Dave Roth brought a friend to the New Times offices, a demure little pigeon he calls Tootsie. He set her on a desk and she strutted around, nodding her head as if in agreement with Roth’s thoughts about pigeon control at the Madison Street Jail. Roth has started a heated…
When it finally opens early next year, the new visitors center at Hoover Dam promises to be a classy affair, a three-story marvel rising from the canyon wall with sweeping views of the dam and of Lake Mead. All for a mere $119 million. That staggering price tag for the…
There was nothing unusual about John Gacy’s brick bungalow. I had seen thousands just like it all over the Chicago area. But Gacy’s house at 8213 Summerdale, near O’Hare International Airport, held a horrifying and sickening secret. To create the events that took place there under cover of darkness would…
Beneath an unassuming building on Central Avenue, in a labyrinth of studios, dozens of artists labor over worktables and at easels and printing presses, churning out watercolors, paintings on canvas and etchings in practically every style known to art history: abstract, cubist and a neoclassical figurative style one could call…
Two of them do it in their bedrooms. Two others do it in an alcove. One does it in his living room and another in his glass-blowing studio. Other people across the country do it in other spaces, but the point is, anyone can do it anywhere. That is, create…
Step into Cynthia Gooding’s enclosed garage and you might believe you wandered into an extraterrestrial petting zoo. But as your eyes adjust to the dimly lighted room, you realize that you’re not mistaken at all. Outside of a sci-fi menagerie, where on Earth would you ever see the large-eared, nearly…
From all appearances, Walter Wrobel is the model Catholic priest. He’s got a doctorate in divinity, years of experience and he looks the part–clad in a suit jacket and black shirt buttoned to the neck. Scholarly glasses. Sweet disposition. Wife and kids. Wife and kids? Wrobel is one of a…
Brunch Tips: The number of high-class resorts in the Valley makes this one of the country’s great brunch sites. If Marquesa and Latilla Room are booked, here are a few other Mother’s Day brunch alternatives: Terrace Dining Room (Phoenician resort): The Sheraton folks have recently taken over the operation of…
And the days dwindle down to a precious few. . . . –song from the Broadway show Knickerbocker Holiday For Charles Barkley, these are the precious few final days. Barkley plans to retire from the NBA at the end of this season even if the Suns are unable to win…
The City of Phoenix has been trumpeting its new City Hall as a prime example of cost-effective public construction. The “Best Run City in the World” even produced a television program about its new headquarters that ran through April on the city’s cable channel. While it may not rate a…
An illustration of an atom is one of the four symbols emblazoned on Maricopa County’s official government seal. It is there to reflect the importance of nuclear energy to the county, home of the nation’s largest nuclear-powered electrical generating facility. And that facility is especially important to the financial well-being…
Early last year, then-Maricopa County manager Roy Pederson found himself sitting across the table from two men who are not easily lost in the labyrinths of government budgets. Newly elected County Treasurer Doug Todd is a crusty pro who previously helped craft the state’s multibillion-dollar budgets as chair of the…
Running up debts of more than $100 million qualifies Maricopa County’s leaders to be called pound foolish, but that doesn’t mean they are penny-wise. While the bulk of the county’s swelling fiscal crisis stems from loans that have piled up and been hidden with more loans, the county has also…
An HIV-positive woman wrongly linked to an alleged “sex for drugs” scandal has won a legal victory in her battle to clear her name. Without comment, the Arizona Supreme Court on April 6 declined to reinstate a marijuana-related criminal case against Ronda Crace. In so doing, the court upheld a…
“We are never the victims of external events. Events just happen,” Neville Rowe once wrote. “When we end a lifetime, we still have the same personalities we had on Earth–the only difference is that we no longer have the physical body around us.” Rowe, a 55-year-old Phoenix man known by…
Fabio? Fabio who? Chalk it up to extreme good fortune, but Chandler rodeo cowboy Norm Nelson somehow managed to reach the ripe, old age of 50 without ever being exposed to the ubiquitous name, image and voice of romance readers’ favorite F-word. But in the past few weeks, Nelson has…
There are worse things than jail. There is no telephone there. There is, instead, peace. A hard table to write on. The best political writing in this century has been done from jail . . . Lenin and Gandhi. –Richard Nixon musing with a friend several hours after resigning as…
In 1962, Grover Cleveland Thompson decided to spruce up the front lawn of his Sunnyslope home with a salute to the then-current Seattle World’s Fair. Using concrete, marbles, broken pop bottles, shattered ceramic figurines and shards of brightly colored Fiesta Ware, the retired plant foreman created a nine-foot-tall replica of…
The Luhrs building, at the intersection of First Avenue and Jefferson Street, is somewhat magnificent–by Phoenix architectural standards. But inside the 1920s-era art-deco structure, the flat, patterned carpet has aged and the hallways smell, faintly, like dirty laundry. It is here, on the first floor, that you will find the…
During the 16th century, fussy Vatican clerics took offense at the friskier frescoes in the Sistine Chapel and commissioned an artist to paint draperies over the private parts of the nudes on the ceiling. Here in Phoenix, there’s a bar called the Monastery, and its frescoes are really a decoupage…
Bob Hirschfeld is used to being the hunter, not the prey. The feisty and flamboyant divorce lawyer–whose specialty is winning child-custody rights for fathers, by any means necessary–is usually on the attack, using the courts as a weapon in his especially bloody brand of domestic combat. Now Hirschfeld is on…
It is about midnight when the cop from Norway cruises East Van Buren Street for the first time. “Wow!” says Einar Kristoffersen, three days into his first visit to the States. “My Godt!” His guttural exclamations are not evoked by the hookers and drug pushers who normally haunt Van Buren…
