Tempe

Tempe is a city of about 230,000 people on the Salt River in the Valley of the Sun, in the March of Arizona. It stands beside Phoenix and east of it, and it is not part of it: the town refused Phoenix’s offer of annexation on the day it was incorporated in 1894, and it celebrates the refusal each year. It is the home of the University of the March, the largest university in the Realm’s Southwest, and its largest employer by a long way.

It is also three other things. It is a lake: Tempe Town Lake, which fills a stretch of the river bed behind two dams, opened in 1999 and proposed thirty years earlier by the university’s engineers. It is the headquarters of the Salt River Project, which keeps the Valley’s water and power. And it is, in the words of the Phoenix Sky Harbor article, the airport’s “second municipality”: the field is boxed in by a riverbed, two freeways, a city and Tempe, and the approach crosses the town’s north-west streets.

The town began as a ferry and a flour mill at the foot of a butte, was given a teachers’ school in 1885 in a division of spoils that it was held to have lost, and has spent the years since being useful to other institutions. It is the youngest city in the March, half of its people under thirty-five, and it keeps in its centre a long main street of shops and music rooms, a butte with a painted letter, and a shaded municipal apparatus for measuring heat that every other Valley city has studied and none has copied entire.

The question this article keeps returning to is whether a young city built on a river that ran twice in a decade can be honest about what it took from the river and from the people who were there first. The record, as Tempe publishes it, is that it can be honest, and that honesty has not prevented the taking.

Name

The name and the people

The settlement was Hayden’s Ferry until 1879, when Darrell Duppa, the Englishman who named Phoenix eleven years before, proposed Tempe, for the Vale of Tempe in Greece, on the ground that the canal-and-orchard country along the Salt looked as the Greek valley had been described. The name was adopted by the settlers and has been spoken ever since as tem-PEE, with the stress on the second syllable, which visitors get wrong and the town does not correct.

The people are Tempeans in print and Tempeites in speech. The first is the form of the charter, the Council’s minutes and the March’s official prose. The second is what the students say and what the older families say when they want to be affectionate, and neither has ever been settled by the Council, which discussed the matter in 1962 and adjourned it.

History

Before the ferry

The people archaeologists call the Hohokam dug canals across this reach of the Salt for a thousand years, and the canals the Salt River Project re-dug in 1902 were theirs. The Akimel O’odham and the Pee Posh farmed the reach after them, until upstream diversion starved the river and the farming with it. The town was laid out on ground that had been worked, and the fuller account of what happened to the people who worked it is in the March and Phoenix articles.

Hayden’s Ferry, 1871

Charles Hayden set up a ferry across the Salt in 1871, at the foot of the butte where the river narrowed against the rock, and the butte took his name. He was a freighter and a trader, and he saw that the road from the south and the army posts to the Salt River Valley would have to cross the river somewhere, and that the crossing could be charged for. The ferry was a flat boat on a cable, and the cable was kept: it hangs now in the Council chamber, and the Lord Mayor’s chain of office is made from a length of it.

Hayden was a landowner and a promoter as well as a ferryman, and he is the founder in the way founders of such places are, by being the first person there with a plan. He did not build the town. The people who built it were the families who followed the ferry across: Hispano farmers from the south, who had been farming the river’s edge for a generation, and settlers who came with the canal.

The ferry’s rules

The ferry ran by rules that were posted on the south landing and have been preserved. There was a fare for a foot passenger and a larger one for a wagon and team. There was no crossing at night, and none when the river stood above a marked post on the landing. The ferryman’s bell hung on the south bank, and it was rung once for a crossing and twice for an emergency.

The post is the part that matters. Its readings, kept by the ferryman from 1872, are the oldest record of the Salt’s height, entered in a ledger in the ferryman’s hand, and they are in the town history museum. The town’s habit of measuring what the river and the sun do, and of publishing the figure, begins on that landing, and the Heat Office’s sensors are the post’s descendants. The bell passed to the town when the bridge opened and is the one that is rung on the anniversary of incorporation.

The mill and the settlement, 1874 to 1885

Hayden built a flour mill in 1874, at the foot of the butte beside the ferry, to grind the wheat the new farms were growing, and the mill is the reason the settlement became a place and not a crossing. The wheat came from the Montoyas and the Peraltas, Hispano farm families whose fields lay along the river south of the butte, and from the Brandts, who took over the mill from Hayden in the 1880s and ran it for two generations. The Ekstroms and the Carlyles, who came with the canal, dug and kept the ditches. These five families, and the others who followed them, are the town’s old families, and the claim to go back to the ferry is the one claim in Tempe that nobody else can make.

By 1885 the settlement had about a thousand people and was already a larger place than the school it was about to be given would suggest. It had two churches, a chapel of the Church of America and a Catholic one for the Hispano families, a store, the mill and a weekly newspaper, the Tempe Daily News, which was founded in that year under a name its first editor hoped the town would grow into, and which has kept the name ever since.

The booby prize, 1885

In 1885 the first March Diet had to decide where the new March’s institutions would stand. The university went to Tucson, which was the older and larger town and which had wanted it. The Valley, which had little to offer but a few farming villages along the canals, was given a normal school, a school for training teachers, at Tempe. The Diet’s debate was reported in full in the town’s first newspaper, and Tucson’s members had said in it that the Valley had been given the lesser prize.

The town’s reply is the thing that is remembered. The founders’ answer, printed in the Tempe Daily News the week after the vote, was: “We will teach the teachers.” It became the school’s unofficial motto and the town’s own. The resentment that the vote produced turned within a decade into stubborn pride, and the pride has outlasted the resentment: Tempe has been the place that teaches the teachers for as long as it has been a place of any size, and it has never stopped saying so.

The first Principal, Lucius Orne, met thirty-three students in a single room that year, and the story of the school is told in the University of the March article. What belongs to the town is the consequence. The school made Tempe a place that needed water, police and a government of its own, and it made the town’s economy a college economy from its first year, which it has never ceased to be.

The parish and the town, 1889

The Church of America’s parish church was built in 1889, in brick, on the rise south of the butte, and it is the oldest building in the town after the mill. It replaced the chapel, served the Church’s families and was for forty years the only building in Tempe large enough for the whole town to sit in at once. The Hispano families kept their own chapel and then their own church, in the barrio south of the Avenue, and the two congregations did not share a building until the 1960s.

Incorporation, 1894

Tempe was incorporated as a town in 1894, and the reason was the normal school. A school of a few hundred students and teachers needed a municipality: it needed water, it needed police, it needed someone to answer for the roads and the ditches, and the town board that had managed the settlement’s affairs by agreement could not. Incorporation followed the school and not the other way round, which the town has always found slightly embarrassing and the university has always found reasonable.

The first Mayor was Josiah Brandt, a miller, and his first act was to refuse the offer that Phoenix had made the previous winter: that Tempe should join it as a ward, on the ground that a town with a school and a mill and a canal would be better governed from the capital. Brandt’s refusal was recorded in one sentence in the minutes. The town has celebrated it on the anniversary of incorporation ever since, with a procession from the mill to the butte, a speech by the Lord Mayor of the day and the unhurried ringing of the old ferry’s bell, and it is the nearest the town comes to a civic holiday.

The Project, the dam and the bridge, 1902 to 1913

The March Reclamation Act of 1902 empowered the valley’s water users to organise themselves into the association that became the Salt River Project, and Roosevelt Dam, completed in 1911, made the water certain. The effect on Tempe was the effect on the whole Valley, and it was larger than the town had expected: the town doubled in a decade. Farms that had gambled on the river’s mood each spring could plant on a schedule, and the families who had come with the canal found that they had been right to dig it.

The old ferry closed in 1913, when a bridge opened across the Salt at the foot of the butte. The ferry’s owners had fought the bridge and lost, and the bridge’s builders, as a courtesy, took down the cable and gave it to the town. The canal rights that had been Tempe’s oldest quarrel with Phoenix became, in the same years, a shared interest in the Project, and the quarrel did not end so much as lose its subject.

