Flagstaff finds new life in Arizona's Old West heritage

Long a stop on the way to nearby natural wonders, the Arizona mountain town has rounded up its own assets to show off its historic past.

By Don Shirley, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
12:00 AM PDT, July 24, 2005

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This town used to bill itself as "The City of Seven Wonders" — a reference to the Grand Canyon and other nearby Northern Arizona attractions. The catch? Not one of the wonders was actually in Flagstaff.

Nowadays, the official slogan is more local and less grandiose: "They don't make towns like this anymore."

I lived in Flagstaff until age 5 and have passed through a few times since, but my vague memories of the downtown district were not especially glowing. A row of seedy bars and curio shops lined Route 66, just north of the railroad tracks. Northern Arizona University dominated the south side, but the campus was invisible from the main drag.

I was intrigued by rumors of a resuscitated downtown. The city's first public plaza, Heritage Square, opened in 1999. The surrounding town center reportedly was hopping with new restaurants and shops. So I decided to see how Flagstaff fared without leaning on its more famous outlying wonders.

My octogenarian mother, who lives near Phoenix, also wanted to revisit her former haunts — but Flagstaff would be too cold for us during much of the year. Located a few miles south of the 12,000-foot, snowcapped San Francisco Peaks, Flagstaff is just shy of 7,000 feet in elevation, which makes for generally wonderful summer weather. As we escaped Phoenix, the temperature was on its way to 104. After driving north for nearly three hours — slowed slightly by fellow travelers presumably escaping the heat — we found it an agreeable 78.

Flagstaff is surrounded by the Coconino National Forest, part of the largest stand of ponderosa pines in the country. We ate a light lunch at Jackson's, a contemporary American restaurant a few miles south of town with windows that provide forest and meadow views. Then we entered the city limits.

The community was born around 1880 near a spring that still runs today in a tiny park on the west side of Flagstaff. The original buildings are long gone; the spot is marked only by a plaque and playground equipment.

We drove by the park with Alan Lew, a professor who specializes in the geography of tourism and recreation at Northern Arizona University, whom we met through a family friend. Five minutes later, we arrived at a lookout point atop Mars Hill, slightly farther west. From our perch about 200 feet above the streets, we looked down at a city that has grown from fewer than 10,000 residents when I lived here in the '50s to nearly 60,000.

We could easily see the railroad track that has bisected Flagstaff from the beginning. The first depot — actually just a boxcar — was stationed on flatter ground in 1882 east of that first settlement. By 1884, local businesses had abandoned the spring to relocate next to the boxcar, and that spot became the center of downtown Flagstaff. The logging and ranching economy grew up around the rails.

By the 1980s, Lew said, downtown was dead. Much of the retail had been lured by a new type of boxcar: a shopping mall on the eastern outskirts.

At the heart of things

The centerpiece of Flagstaff's revitalized urban core is Heritage Square, a brick plaza with architectural details that represent local history and geology, such as a wooden flagpole with a base made of Grand Canyon rocks arranged chronologically.

It's often abuzz with activity. On our Friday afternoon, it was swarming with families, toddlers bouncing to the beat of a live band covering "I Shot the Sheriff." A few hours later, the place was even busier, although quieter. Free movies are projected outdoors on Friday nights during the summer, and several hundred people with picnic hampers were taking in "The Incredibles." The next afternoon, a troupe of Middle Eastern dancers and musicians defied threatening clouds and occasional showers.

Surrounding Heritage Square are several blocks of shops, restaurants and bars — although the bars are now young-adult hangouts instead of the dives that used to line these streets. We ate well at Pasto, a Mediterranean restaurant across the street from Heritage Square, with intensely colored interior walls and a back patio that provided a retreat from the hubbub of the square.

Examining the nearby shop windows, my mother and I noticed that not one of the shops was selling curios; they appear to have been replaced by stores selling Native American crafts.

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