Phoenix's Ahwatukee-Foothills

Images of America: Arizona

by Martin W. Gibson

South of Phoenix's South Mountain, west of Interstate 10, north of the Gila River Indian Community, and east of Arizona state land lies the picturesque village of Ahwatukee-Foothills, home to some 87,000 people. Its proximity to adjacent cities, cultural centers, shopping, and dining combines with these natural boundaries to give the area its beautiful topography, sense of peaceful isolation, and high desirability as a great place to live, work, and play. But long before there was a freeway, the area was part of the Kyrene farming community, a rural patchwork of hardy pioneer families typifying the country's agricultural way of life during the first half of the 20th century.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published September 6, 2006

Reviews

[Joel Wakefield · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Ahwatukee Foothills pose an interesting problem for recording history, both because it is really a very young community with not a long history to begin with, and because so much of the history is bound up in commerce and building, rather than a more organic development story. Martin Gibson's work is really impressive here, unearthing photos and stories to show the development of the area from an unwatered desert to a thriving community of 80,000. Anyone who lives in the area should be incredibly thankful for his work in putting this all together to avoid it being lost. Gibson also does a very nice job describing photographs that bear no resemblance to current day, but putting them in context of what we all drive by every day now.
My one wish here is for more stories of individual people and events that weren't so tied to the developers and merchants once the development began. I thought this book was strongest in telling tales of the early farmers and those who built the first houses on their own, but once it became a development the entire history seemed to switch to becoming the history of construction and merchants. Of course, it may be that this is just a function of the development of a community like Ahwatukee - maybe his history of a place like this really is just the history of the development of golf courses and which stores opened and closed (there is an argument to be made that the primary stories in the history of Ahwatukee continue to be related to the openings -and closings, and reopenings - of golf courses). I know that Gibson has put together another book that is designed to have more stories, and that may be the perfect companion piece to this one. I look forward to reading it for more human interest.
But again, I can't stress enough how even a young community like Ahwatukee benefits so very much from having someone willing to spend the time and be enthusiastic about its own history.