The Hispano town

The barrio grew south of what is now the Avenue from the 1900s, around a church, a school and a hall, and the families who lived in it were the town’s majority until the 1950s. They farmed the old fields, kept the canals, worked the mill and the school’s grounds and built most of what the town was built from. The barrio had its own church, its own mutual aid society, its own bakery and bars, and a life that the old town and the college saw from the other side of the Avenue and did not enter.

It is the part of the town’s history about which the town is least comfortable, because what happened to it was done without any single decision. The barrio was not cleared. It was bought up, house by house, by student landlords from the 1980s, and the account of that is in the Failings section.

The teachers’ college and the Depression

The normal school became a teachers’ college in 1925, with the right to grant a four-year degree and with a woman at its head, Dr Mabel Tolliver, who was to hold the office until 1944. The town’s economy was already the college’s, and the Depression of the 1930s tested the connection and did not break it: the college kept the town employed, the Project’s works kept the labourers, and Tolliver kept the college open by teaching half of its classes herself.

The decade also had a darker side that the town does not often tell. In the early 1930s county and municipal drives removed Hispano families from the Valley by what were called repatriations, funded by the counties and the towns’ relief rolls, on the argument that the families were a charge on public money. Some of those removed were citizens. The federal ministry of the day knew of the drives and did not stop them, and the town’s own relief committee, which was Tolliver and the parish priest sitting together, could not stop them either; it fed the families who remained and kept the names of those who went.

The second war

The war changed the town more than anything since the dam. A Royal American Air Force flying school opened on the open land east of the town, on a field that lay across the line in Mesa, training pilots for the Realm and for the allied air forces, and it brought thousands of young men, a great deal of money and the town’s first large growth since 1911. The town had a hundred things to provide for them, and it provided them.

The war also brought a prisoners’ camp, in Papago Park on the line between Tempe and Phoenix, which held French prisoners of war from 1942 to 1946, men of the fascist regime’s army taken in the Atlantic and North African campaigns. It is remembered for one thing. In the winter of 1943 a party of prisoners dug a tunnel from the camp to the canal, and went out through it at night, and walked back the same night, having wanted, as one of them said afterwards, only to see whether the tunnel went through. The Valley still tells it as a story, and nothing else stands on the site.

The college and the war are told in the university article: it admitted a handful of Japanese American students released from the camps in the March, refused to dismiss those already enrolled, and says it was far too few.

The camp in Papago Park

The prisoners’ camp stood in the red butte country of Papago Park and held about three thousand French prisoners of war at its fullest, men of the fascist regime’s army taken in the Atlantic and North African campaigns, who were guarded by the Army and housed in huts that the Valley’s winters made bearable and its summers did not. They worked, by agreement, on the Project’s ditches and in the orchards, and the old families remember them as quiet men who ate more than they were given and sang on the canal banks in the evenings.

The tunnel of 1943 was the camp’s one famous episode, and the story the Valley tells is gentler than the camp’s records. The prisoners dug it for most of the autumn with spoons and a bent shovel, came out at night in the canal’s ditch, stood on the bank for an hour, and walked back through it the same night, and the guards found the tunnel the next morning with nobody missing. Four of the prisoners returned to Tempe after the war as students at the college, and one of them taught French there for thirty years.

Refrigerated air and the 1950s

Refrigerated air changed the Valley completely, and Tempe’s version of that change is a number. The population went from about 7,000 to about 25,000 in a decade. The college’s first air-conditioned residence opened in 1951, and the town’s summer population stopped leaving: the families who had taken their children to the coast each June found that they could stay, and the college found that it could teach through the summer.

It was also the decade in which the town’s Hispano majority ended, though not in an act. The new families came from the rest of the Realm, they were mostly Anglo and mostly young, and they settled in the blocks south of the college, where the farms had been.

The charter of 1955

The town became a city by a charter of 1955, and the fight over it was about one question. The old town board’s chair had been, in effect, chosen by the college’s regents since 1894, and the question was whether the head of the city should be elected by the voters or continue to be chosen by the college. The college lost. The title was borrowed from Phoenix, which has had a Lord Mayoralty since its charter of 1884 and whose reform Council of 1949 made the City Manager’s office the model for a city of this kind, and the Lord Mayor of Tempe has been elected citywide ever since.

The rest of the charter was a compromise that satisfied nobody. A council of eleven, six by ward and five at large, replaced the board, and a City Manager took the administration that the board had shared out among its members. The wards were drawn to give the old town and the barrio and the new blocks a voice each. The five members at large were put in so that the college’s end of the town could not outvote the rest, and they have been the means by which the old families keep the Council.

The university and the field

The Heat Laboratory was founded in 1957 and the college became a university in 1958, and the two belong together in the town’s account of itself: the first gave Tempe its reason for being studied, and the second gave the town its largest employer for the rest of its history.

The flying school closed in 1963. The land it stood on lay across the Mesa line, and the Diet divided it by a statute of 1964: the runways and apron went to Mesa as a freight and general aviation airport with unlimited room and almost no traffic, which is the second regional airport of the Valley, and the rest went to the university for its Polytechnic campus, on the old base housing. Tempe received nothing but the memory of the young men and the money, and a certain complaint that the town that fed the school had not been given any of its land.

The Auditorium, 1964

The university’s regents commissioned a hall in 1958, the year the college became a university, for its convocations and for the Valley’s concerts, and asked the architect they most admired. Frank Lloyd Wright accepted in the last year of his life and drew a circular hall under a low, lifted roof, with the stage at its centre and the seats rising around it. He died before it was built, and it was completed on his drawings in 1964 by the associates who had worked with him.

The Valley calls it the Wright. It is the university’s convocation hall and the Valley’s concert house, it seats about three thousand, and it is the one building in the March on which nobody has ever been heard to disagree. It stands at the south end of the campus mall, under the palms, and its roof is the first thing a visitor from the airport sees of the university.

The freeways, 1965 and the 1980s

Two freeways cut the town in three. The first, in 1965, ran along the old town’s south edge and cut the barrio from the Avenue. The second, built in the 1980s, ran along the south and cut the blocks from the old farms. The town opposed both in the Diet and lost both. The barrio now sits between them, in a strip of streets under the noise of the road and the approach of the airport, and the two roads are why the town is described, by those who live in it, as three towns that happen to share a Council.

The canal banks, 1974

An ordinance of 1974 opened the banks of the Project’s canals as public ways, and it is the Council’s most durable work. It followed a summer in which two children drowned in a canal behind a fence, a campaign by the students and the cyclists that filled the Council chamber for three months, and the first Council in the town’s history on which the old families did not have a majority. The Project consented with reluctance, on the ground that open banks were a liability, and the Council indemnified it.

The result is the town’s quiet network of shaded paths, laid along the water under the cottonwoods that the Project had planted to stabilise the banks. It is the part of Tempe that the Heat Office most often recommends, and it is where the plaque the nations wrote stands, beside the line of the Hohokam canal.

The Index, 1976

The March adopted the Abernathy Index in 1976, after a hearing that the Diet’s committee held in Tempe, in the university’s laboratory, under the rule that the Diet must sit ten days a year outside the capital. Ruth Abernathy, then in her sixties, gave the committee the evidence of two decades of heat deaths counted house by house, and the building industry argued for the airport’s reading, which was cheaper and which gave the industry more working hours.

The Index was adopted for advisories in 1976 and made binding on building sites in 1986, after a decade in which the industry fought the site rule and lost. The rule that outdoor labour ceases at thresholds fixed in regulations and measured at the work itself, which the March now treats as one of its settled laws, rests on that hearing. Abernathy lived to see the second vote and is buried in the town cemetery on the butte’s flank, under a stone that carries no title.

