraces cultures of all origin, or the abundance of opportunities for local entrepreneurship. Still others opine it's the historic buildings and neighborhoods that keep the stories of the past alive throughout generations.

Emily Talen, professor at the ASU School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, said: "Good urbanism is about having a strong sense of community and a strong sense of what that means in physical form."

Kimber Lanning, founder and executive director of Local First Arizona, a statewide non-profit organization that supports locally owned businesses, warns, "It's a mistake to try to find a soul, a single soul."

At this point, all I have learned is that the soul isn't a singular thing or determined by one person.

Talen says that having a strong sense of community means things have to be small scale and pedestrian friendly. "It's kind of that simple."

When blocks are smaller and the cool places that people want to go to are within walking distance, people will gather. Where people gather, things happen.

Certainly, there are pockets of Phoenix like that, Talen says. But much of Phoenix's growth happened after World War II. During that time, historians say, people gravitated toward car transportation and segmented, suburban living, which led to developments of massive housing complexes with similarly designed units.

"Geographically described, Phoenix is a poster child for sprawl," she said. "It was kind of the epitome of individualistic free-for-all."

That individualistic attitude calls for higher expectations of privacy, thus the existence of gated communities in remote locations, far from the clusters of bright neon signs, the noise of the inner city and, most important, other people.

Architect Salenger surveyed about 100 Phoenix residents about how they really feel about their homes and the city, inspired by the fact that so many people seem to come and go.

The people living in what his research team designated as Zone1, which is an urban area near the core of the city, were more in touch with cultural community connections. Zone2, with about 40percent of the population, is beyond the central core but not quite in touch with the environment of the outskirts either; its people tend to shop at national chains.

"It looks like they have far less connections to the city," Salenger said. And that disconnect is a barrier to building a sense of community.

Disconnect. That explained the void I witnessed on my walk to Roosevelt Row. I was headed to some place decidedly cool, where I was told the coffee is great and art is ubiquitous. It turned out to be true, but the walk to it was far less colorful. The nearest congregation of human beings was too far away for comfort.

"But the community is happening. Things are happening," said Jim McPherson, president of the Arizona Preservation Foundation. "You just have to get to them."

McPherson met me at a local coffee shop, Songbird, on Roosevelt in an old building redesigned to host art studios, workspace and the coffee shop. The ceilings were high with pipes exposed; there were plenty of chairs, couches and whatever else to sit on; doors were open. There were walls, but not in the ways that created impassable barriers, the ones that scream for highest expectations of privacy.

There, I felt a sense of place in the way that I knew there weren't thousands of other buildings in Phoenix just like it. That's the thing, McPherson said. Historical buildings give you the awareness of the place that you are in.

"Is it the exposed bricks? Is it the wood? Is it the connection to an earlier time? Something in your childhood or something you could learn?" he said.

The people of Phoenix, McPherson says, have fought for countless historical buildings and the sense of place they provide to the younger generation. He spoke of Santa Rita Center on Hadley Street, where Cesar Chavez conducted a fast in 1972 in protest of the legislation that limited union formations and strikes during harvest time, and the Sun Mercantile building, a landmark in what used to be the second Chinatown of Phoenix.

Both buildings were saved, but many others were demolished. In the end, most property owners found it easier to maintain empty lots than to pay taxes on old buildings. The idea of a blooming metropolis took out entire neighborhoods, each time cutting through the souls of the neighborhoods, he says. "Literally and figuratively," he said. Big, towering buildings replaced multiple small ones. Impressive buildings on street corners were replaced by gas stations and convenience stores.

One community that disappeared with large-scale development is the old Chinatown.

I was sitting across from Marshall Shore, the "hip historian" of Phoenix at the Gallo Blanco Cafe in the Clarendon Hotel, when he told me that.

There was a Chinatown? An actual Chinatown?

"That's basically where the ballpark is," Shore said.

Over time, many Asian Americans took their businesses and home to other parts of Phoenix and surrounding Valley cities like Chandler and Mesa. Now, there are strips and pockets of Asian markets and restaurants here and there, and there's the Chinese Cultural Center on 44th Street, but nothing that effectively replaced the previous Chinatown.

Shore, who said he lives in a neighborhood with a "really nice mix of everybody," said he's an explorer of those pockets, regularly walking into a foreign market with "produce that I don't even know what it is."

But he said he couldn't say the same about many other resident who drive from their workplace straight into their garages, shut the doors and stay in their homes.

"A lot of people are afraid to go into the unknown," he said.

But sooner or later, people have to drive through the realities of Phoenix, which are the diverse and multicultural neighborhoods, to get to the freeway, says Silvana Salcido Esparza, renowned chef and owner of Barrio Cafe on 16th Street.

"In Phoenix, you can run, but you can't hide," Esparza said.

There is an abundance of culture to be celebrated and embraced in Phoenix, but what ends up flourishing instead are the sterilized, diluted versions of it, she says.

"It's like we're afraid to embrace the rich culture," she said. "It's all there, but it's just not coming together."

Esparza, who also runs the grass-roots community-building mural project, Calle 16, considers herself a representative of Mexican culture, a bridge to the cultural gap, and the delivery method of her choosing is cooking.

Real Mexican food stops at the border, she says. The produce is different. The sugar is different. And that's just the way it is. Her job is to accept the imperfections of re-creating and put her best foot forward.

What really changes the dining experience is the stories behind it, she says, a philosophy that arguably is a parable of life at large. Going somewhere and doing something that you know means a little more than many of the other superficial activities you engage in throughout the day; something that inspires a little bit of imagination and awe — those are the moments of getting in touch with your individual soul.

Esparza spoke of mornings in her neighborhood on 19th Avenue.

At face value, it's a rather mundane story, perhaps one many Phoenix residents experience daily. The chef said she sees children out on the streets in the morning, scrambling to go to school. There is conversation. There is laughter.

"It's like the United Nations!" she said of the children. "People are the soul of the city."

Duh.

People interact with things or other people, creating stories and leaving traces of those stories as memories in the minds of other people or the physical space of places they go. Those bits and pieces accumulate in the pockets of this city, giving the people an experience more special than all the rest.

As for the gaps caused by the massive sprawl that disconnects the pockets of concentrated cultures of this town, the very souls of Phoenix are the ones that can bridge the gaps — to community leaders like Lanning, of Local First Arizona, to a person who shows up at a neighborhood forum to keep a building with history from being torn down, or whatever cause there is to nurture the community. And when those gaps lessen, something collective can develop.

"There's an opportunity to influence real measurable change," Lanning said. "Even one person can make a huge change in a city of this size."

The city, not just the municipal government but as a collective of people living in it, is pushing a lot of things forward, she said — from historic preservation to localized economies and everything in between.

Some people move away because they don't find what they need here and that's OK, but the people who stay will make a difference, says McPherson, the historical preservation activist.

And when people come together, "beautiful, magical things happen," said Esparza, the Barrio Cafe chef.

A former Pulliam intern for The Republic, Yoohyun Jung now is a metro/public-safety reporter with the Arizona Daily Star.