Staying on Top of Things

Growing into a wise old grizzled old bestower of the culture’s lore has its privileges. And it has its drawbacks.

One of the latter is that you take to change less and less as you devolve further into the wisdom of maturity. That’s another way of saying you get to a point where you can’t stand it when people change things up on you!!!!

Argha.

All of which is to lead in to the tale of yesterday’s trip to downtown Phoenix, a place I’ve managed to stay out of for a good long time. Once again this year, I agreed to participate in a mock trial for the County Prosecutor’s office, a device used to train young lawyers and an activity that’s a bit of a hoot.

However, they changed the venue from the seedy offices where one would expect a prosecutor to reside to the courtroom set-ups at a proprietary law school that occupies many floors of a new highrise downtown. And in doing so, they changed parking garages, too.

Holy sh!t.

Parking garages now share space with things like…oh, a bowling alley. I had one hell of a time finding the entrance to the parking cave, causing me to have to navigate and renavigate the frenzied, spaghetti-like maze of one-way streets that they’ve installed downtown. What a mess!

I’d elected to go down Central Avenue because you can’t turn left off Seventh and Seventh during the rush hour. Though I thought the reverse lane ended somewhere north of downtown, I wasn’t sure where and didn’t want to go right, right, and right to turn left to get to the promised parking garage.

Everyone else had the same idea: Central was a commuter’s nightmare even north of where the accursed train turns onto that formerly beautiful urban boulevard. The train not only has massively uglified what was once the only really pretty street in central Phoenix, it’s made a horror show of driving.

Finally I had to cut off a few of my fellow homicidal drivers and slam my way into a right-turn lane so I could go west to Seventh Avenue, which was virtually empty because everyone was on Central. On Seventh I cruised downtown without a problem, but by then I’d turned a 20-minute drive into a 40-minute drive.

So I was late by the time I hit downtown, and then it took forever to find the parking garage with its well-disguised entrances.

Fortunately I wasn’t the only one — others also straggled in even later, having encountered the same mess.

Part of the problem is age — one adjusts to change with increasing difficulty as time passes — and part is CHANGE. The city and its grasping developers have transformed our formerly down-at-the-heels downtown, largely for the better.

What used to be a nature conservancy for drug addicts, alcoholics, and the homeless mentally ill has turned into a vibrant, active, busy central-city core. New high-rises now dominate the skyline, and old historic high-rise buildings — now mid-rises in the new landscape — have been elegantly restored. The place is buzzing with activity.

Problem is, the centerpiece of this redevelopment, a large, expensive, and ugly stadium, took up so much space that they had to reroute a couple of main drags and turn a bunch of two-way streets into one-ways, with no discernible logic or good sense.

Adding to the mystification, the damn train has made an unholy mess of the roads and traffic lights a half-mile in either direction of the rails. Timed lights have gone away, so you sit through two or three red signals to get past an intersection, and you never know which way you can turn and what lane you can safely enter. Bizarre arrows are painted in lanes directing you out of this or that lane, for no apparent reason; these are sometimes ignored and often senseless. Literally I have seen intersections with signs reading

NO LEFT TURN
NO RIGHT TURN
DO NOT ENTER

As you can imagine, then, a drive to a downtown destination makes for a confusing, unpleasant trip.

Adding to the confusion is that what’s in my head as  I think of the downtown map is the grid I knew when I worked down there in my 20s. That was a long, long time ago. Today’s map is a whole lot different. And i. don’t. like. it.

So we see how incumbent it is upon the aging city dweller to bloody keep up with the changes in her or his city!

I think what I’m gunna do, while the weather’s still nice, is get on the train at AJ’s, attired in some costume with comfortable shoes, and ride downtown. Then I’m going to get off the train at Washington or Jefferson, with a Mapquest printout in hand, and spend two or three hours just walking around.

This, I hope, will revise the internal map of the place. And it’ll be a good way to get the day’s exercise.

Images:

Downtown Phoenix at night. JCordova. Public domain.
Exquisite train stop in downtown Phoenix. 2008. Ixnayonthetimmay. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.