The lake

The lake took thirty years. The university’s engineers proposed in the 1960s that the town hold water in the bed of the Salt at Tempe, and the proposal was put to the voters in 1971, who rejected it. The Project would not consent to a lake until it was satisfied that the bed could be managed, and in the winter of 1979 to 1980 the river ran for weeks at a rate nobody alive had seen, took out every bridge across it but one and cut the Valley in two.

The flood of 1980 is the reason the lake was possible. It showed what the bed could do, and it gave the university’s engineers the design they needed: two dams that lower for exactly that, so that the river passes through the town unimpeded when it comes. A second vote in 1988 passed narrowly after a campaign by the students and the old town, and the Project agreed a lease in 1991. The agreement required a continuous release of water below the dams, which the nations had asked for as part of the settlement, and the lake opened in 1999.

The barrio bought up

The barrio was lost in the 1980s and after, and the loss was not a clearing. Student landlords bought the houses one at a time, as the university grew and the freeways made the streets unattractive to families, and the rents rose until the people who had lived there for four generations could not afford to stay. There was no compulsory purchase, no plan and no announcement. The families dispersed to Mesa and Chandler, and by the end of the decade the old barrio was student blocks.

Heat becomes law, 1994 to 1997

In August 1994 two students died of heat in one August in a residence hall, and a student campaign for a lawful maximum began. Article 4 of the March Charter, which fixed a lawful maximum indoor temperature in any dwelling, school or workplace, was enacted in 1996, and in 1997 the university published its count of the dead in its own residences and Tempe founded its Heat Office, which was the first municipal body in the March created for the purpose. The town’s account of its own heat law starts there, and the Heat Officer’s annual report is the document the town is proudest of.

The opening, 1999

Tempe Town Lake opened in January 1999, and it filled over six weeks. The two dams were raised, the Project opened the canal headgates, and the water climbed the bed from the butte’s foot to the eastern dam while the town came down each afternoon to watch. The Lord Mayor of the day opened it, with an elder of the nations beside her, the old ferry’s bell was rung, and the first boat on the water was a rowing eight of the university’s crew.

The river below the dams, which had been gravel for most of the century, ran green and slow for the first time in the memory of anyone living, and within a year herons had come back to it. The first summer’s lease figures showed that the release below the dams had been kept, and the nations’ observer signed the Authority’s first report with a short note, which said only that the water was flowing.

The Avenue and the tramway

The 2000s changed the centre. The university’s downtown campus opened in 2006, in the capital; the Tempe Center for the Arts opened on the lake’s north shore in 2007; and the tramway opened in 2008, run as Valley Metro and owned by the City of Phoenix, with seven stops through Tempe and the busiest stretch of the whole line. The old town’s merchants, who had opposed it in the 1990s on the ground that it would take their customers away, became within a few years its most loyal defenders.

Islands, a strike and a boundary, 2012 to 2022

In 2012 the city annexed two surrounded county islands, the last unincorporated land within its limits, and it has been landlocked since. The faculty and adjuncts of the university struck in 2018 over its online arm, and the strike, the first at any public university in the March, was settled in eleven days by the Diet’s intervention. And the boundary review of 2022, which concerned Commons constituencies and not the city’s limits, added Tempe to the seat of Phoenix East, which became Phoenix East and Tempe, and made the seat a safe one for the Speaker.

The Ahwatukee loop and since

In 2025 Ahwatukee seceded from Phoenix as a town of about eighty thousand people, and Tempe, which lies north of it across a strip of Phoenix and the interstate, watched with interest. Its Council debated a motion to annex a southern strip of the new town, was told that the town did not wish to be annexed, and dropped it. Tempe had never been Phoenix’s, and the secession had no lesson for it that Brandt had not taught it in 1894.

The city is now in the middle of an argument about whether to enlarge the lake against the figures in the Basin Report, with a Council vote in the winter. Its Heat Office is preparing the summer’s count. And the Speaker of the House of Commons, who sits for the town, does his constituency work from a house in it.

Government

The Corporation

The City of Tempe is a municipal corporation of the March of Arizona, governed under the charter of 1955, which replaced the charter of 1894 and which has been amended nineteen times. It is a council-manager city on the model of its neighbour, with a Lord Mayor elected citywide, a Council of eleven, and a City Manager who runs the administration. It is also, by the March’s municipal law, an independent city: it has never been a ward, an urban village or a district of Phoenix, and its boundaries are its own.

The corporation’s arrangements are unusually legible, and the town is proud of that. The Council’s minutes are published in English and Spanish within three days, the budget is printed in a form that a resident can follow, and the Heat Office’s count of the town’s own dead is published by street. The openness has an origin in 1894, when the first Mayor, a miller, said that a town which could be argued with by its own millers had better be able to show them its books, and it has been maintained since by the habit of a college town that contains a great many people who like to check.

The charters

The charter of 1894 was a short instrument for a small place. It created a Mayor and a board of six, gave the town power over its roads, its ditches and its police, and made the head of the board in effect the college’s man: the regents of the normal school named the chair, and the board’s other members sat by election. It served for sixty years because the town did not change much in them, and it ended because the town did.

The charter of 1955, treated above, created the city. It replaced the board with a Council of eleven, the Mayor with a Lord Mayor elected by the voters and not the college, and the board’s shared administration with a City Manager. It also did one thing that has been the subject of every argument since: it fixed the Council at six members by ward and five at large, a compromise that was meant to give every part of a growing town a voice and has instead given the old families a means of keeping the Council.

The Lord Mayor

The Lord Mayor is elected citywide on a four-year term, renewable, and chairs the Council with a casting vote. The office is the only one in Tempe that every voter chooses, and it is exactly as powerful as the Council permits: the Lord Mayor sets the agenda, speaks for the city, signs its instruments and holds its ceremonial position, and has no administrative power whatever, which belongs to the City Manager, as it does in Phoenix.

The Lord Mayor wears a chain of office made from the cable of Hayden’s ferry, the length of rope that carried the boat across the Salt from 1871 to 1913, with a medallion of the city’s seal at its foot, and the chain is the one object in the corporation that everybody in the town can name. It is worn on three occasions: the anniversary of incorporation, when the city celebrates the refusal of Phoenix’s offer; the opening of the Council year; and the day each autumn on which the town climbs the butte.

Patricia Aldana holds the office. She came to it from the Council, where she sat for the ward of Old Ferry, the barrio south of the Avenue, and she is the first Lord Mayor in two generations to have come from there. Her administration has been identified with the Heat Office’s publication of street temperatures, the student housing levy on the university and the lake’s enlargement, which she has not yet taken a position on, and she is criticised, from the town’s older families, for the levy, and from its tenants’ associations, for having taken so long to pass it.

The Lord Mayor is also chairman of the town’s standing delegation at the March Diet, a body of the Council’s members which attends the Diet’s committees on water, housing and the heat law, and of which the title is the only part that is ceremonial.

The City Manager

The City Manager runs the city. The office is deliberately strong, on the Phoenix model: the Manager appoints and directs every department, prepares the budget, holds every operational decision, and serves at the Council’s pleasure rather than the Lord Mayor’s. The police, the fire service, the streets, the parks, the libraries, the cooling network, the refuse and the Heat Office are all the Manager’s, and the Manager is not elected by anybody.

Dr Samuel Whitlow holds the office, on a professional appointment. He came to Tempe from a career in municipal government in the Eastern March and holds a doctorate in public administration from the university, and he is the first Manager to have been a student of the place he runs. The arrangement is the ordinary council-manager form, and the consequence in Tempe is the one the town has long accepted: the person who decides how the city is serviced is a career officer whom the voters cannot remove, and the elected politics of the town goes on over the top of an administration that the Council can dismiss and cannot direct.

The Council and the wards

The Council has eleven members, elected on the same four-year cycle as the Lord Mayor: six by ward and five at large.

The six wards are drawn to give the town’s parts a voice each. Butte Flank is the old town and the streets of Maple-Ash on the butte’s lower slopes. Campus Row is the student streets and the Alameda to their south. Old Ferry is the barrio south of the Avenue, now largely student blocks and the remains of its families. Papago Heights is the north-west, under the airport’s approach. Rio South is the lake’s south shore and the instrument corridor, with the Lakes. Daley Park is the blocks south of the freeways, the town’s most settled and most conservative ward.

