Tucson, Might and Memory

On a return visit to Tucson at the end of December, I was reminded that modern San Francisco was born in Tucson, as the city’s western founder, de Anza, arrived from Tucson in the southwest, rather than along California’s Mission Trail, the El Camino Real.

Arizona celebrated its centennial last year. While the state has several neat smaller cities – Tempe, Flagstaff, and Scottsdale – the two main cities establishing the sun corridor mini region are Phoenix and Tucson. Along this two-hour corridor lie zombie suburbs, empty of houses but fully platted with streets and utilities and sidewalks. Over a million permitted dwelling units lay waiting for investors and buyers along this route.

Tucson is a vast, flat gridded city, set out along the Santa Cruz River, following the American Continental Grid township guidelines, with major arterials - all wider than San Francisco’s Market Street, every half mile or mile. The city is surrounded by mountain ranges, in each direction, which are almost always within view. New construction in the city is thin and beige, with occasional shades of light brown.

Tucson is home to the University of Arizona (almost 40,000 students) and a resurging technology industry. It has a long history of military settlement and occupation, most visible in the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. My visit was bookended by two fascinating post-military facilities, marking the public face and memory of the region’s vast military industrial complex: The Pima Air and Space Museum (PASM), and the Titan Missile Museum.

The PASM, one of the largest aviation museums in the world, is a facility filled with airplanes covering the history of aviation, mostly military planes, including the Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird”, sleek enough to look at home in the next Star Wars movie. The planes are displayed in four vast hangars and an 80 acre outdoor yard. Fighter planes, jets bombers, helicopters, even some presidential cruisers. The themes are military might and patriotism. The staff seemed to be mostly veterans who were knowledgeable, proud, patient, and enthusiastic. The planes expressed incredible and innovative design and machinery. My favorite part of the museum was that everything in the museum is full-scale, real, tactile, touchable, and visceral. A relief from my hours spent gazing at digital screens of all sizes. And appealing as an antidote to online representations and video war games. But the PASM is a miniature facility compared to the affiliated “Boneyard”, officially the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG). The boneyard goes on for hundreds of acres, with thousands of retired planes. The PASM is a reminder that military R and D often filters down into civilian applications.

The PASM, a visual display of our evolving might and power in the skies, could be contrasted with the Titan Missile Museum, an invisible statement of American power. The museum is one of the last physical remnants of the Titan II missile program. It is a former launch site converted to a museum. This is the last remaining facility if its kind, outlasting the fifty-something sites gathered around Tucson, Little Rock, and Wichita that have been destroyed following US/Soviet treaties in the 1980s. This is where we kept 24-hour watch on our nuclear arsenal, following a strategy of “peace through deterrence”,that "kept the Cold War from turning hot". Due to a common belief in “mutual assured destruction” (MAD), no missiles were ever fired at enemy targets. Here’s the staggering data:

• Titan II Missile: 104' h x 10'd
• Warhead: Nuclear bomb to destroy a 600 square mile area
• Range: 6000 miles, with accuracy to within 1 mile of target
• Lifespan: the silo was a one-time use facility

Except for a small museum building and some miscellaneous components, the entire facility is underground, a window-less concrete bunker meant to survive a nuclear war, but not a direct hit.

 

The road leading out of Tucson to the southeast, towards El Paso and Mexico, lead to Tombstone, “the town that's too tough to die!” Tombstone is now the ultimate stage set of a town, but was before a real town, an original boom town of the 1880s that had a decade-long mining boom probably comparable to San Francisco in the 1850s. It was booming with prospectors and Texas cattlemen and Chinese laborers and showgirls and lawmen. It had its own archetypal western main street, its own Chinatown, and the County seat. Yes, this town lives in the past, its own real past, and you can be part of the experience – the gunfight at the OK Corral is reenacted five times a day.

Here are some pictures, beginning with Tombstone, then the PASM and Titan Missile Museum:
(Note: you can scroll through the slideshow below, on this website; or click below to see them bigger at Shutterfly.)

Click here to view these pictures larger