Tucson Barrio
by Jane St. Clair

“I am always drawn back to the places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods,” Truman Capote once wrote.

But when you do go back to those places, they look different — even though your overall memories of your city can be accurate. For example, sometimes I think of Manhattan, where I once lived. I remember the Art Deco style, its skylines, and its crowded streets. If it were music, it would be Gershwin.

I remember Chicago, as Carl Sandburg wrote, with big shoulders and a tougher edge to it, with its tall beauty standing against the shores of Lake Michigan.

San Francisco is strangely western and eastern to me all at once, with its Victorian pink ladies standing in front of the modern age, almost as if Victoria is refusing to budge.

A city’s past, its geography and climate, its architecture and its setting are what you remember about it.

Tucson is about desert, an extreme climate, adobe brick, and its long long history.

Although you think of the American West as new, Tucson is one of the oldest cities in the United States.

In the 1770s Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr were doing their thing back East. Yet people here had already built the presidio to protect them against the Apache. Tucson was then part of Mexico, and stayed that way until 1854. Meanwhile for the next 100 years, the Tucson Barrio with its unique abode houses kept growing into a large neighborhood south of the city’s center.

In the 1950s, in the name of progress, the city fathers of Tucson tried to bulldoze the Tucson Barrio to make way for skyscrapers. There was a fight that ended with leaving part of the Tucson Barrio still standing, including the Shrine of El Triadito, now a historic landmark.

Today the Tucson Barrio is a really interesting and vibrant neighborhood, probably one of the most diverse American neighborhoods in terms of income. All kinds of people, wealthy and not so wealthy, have moved into the area and are restoring the buildings, painting them vibrant colors while keeping their architectural integrity. I love their boxy lines, and the way their bright colors contrast with the West’s big turquoise sky.

Someday, when I am drawn back to the places where I have lived, I’ll remember Tucson in terms of these bright and wonderful adobe houses standing in front of slick city buildings. It’s a unique and wonderful image, and it defines Tucson.

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For more pictures of the Tucson Barrio, go to 1 -2 -3 Southwest Doors.

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