The five members at large are the mechanism by which the older families govern. A student ward elects its member with a small turnout in an off-year, and the five at-large seats go to whichever side turns out the most voters, which in a municipal election in Tempe has been, for most of the charter’s life, the side with the longer memories. The old families are the smaller side and win the Council by turnout. The Council’s elections are non-partisan in form and thoroughly partisan in practice, and the March’s blocs organise in them without appearing on the ballot.

The services

The city runs its own police department and its own fire department, and shares an ambulance service with the NHSA hospital on the lake’s north shore, whose heat-injury unit is the busiest in the Realm. The police are a municipal force of about four hundred officers, and the one regular criticism of them, made by the town’s tenants and by the university’s students, is that they enforce the noise ordinance against music rooms more energetically than the heat ordinance against landlords.

The service the town does not share with any other Valley city is the Heat Office. It was founded in 1997, the year after the March’s Article 4 fixed a lawful maximum indoor temperature and the year the university published its count of its own dead, and it is run by the Heat Officer, Dr Leila Farouk, a physiologist who trained in the university’s laboratory and who is the third to hold the post. The Office has four duties. It inspects building sites, schools and rentals against the Abernathy Index. It publishes street temperatures from about two hundred sensors on the shaded streets, every ten minutes in the summer. It runs the town’s cooling places, the libraries, the arts centre and the community halls that the March’s Article 3 requires to be open at a measured heat. And it keeps the count of the town’s own heat dead, which it publishes by street, in the autumn, with the names where the families have consented.

The Heat Office is the most admired part of the corporation, and it is the reason Tempe is the March’s model city for the heat law. The town has a shade ordinance for every new street: a street cannot be laid out or rebuilt without a shaded footway and a canopy plan, and the Office’s inspectors measure the result in the first summer. The lake’s own heat figures, taken at the water’s edge, are the second most watched reading in the Valley, after the airport’s.

Elections

The Lord Mayor and the Council are elected on a four-year cycle, in the spring of the off-year, which is the choice that gives the old families the Council: about three in five of the old families’ voters turn out for a municipal election, and about one in six of the university’s. The elections are non-partisan in form. The Sun Liberal Alliance and the Basin Conservatives both organise in them, fund candidates and issue endorsements that are not called endorsements, and the town’s voters know which is which.

The five at-large seats are the part that is contested. A student ward elects its member on a small turnout, and the at-large seats go to whoever turns out the most voters across the whole town, which has been the old families’ side in every election since 1955 except two. The Council’s majority has been conservative on rents, the lake and the airport, and the left on everything the Diet decides, and the two facts coexist because the electorates differ.

Police and the noise ordinance

The police department is a municipal force of about four hundred officers, headed by a chief appointed by the City Manager, and it polices a town in which nearly half the residents are young, most of the visitors are drunk on football Saturdays and the heat is the cause of a surprising share of the calls. Its relations with the students are good in the autumn and poor in the spring, and its complaints board, which includes two students, meets monthly and publishes its findings.

The noise ordinance of 1972 is the department’s most regular business, and its single regular criticism. It is enforced against the music rooms and the student blocks with a vigour that the tenants’ associations contrast with the Heat Office’s enforcement of the heat ordinance against landlords, and the contrast is true. The ordinance has done little for the north-west under the airport’s approach, which it does not cover, and which the town’s own officers regard as its weakest point.

The Heat Office’s year

The Heat Office keeps a calendar, and the town keeps it too. In April its inspectors begin the readiness round, visiting every school, care home and rented block that the March’s Article 4 covers and recording whether its cooling works. In May the sensors on the shaded streets are tested and the cooling places’ summer hours are posted. From June the Office publishes the street temperatures every ten minutes, and from the first day on which the Index passes the threshold for outdoor labour its inspectors are on the building sites at dawn.

In the autumn the calendar turns. The first cool morning is announced, the Office publishes its count of the town’s dead, by street, and the town holds its vigil. In winter the Office writes its annual report, which the Council debates in the spring and which has been, since the report of 1998, the town’s best-read public document. The Office’s critics, who are the landlords, say that it measures more than it enforces. Its defenders say that the measuring is the enforcing, because a landlord who knows the figure will be published acts differently.

The Council year

The Council’s year is shaped by the lake and the heat. It opens in the spring with the Council year’s opening, at which the Lord Mayor wears the chain, and it passes its budget in May, after the negotiation of the payments in lieu. In the summer it sits in the evening, in the cooled chamber, and meets rarely. In the autumn it receives the Heat Officer’s count and the Lake Authority’s water figures, which are published the same week as the Basin Report, and it holds its quarrel about the lake in the weeks that follow.

The winter is its working season. The planning decisions are made, the housing rules are amended, and the Council’s committees take evidence on whatever the summer has made urgent. A Council member who has sat a full term will have attended about two hundred and fifty meetings and will say, correctly, that the lake took up a tenth of them.

The money

The city pays for itself in three ways, and the third is the largest. A sales levy is the largest tax paid by residents and visitors. A lodging levy is charged on the town’s hotels, most of which stand on the lake or by the airport, and pays for the lake. And a payment in lieu is made by the university and by the Salt River Project, which pay no rates, in a negotiated sum that is the largest single item in the budget and the subject of the Council’s most careful negotiation every year.

The arrangement has an obvious weakness, which the town admits. The two largest payers are public bodies that could, in principle, decline, and the town has no remedy if they do except the Diet and the courts. It has never been tested, because both institutions have found it cheaper to pay than to argue, and because both have people on the Council’s finance committee.

Planning

The city’s Planning Commission has seven members, appointed by the Council, and a planning department of about sixty, and it holds three rules that distinguish Tempe’s development from its neighbours’. The first is the shade ordinance: no street may be laid out or rebuilt without a shaded footway and a canopy plan, and the Heat Office measures the result in the first summer. The second is the student housing levy on the university, which pays for family homes. The third is the rule that new blocks must include family flats, a proportion of the units fixed by the Commission and enforced at the permit stage.

The three rules are why the town builds less than the developers would like and why it has kept most of its remaining families. The Commission’s critics say that it has made the town’s housing the most expensive in the Valley for people who are not students. Its defenders say that the alternative was the barrio, and that the barrio is what happens when nothing is done.

The Valley and the March

Tempe sits in the Valley Mayors’ Conference with Phoenix, Mesa and the rest, a body that meets monthly, has no powers, and agrees on nothing, which is what its members say they like about it. The Conference’s single serious function is the one the March gave it in 1983: it nominates the Valley’s members to the boards of the Project and the regional bodies, and the nominations are the one decision on which the mayors always agree, because the alternative is that the Diet makes them.

The city’s relation to the March is the relation of a municipality to a polity whose Charter is unusually concerned with water and heat, and the city is, in practice, the polity’s favourite example of a municipality that does what the Charter wants. The Diet’s committees cite Tempe’s Heat Office in their reports on the heat law, and the Ministry of the March sends visiting delegations to the town to see it. The relation with the March’s treaty nations is mediated by the Lake Authority, which has a nations’ observer, and by the Council of Nations and Compacts, which meets in Phoenix.

Representation in Parliament

Tempe sits in the federal constituency of Phoenix East and Tempe, which crosses the old Phoenix boundary into the town. It is held by Mark Kelly, who took it at the by-election of 2018, left the Liberal Federal Democrats the following year, has sat as an independent since, and has been Speaker of the House of Commons since the new Parliament first met in September. The boundary review of 2022 added Tempe to the seat, and the university wards made a seat that had been genuinely marginal into a safe one. At the last general election he was re-elected with a majority of about 26,000 against token opposition.

