Grand Avenue is the great diagonal on the Phoenix grid, based near downtown and shooting off towards the northwest. Near downtown Grand is today notable for its collection of old motels, magically retaining their sinister appeal into the 2000s, and its air of desperation. Healthy buildings and businesses on this stretch are fenced and fortified as if prepared for zombie attack, which is near enough to truth. There are indications of a revival.

Donna Reiner sent me down to Grand to check out this former branch bank. Donna said, "Check out 1769 Grand Ave. It's now the Rock of Salvation Church building, but it was originally a 1st National Bank (Varney & Associates) dating from 1953. By the way, the odd numbers on Grand are on the west side of the street as the city views it as an east/west running street."

The bank is a nice little piece of work: lots of rock facing including a solid back wall and two solid rock cubes forming the rear, shading wings spread out for a pedestrian entry (pedestrians here? really?) and the drive-through (which would have been a relatively early drive-through, 7 years after the first one in Phoenix), and a pop-up along the spine of the floorplan for clerestory windows. And in amazingly good shape. And pink.

Note the proximity to the Coliseum in the bottom photo. Looming back there like a friendly giant.

This beautiful little rounded corner belongs to a 1947 Pie Factory, architect unknown, and in the process of being rescued from the lip of oblivion by Beatrice Moore.

Beatrice stopped me in the street, and we had a chat: there's a cafe going in in the next six weeks; the corner windows were a surprise (they'd been entirely covered over in the building's former appauling condition); she's applied for the National Historic Register, and the architect is unknown. And she'd been advised against categorizing it as "Streamline Moderne" although -- it plainly is. There is not much Streamline Moderne or International Style in Phoenix and that's what makes me think an out-of-towner may have designed this one.

Beautiful details. We wish Beatrice the best success.

This former Quebedeaux Chevrolet dealership, and most formerly the Paper Heart Gallery (the termination of Grand is relatively close to the downtown First-Friday art scene), is the work of a world-famous architect. Victor Gruen. Gruen, if you've never heard the name of this world-famous architect (shrug), was an Austrian emigre in the same Modernist cadre as Schindler and Neutra.

Architectural modernism was from its very beginning in German-speaking Europe a Socialist enterprise so it's one of the more painful and sickening ironies in architectural history, like a blind and backwards descent on a carnival ride, to know that Victor Gruen was the man who invented the American enclosed shopping mall. At Southdale Mall, 1956, in Edina, Minnesota. Gruen had meant the enclosed shopping mall as a social replacement for the dying city-center, and even though this was the first of a long list of malls he was hired to design, and he had quite a financially successful office as a planner through the 1960s, towards the end of his life Gruen came to believe he'd created a Frankenstein monster. He also gave his name to the "Gruen transfer", the moment where incoming shoppers are changed by ambient psychological techniques into an impulse purchase waiting to happen. He wouldn't have been pleased.

Back to Phoenix. John F. Long had hired Victor Gruen to master-plan Maryvale in 1955. For John Quebedeaux's dealership, year unknown, note the exaggerated roof that seems almost, I dunno, Polynesian, and the diagonally situated wide auto-dealer windows here, now partly covered up. These and the similar display windows of the Pie Bakery, and the motels lined up along the street, suggest Grand Avenue was once quite a showpiece. Maybe that's just a Grand illusion.