By the convention that parties do not contest the Speaker’s seat, Phoenix East and Tempe will not be fought while he sits in the chair. He continues to do the constituency’s casework, which is most of what the seat consists of, and he does it from a house in Tempe, where he lives in the week when he is not at Parliament House.

The town elects two constituency members to the March Diet and shares in the Diet’s list. Both members sit with the Sun Liberal Alliance, and Tempe is the Alliance’s safest pair of seats in the Valley.

The politics of the city

The city’s own politics are divided, between two parties that are not parties. On one side are the university’s wards, whose voters are young, rent their homes, change them often and vote in large numbers only when the federal and Diet elections bring them out. On the other are the old families, whose voters have owned their houses for two generations, remember the ferry, and vote in every election. The old families are the smaller side, and they control the Council by turnout.

The difference between the two electorates explains the town’s most characteristic fact. In Diet and Commons elections Tempe is as safely left as any place in the March. In municipal elections it is a close contest between the left and a conservative, locally minded politics of homeowners, in which the issues are not the issues of the March. They are three: the lake, which the old families defend as the town’s one great achievement and the students criticise as a waste of water; the airport, which the north-west wards hate and the rest do not think about; and rents, over which the town has fought for twenty years, and which the Lord Mayor’s administration has at last begun to settle.

Geography

The setting

Tempe lies at about 1,150 feet on the north bank of the Salt River’s old course, in the eastern part of the Valley of the Sun, eight miles east of the Phoenix old townsite. It is flat, as the Valley is flat, with one exception: the butte at its north-west corner, which rises about 300 feet above the river and is the first thing a traveller sees from the west. The Valley’s mountains stand to the north and south, and the town’s horizon is a rim of dry ranges that turn violet at dusk.

The town covers about forty square miles and is landlocked: Phoenix lies to the west and north-west, Scottsdale to the north across the river, Mesa to the east and Chandler to the south-east. The town has been the same shape since the annexation of two county islands in 2012, and it is among the densest in the March, with more people to the square mile than any other Valley city.

The butte

Hayden Butte stands at the town’s north-west corner, on the south bank of the river where the old ferry crossed, and it is the town’s single landmark. It is a public park, with a stepped path to the summit, and it carries a large A, whitewashed, for Arizona, on its west face.

It is a landmark with no special status in canon: it is a city park, owned by the city and kept by the Parks Department, and nobody has objected to what is done to it. What is done to it is a ritual. On the first cool morning of each autumn, when the heat has broken and the Heat Office has declared the Index below the threshold for outdoor exercise, the town climbs the butte, in thousands, and the first-year students of the university paint the A. The first cool morning is not a date. It is announced by the Heat Office, and the town’s whole calendar is arranged around it.

The butte is also the town’s orientation. The old town lies on its flank, the Avenue runs south from its foot to the campus, and the ferry crossed the river at its base, where the mill still stands. Tucson’s university has a hill with an A of its own, and the two letters are a joke that neither city enjoys when the other makes it.

The river and the lake

The Salt River forms the town’s northern edge and the Tempe Town Lake fills its bed for about three kilometres. The river flows continuously, which it did not before the lake. It ran about twice in a decade, and when it ran it ran enormously; it now flows all year, shallow, through a bed that is still wide enough for the flood of 1980. The continuous flow is a term of the lake’s lease, agreed in the 1990s with the nations, and the river below the lake is a green and slow-moving thing for the first time in its modern history.

The lake is treated under Water. What belongs to the geography is the fact that it has changed the town’s shape: the north shore, with the arts centre and the hotels, is the new face of the town, and the south shore, with the Project’s headquarters and the instrument corridor, is its working face. The old town on the butte’s flank looks at both from a little above.

The shape of the city

The town’s plan is simple to describe. The butte and the river stand at the north. The old town lies on the butte’s flank, with the parish church at its upper edge. The Avenue runs south from the butte’s foot to the campus, which lies to the east and south of it. The lake runs along the north edge from the butte eastward. The blocks lie south of the campus, laid out in a grid in the 1950s on the old farms. The barrio lies south of the Avenue, between the two freeways. Papago Park and the airport lie on the western edge, where Tempe meets Phoenix.

Two freeways divide the south into thirds. The first runs along the south edge of the old town and the barrio, and the second along the south of the blocks, and the town is in effect three: the north, with the butte, the Avenue, the campus and the lake; the middle, with the barrio and the blocks; and the south, beyond the second freeway, which is Daley Park and the town’s newest streets. The north has the university and the money. The middle has the density and the argument. The south has the lawns.

The neighbourhoods

The town has nine neighbourhoods that residents name, and they do not map exactly onto the wards.

Butte Flank is the old town on the butte’s lower slopes, with the oldest houses, the parish church and the mill, and the town’s most established families. Maple-Ash adjoins it to the south, a quiet district of old trees and brick houses where the college’s older faculty live. Campus Row is the student streets east of the Avenue, dense and noisy and impermanent. The Alameda lies south of it, an older district of small houses that the students have taken over street by street.

Old Ferry is the barrio south of the Avenue, now mostly student blocks, with its church and its hall still standing and its families few. Daley Park is the blocks south of the second freeway, the town’s most settled ward. The Lakes is a district of the 1970s built around artificial ponds, a little west of the freeway, and the town’s idea of the suburbs. Papago Heights is the north-west, under the airport’s approach, one of the poorest and oldest districts, and the one that hears the engines. Rio South is the lake’s south shore and the instrument corridor, the town’s newest district and the one that has no history.

The neighbours

Tempe’s neighbours are each a different thing to it, and the town has a settled opinion of them all. Phoenix is the big sister it is faintly embarrassed by: larger, richer in institutions, the seat of the March’s government, and the one place in the Valley that Tempe has refused to be part of. Mesa, to the east, is the larger, more devout and more conservative neighbour, a city of the Latter-day Saints and of the families who left Tempe’s barrio, and it holds the old flying school’s field and the Polytechnic campus.

Scottsdale, across the river to the north, is the rich one that Tempe resents, with the resorts, the galleries and the lower rates of tax. Chandler, to the south-east, is the one that has the industry Tempe wanted: the large plants, the wide streets and the big employers that Tempe has never had. And Ahwatukee, to the south across the interstate, is the new town that did what Tempe has never needed to do. The Valley Mayors’ Conference meets monthly and these are the opinions that the mayors bring to it.

Papago Park

Papago Park stands on the line between Tempe and Phoenix, and it belongs to both, which is its whole difficulty. It is a park of red sandstone buttes and washes, with ponds that the Project’s canals feed, and it is the one piece of the natural desert left within the city. The park straddles the line. The zoo and the botanical garden stand on Phoenix’s side and are Phoenix’s institutions. Tempe holds the buttes, the ponds and a public golf course, and the two cities share the park’s upkeep by a joint board, which meets four times a year and has not changed its agenda since 1961.

The park was the site of the prisoners’ camp of 1942 to 1946, and nothing stands where the camp was. It is also, in the town’s mind, the place where the ferry’s old road went, and a plaque beside one of the buttes records that the first wagon road from the south crossed it in 1869.

The river bed

The bed below the lake is the green line of the town. Since the continuous release began in the 1990s, cottonwoods and willows have come back along it, a mile wide at the airport, and the stretch between the lake’s eastern dam and the western boundary of the city has become a bird reserve in everything but name. Herons and egrets nest there, a rarity in the Valley, and the nations’ observer on the Authority counts them each spring.

The river is also a floodway, and the town does not forget it. The two dams are the lake’s gates and the floodway’s valves, and the Authority’s plan for a flood on the scale of 1980 lowers them in a fixed order over six hours, so that the water passes through the town before it reaches the airport. The plan is rehearsed once a year, in March, with the sirens sounded and the footbridges closed, and it is the town’s one regular civil exercise.

Climate

Tempe’s climate is the Valley’s, a hot desert one, with long summers, mild winters and a short wet season. Summer highs average above 41 degrees from June to September and pass 46 on the worst days, nights fall below 30 only in the cooler summers, and the winters are the Valley’s pleasant ones, with highs in the low twenties. Rain averages about 200 millimetres a year, falling mostly in the summer monsoon and the winter storms.

Heat is the fact the whole town is organised around, and the Heat Office measures it more closely than anyone in the Realm. The Abernathy Index, a wet-bulb reading taken at the site, is read at the Office’s sensors, and the first cool morning, the first day on which the Index drops below the threshold for outdoor exercise, is announced to the town and is a minor civic occasion.

The lake and the heat

The lake affects the temperature in a small and measurable way. It makes the shore two or three degrees cooler by day and warmer by night, and the university’s laboratory measures the difference every summer. The Index at the lake’s edge is the most-watched reading in the Valley after the airport’s, and the town’s hotels and its heat office both quote it, the first because it is favourable and the second because it is accurate.

The lake does not cool the town. It cools the shore, and the people who live within a few hundred metres of it, and the town’s honesty about this is part of why the Heat Office is trusted. It publishes the effect with its figures, and says in the same report that the rest of the town is as hot as the rest of the Valley.

Water

The Project in Tempe

Tempe’s water comes from the Salt River Project, and the Project’s headquarters and operations centre stand on the lake’s south shore. The Project is the town’s second-largest employer, after the university, and the building is the Valley’s water and power control room: it is where the dams and canals and generating plant are run together, as the Project’s doctrine requires, from a single room.

The Project’s presence is the town’s oldest and least remarked fact. It dug the canals the town was built along, it built the dam that made the town certain, and it keeps the river that the lake sits in. The town’s relation to it is the relation of a household to the institution that owns its water: respectful, grateful and not at all deferential, as the lake’s lease and the town’s payment in lieu both show.

The canals

The Project’s canals cross the town, and the canal banks are public ways, by an ordinance of 1974, which opened them as walks and cycle paths and made them the town’s shaded promenades. The ordinance was the Council’s work and the Project consented to it with reluctance, and the canal paths are now the quietest part of the town and the one the Heat Office most often recommends.

The line of the oldest canal, the Hohokam line that the Project re-dug in 1902, runs under the Avenue near the butte, and a plaque marks it. The plaque was written by the nations, not the Council, and its text is a single sentence in the O’odham language with a translation beneath it, and nobody in the corporation has ever asked to change it.

The river and the release

The river below the lake flows because the lease says it must. The lease of 1991 between the Project and the town required a continuous release of water below the lake’s dams, a flow the nations had asked for as part of the settlement, in return for their agreement to the lake, and the release is the reason the Salt is a running river and not a gravel bed for the first time since the diversion of the nineteenth century.

The release is small, a fraction of what the river carried before it was diverted, and it is shallow. It is also the most important thing in the lake’s lease, and the nations’ observer on the Lake Authority exists to see that it is kept. The Authority publishes the release figure every November beside the Basin Report, and the figure has never fallen below the lease’s minimum.

The lake

Tempe Town Lake is about three kilometres long and a hundred metres wide, held in the river bed behind two inflatable dams, and opened in 1999. It is kept full from the Project’s canals under a lease that the Basin Report mentions each November, and it loses about 2,800 acre-feet to the sky every year, which is about as much water as a town of ten thousand uses.

The lake is run by the Tempe Lake Authority, a joint body of the city, the Salt River Project and the university, with an executive from each and a nations’ observer. The Authority holds the lease, sets the release below the dams, runs the lake’s rowing course and beach park, and publishes the lake’s water figures each November beside the Basin Report. It is the only body in the March on which the university, the Project and a city sit together as equals.

The dams are the university’s design. They are inflatable, they are anchored in the river bed, and they lower for floods, so that the Salt passes through the town unimpeded when it comes, as it did in 1980. The lake works. It also evaporates a great deal of water in a basin in deficit, and the university’s own hydrologists are its fiercest critics on that ground, which is the characteristic position of a university that designed a thing and then measured it.

The lake’s enlargement

The question before the Council is whether to enlarge the lake, by a second basin to the east, and the argument turns on the figures. The Lake Authority has proposed the second basin, on the ground that the first is full on summer weekends and the town needs more water for rowing and for the shore’s heat benefit. The university’s hydrologists have shown that the second basin would lose a further 2,000 acre-feet a year. The Basin Report’s figures for the Valley’s supply are against it, and the old families, who defend the lake, are divided about whether to defend an enlargement.

The vote is due in the winter. The Lord Mayor has not said which way she will vote, and the town reads her silence as a position.

What water costs

Water in Tempe costs what it costs in the rest of the Valley, which is less than it should. The city’s rates are cheaper than the March’s average and there is no scarcity tariff, and the Heat Office has published the arithmetic of what the lake and the town’s lawns consume. The Council has declined to act on it, as the Phoenix Council has declined to act on its own, and the town’s honesty about its figures is exactly as far as its politics goes.

Economy

A college economy

Tempe has had one economy since 1885, and it has been the college’s, in three layers. The first is the university itself, which is the largest employer in the town by a very long way and the reason there is a town of this size at all. The second is everything that exists to serve the university’s students and visitors: the rented rooms, the bars, the bookshops, the hotels and the football Saturdays. The third, which is newer and which the town is proud of, is the set of institutions that the university’s research has produced around it, chiefly the firms of the instrument corridor.

Beside this, and not part of it, stand two employers that the college did not make: the Salt River Project and the airline base. They are the second and third largest employers in the town, and between them they provide the part of Tempe’s economy that does not depend on the academic calendar. A Tempe summer is quieter than a Tempe autumn by a visible margin, and the town’s finance committee reads that margin in its monthly figures.

The university

The University of the March employs more people in Tempe than any other body and is the town’s largest landlord, and it is the one institution to which the town’s budget is tied by a payment in lieu. The Tempe campus is the oldest of its four and the largest, with about fifty-five thousand of its hundred thousand students, and the town’s economy is arranged around the rhythm of its terms: the autumn’s return, the football Saturdays, the spring’s baseball and the short, evening-lit summer term.

The university is also an unusual neighbour in a particular way. It pays no rates and takes up a great deal of land, and it is a public body that the town cannot refuse, so its relation to the Council is negotiated, annually and carefully, in the payment in lieu. The town’s Lord Mayors have made a point of saying, in public, that this is the only fair arrangement and that it is a good deal less than the university costs the town in water, in policing and in the pressure it puts on rents.

The Salt River Project

The Salt River Project keeps its headquarters and operations centre on the lake’s south shore, and is the town’s second-largest employer. It is a Crown corporation of the March and the Valley’s water and power authority, and the town hosts it as a household hosts the institution that owns its water. The headquarters is where the dams, the canals and the generating fleet are run as one system, and the control room is the one place in the Valley where a hot August afternoon’s water demand and power demand are on the same screen.

The Project employs engineers, hydrologists, operators, linemen, lawyers and the people who read the meters, and it has done more than any other body to give Tempe a settled, professional middle class that does not depend on the university. Its relationship with the town is the oldest in the Valley and the quietest, and it is mediated through the Lake Authority and the payment in lieu.

The airline base

The third-largest employer is an airline’s maintenance base at the airport’s south side, in two great hangars within Tempe’s limits. It employs about three thousand engineers and fitters and is the reason that the north-west neighbourhoods hear engines at night.

The base was built by UKAirways, the carrier that was headquartered at Tempe and whose hubs were Phoenix and Charlotte, and which merged into American Airlines in the years that the American article records as the acquisition of its western and south-eastern points. American kept the Tempe base. It kept the three thousand jobs, the hangars and the workforce that came with them, and it kept the memory of UKAirways in the town, where older engineers still describe themselves as UKAirways people and the base’s canteen has a photograph of the carrier’s first aircraft on the wall.

The base’s value to Tempe is large and its cost is concentrated. The hangars are the town’s third-largest source of employment and pay the best wages in the south of the town. The engines that are tested on the apron at night are heard in Papago Heights, which is the district the airport’s approach crosses, and which has paid for the base’s benefits in sleep for most of the town’s history.

The Rio corridor

The Rio corridor runs along the lake’s south bank, and it is the town’s newest industry. It consists of small firms making cameras, spectrometers, sensors and heat instruments, descended from the university’s planetary-science and heat work, and it employs about eight thousand people and has no large employer. Its firms were founded by the university’s graduates and its staff, they sell to the American Aeronautics and Space Administration, to the Salt River Project and to the March’s heat regulators, and the largest of them has about four hundred workers.

The corridor is why Tempe is a town of engineers and not only of students, and it is the part of the economy with which the Council is most pleased. It has also changed the south bank, which was a strip of warehouses and which is now a strip of low glass buildings with canal-side walks and very little parking, and it has given the old families a new thing to complain about, which is the price of the flats the engineers rent.

Lodging, shops and the visitors

Tempe’s lodging trade is built on the university’s visitors, the football Saturdays and February’s baseball, and its hotels stand on the lake and by the airport. It is a strong trade and the Council taxes it: the lodging levy pays for the lake, and the argument about whether it should pay for anything else recurs every budget.

The shops are of two kinds. The old town’s and the Avenue’s shops are small, independent and heavily dependent on the term. The large outdoor shopping centre on the airport’s edge, built in the 1990s, is the town’s one large retail development, and it serves the whole east of the Valley and is the town’s second-largest source of sales levy. The Avenue’s merchants have never forgiven it, and the town’s planning officers say that without it the sales levy would not pay for the lake.

Wages and the cost of living

Tempe’s wages are the Valley’s most unequal. The university pays well at the top and badly at the bottom, the Project pays steadily, the airline base pays the best wages in the south of the town, and the shops and music rooms of the Avenue pay what they can. The town’s median household income is lower than Phoenix’s, because nearly half its households are students, and its poverty rate is among the highest in the March, a figure that the Council has never been willing to treat as meaning what it appears to mean.

Rents are about a fifth higher than Phoenix’s for the same flat, the product of the student market and the town’s density, and the town’s regulation holds them below what they would otherwise be. The cost of living for a family is higher than in Mesa or Chandler, which is why the families have moved to both.

What the students spend

The students are the town’s largest retail customers, and fifty-five thousand of them arrive in the first week of September. The Avenue’s shops take a third of their year’s trade in that fortnight, the bars take another third across the football Saturdays, and the rest is spread across the nine months. The students’ spending is the town’s single largest private source of sales levy.

The dependence is the town’s quiet worry. A fall of a tenth in the university’s Tempe enrolment would cost the town about a twelfth of its levy, and the Council’s finance committee has modelled it every year since the 1990s and published the result, which it has never acted on.

The summer

The town’s economy has a summer, and the summer is not a dead season, as it was before refrigerated air. The university teaches an evening summer term, indoors, in rooms the heat law requires to be kept below the lawful maximum, and the Avenue’s shops and music rooms open late and close early. The town’s population falls by about a fifth in July and rises again in August, and it is, in the Council’s own phrase, a town that does its business after dark for three months of the year.

Transport

The tramway

The tramway, which the Valley calls the light rail, is run as Valley Metro and is owned by the City of Phoenix. It was built in the 2000s on a dedicated sales levy that Phoenix’s voters approved, and it opened through Tempe in 2008, with seven stops from the airport’s edge to the campus, the Avenue and the lake. It is the busiest stretch of the whole line.

The arrangement has an oddity that the town’s lawyers have pointed out and have not pressed. The line is the city’s tramway, owned by Phoenix and run by an operator whose name is the Valley’s, and Tempe pays its share of the levy and has a seat on the operator’s board. The town is the only corridor town of the three that both pays the levy and uses the line, so it is the line’s defender in every argument and the other two towns’ favourite example of who gains.

The old town’s merchants opposed the tramway in the 1990s, on the ground that it would take their customers to Phoenix. Within a few years of its opening they were its most loyal defenders, because the stop at the Avenue brought more customers than the road ever had. The tramway has reorganised the town’s development along it, and it is the one piece of the Valley’s transport that was built to a plan.

Sky Harbor

Phoenix Sky Harbor lies three miles west of the butte and is, in the words of its own article, boxed in by a riverbed, two freeways, a city and a second municipality. Tempe is the second municipality. The airport’s runways point east and west along the river’s old course, and the approach crosses the town’s north-west neighbourhoods, which are among its poorest and oldest.

The town has a noise ordinance and a standing claim against the airport’s owner that has run for decades. It has never cleared a neighbourhood for the airport, which it counts as a difference from Phoenix, whose own clearance of a Mexican-American district from the 1960s is recorded in the airport’s article. The claim is for the cost of insulating the homes under the approach, and its history is told under Failings.

The freeways

Two freeways cut the town in three, and the town opposed both in the Diet and lost both. The first, built in 1965 along the south edge of the old town, cut the barrio from the Avenue. The second, built in the 1980s along the south of the blocks, cut the blocks from the old farms. The barrio sits between them. The roads carry the Valley’s east-west and north-south traffic and bring the town’s workers and students in, and they are, for the people who live beside them, the town’s most persistent complaint.

The freeway authority is the town’s oldest adversary after the airport, and the standing argument, which the Council has made at every opportunity, is for the roads to be capped and the cap to be planted. A short section was capped in the 2010s, a park of a few acres over the first road, and the town’s engineers say it is the only part of the road that the town has been able to take back.

The bridges

Six bridges cross the Salt at Tempe, and they are the town’s most used and most argued-over structures. The Old Bridge of 1913, at the butte’s foot, is the oldest; it is the one that survived the flood of 1980, and it is a pedestrian and cycle bridge now, with a plaque that carries the water-stage record of the flood. Two road bridges carry the main traffic. Two freeway bridges carry the Valley’s. And a footbridge across the lake at the arts centre, built in the 2000s, is the town’s pleasantest crossing and the one on which every wedding party is photographed.

The bridges are also the unhoused’s shelter, and the Heat Office’s own count shows it. A bridge gives shade, a bridge gives a roof in the rare rain, and the people who sleep under the Old Bridge are the ones the town knows best, because they are the nearest to the Avenue. The Council has twice proposed to close the space under it and has twice been persuaded not to.

Bicycles

Tempe is the Valley’s cycling capital. It has the highest bicycle share of any March city, a network of canal paths that the 1974 ordinance opened, shaded lanes laid out by ordinance on every new street, and a university whose students ride because the campus is flat and the shade is organised. The Heat Office publishes a cycling index each morning in the summer, and the town’s cyclists plan their journeys by it.

The standing argument is with the freeway authority over the two roads. The bicycle network is the town’s pride and its two freeways are its great defect, and the paths end at the freeways’ edges, where a rider must use one of a small number of bridges. The bridges are the town’s busiest cycling points and its most criticised.

Buses and walking

Valley Metro’s bus network serves the town and links the tramway to the places it does not reach, and the university runs its own shuttles between the campuses. The walking is organised by the shade: the town’s footways are shaded by ordinance, and its Heat Office publishes which streets are comfortable at which hour. A Tempe resident who walks does so on the shaded side, at the hours the Index allows, and the town’s best route for a pedestrian is the canal bank.

Demographics and society

Population

Tempe has about 230,000 people, a little larger than a town of its history would suggest, because the university is large and the city annexed two surrounded county islands in 2012. It is the youngest city in the March, with about half its people under thirty-five, and it is the densest city in the Valley, with more people to the square mile than any other.

The numbers conceal a distinction that the town understands better than its statisticians. About fifty-five thousand of the population are students at the Tempe campus, who live in the town for nine months and leave for three, and the rest are the people who are there all year: the families, the workers and the pensioners. The two populations occupy the same streets and have very little to do with each other.

Who lives here

About a fifth of the town is Hispano, the descendants of the families who farmed the river’s edge before there was a town and of the families who came later. About a twentieth is Native, the largest share of any March city outside the nations’ own country, many of them students at the university under the compacts. About a tenth is foreign-born, mostly Sonoran, Pacific and Indian. The rest are the March’s usual mixture, and a long-settled core of old families, who go back to the ferry and who are now a minority in their own town.

The old families are the town’s memory, and they are conscious of being a minority. They are the Montoyas and the Peraltas, who farmed the river’s edge in the 1870s; the Brandts, who ran the mill; and the Ekstroms and the Carlyles, who dug the canal. They are fewer than ten thousand in a town of two hundred and thirty thousand, they hold the Council through the five at-large seats, and they are the people to whom the town’s history is a family matter.

The university and the town

The relation between the town and the university is cordial and quarrelsome in equal parts, and the proportions have not changed since the 1890s. The university is the town’s largest employer, its largest landlord and the reason there is a town, and it is also the body whose students have taken the barrio, whose football Saturdays close the Avenue and whose payment in lieu is the largest item in the town’s budget and the one the town cannot enforce.

The quarrel has a calendar. In September the town complains of the move-in. In October it complains of the football. In the spring it complains of the noise and the rents, and in the summer, when the students have gone, it complains that the town is quiet. The town’s affection is shown in a hundred ways that the quarrel does not touch: the old families’ children go to the university, the Ferry Society’s pensioners volunteer at its museum, and the university’s laboratory counts the town’s heat, and the town goes on counting on it.

The nations and the town

The nations are present in Tempe in four ways. About a twentieth of its people are Native, the largest share of any March city outside the nations’ own country, and most of them are students at the university under the compacts. The Lake Authority has a nations’ observer who counts the herons and checks the release. The plaque on the Avenue, beside the line of the Hohokam canal, was written by the nations. And the Council’s meetings begin with a short invocation in the O’odham language, which the nations asked for in the 1990s and the Council gave.

The town’s honest account of what these four amount to is the one in its Failings section: they are real, they are small, and they do not return what the river and the fields were. The nations have said so. They also say, which the town finds harder to hear, that the observer’s counts of the herons are the first sign in a century that the river is being looked at by the people who lived beside it.

Language

English and Spanish are both languages of the town’s public life. The Council’s minutes are published in both, the Heat Office’s warnings are issued in both, and about a fifth of the town’s homes speak Spanish at table. The university has brought a student population from Sonora, the Pacific and further afield, and Hindi, Mandarin and Tamazight are heard on the Avenue among a great many other languages, though none of them has any official standing.

The Hispano families’ Spanish is the older layer, and it is the one the town forgets that it has. The barrio’s church still says Mass in Spanish on Sundays, the old bakery’s sign is in Spanish, and the Council’s meetings begin with a short invocation in the O’odham language, which the nations asked for in the 1990s and the Council gave.

Faith

Tempe is the most secular town in the Valley, and about four in ten of its people say they have no religion, the highest share in the March. The Church of America’s oldest parish stands on the rise south of the butte, built in 1889, and is the oldest building in the town after the mill. The Church’s chaplaincy to the university is its busiest in the March.

A temple of the Latter-day Saints stands on the town’s eastern edge, the town’s largest religious building and the one nearest the larger community of Mesa. A mosque, a synagogue and a Sikh temple serve the student population, and the barrio’s Catholic church, in Spanish, is the town’s most regularly attended. The town’s religious life is a quiet one, and its principal interfaith occasion is the Heat Office’s annual vigil for the dead, in the autumn, in the park by the butte.

The old families’ associations

The old families keep two associations. The Ferry Society is the descendants of the settlers of 1871 to 1885, about six hundred families, which meets in the old mill, keeps the register of the founders’ descendants, runs the anniversary procession and tends the ferry’s bell. It was open by descent only until 1991, when it admitted the barrio’s families who could show a forebear in the settlement before 1900, and the admission changed its membership by a fifth.

The Sociedad is the barrio’s own mutual aid society, founded in the 1900s around the church and the hall, and it is now small, old and housed in a few rooms behind the hall. It keeps the barrio’s records, the list of the families removed in the 1930s, and the memory of the streets, and it is the body that the Council consults, and does not often follow, on the barrio’s history.

The students’ year

The students’ year is the town’s calendar. September brings fifty-five thousand people in a week, a move-in that fills the Avenue with parked vans and the Heat Office with questions about cooling. October brings the first cool morning, the butte and the first football Saturdays. The winter term is short and brisk, in the Valley’s mild weeks, and spring brings the baseball, the festival and the last exams before the heat. The summer brings the evening term and a town that is half empty by day.

The town’s feeling about the students is the feeling of a town that cannot do without them: affection for a young population that keeps the shops open, resentment of the rents and the noise, and a quiet pride, which the old families will admit to in the right company, that the Valley’s most intelligent young people come to Tempe.

What the town is like to live in

Tempe is a town that is easy to live in and hard to afford. It is flat and shaded, the canal paths and the tramway reach most of it, the library is open late, and a person who does not own a car can live in it comfortably in every month but July and August. It is also young and loud, with the football Saturdays and the Avenue’s nights, and its rents are the Valley’s highest for a family.

The people who like it say that it is the one place in the Valley where a person can walk to a bookshop and a concert and a lake. The people who do not say that it is a student town with a university attached to it. Both are right, and the town’s own survey of its residents, which the Council takes every four years, has returned the same result since the 1980s: nine in ten would recommend it to a friend, and four in ten expect to have left within five years.

Housing

Tempe is a student town in a Valley whose rents are rising, and the story of its housing is the story of what the students did to the families.

For most of the town’s history the students rented rooms and the families owned houses. From the 1980s the balance changed. Student landlords bought the houses one at a time, as the university grew and the freeways made the barrio’s streets unattractive to families, and students outbid families for the old town’s houses. The barrio south of the Avenue was rebuilt as student blocks. The families moved to Mesa and Chandler, and the Council called it a hollowing and could not stop it.

The Council refused to touch the student rental market for twenty years. The change, when it came, came in the last decade, and Tempe now has the Valley’s strongest rent regulation, a housing levy on the university that pays for family homes, and a rule that new blocks must include family flats. The regulation has kept most of the town’s remaining families, at a price in building that the developers resent. It came too late for the barrio, which was already student blocks.

The unhoused

About six hundred people sleep along the river in an ordinary summer, and about eleven hundred in the worst. They live on its banks and under its bridges, and an average of nineteen of them die of heat each year, about a tenth of the county’s total in an ordinary summer, a figure the Heat Office counts and publishes by street.

The river is the town’s worst place in the hottest weeks. The bridges give shade and the lake’s release gives water, and the shade is not enough. The cooling places that the March’s Article 3 requires are open by day, the library’s and the arts centre’s, and closed at night, when most heat deaths occur. The beach park, the town’s pleasantest public place, has been designed in ways that keep the unhoused out of it, and the Council has declined to change the design.

Schools

The town is served by two school districts. One is for the old town and the north, and lies wholly in Tempe. The other is for the south, and also serves a strip of Phoenix and Ahwatukee, which is the district that crosses the municipal line and that Ahwatukee’s article describes as not the town’s. Both teach in English and Spanish.

The two districts are different in character. The northern one is the older, smaller and more local, and its schools draw on the old families and the university’s staff. The southern is larger and more varied, and its boundary with Ahwatukee is the sharpest of the town’s civic edges: it serves children on both sides of a municipal line that the freeway also marks.

Health

The town’s hospital is a mid-sized NHSA hospital on the lake’s north shore, and its heat-injury unit sees more cases each August than any other in the Realm. The unit’s nurses come from the university’s school of nursing, and its physicians from the March’s medical college at Tucson, which rotates its residents through Tempe each August for the purpose.

The student health service is the Valley’s largest clinic. It treats a hundred thousand people a year and publishes its figures, and it is the first line of the town’s heat response: the Heat Office’s cooling places and the clinic’s walk-in hours are co-ordinated, and the hospital’s unit is the last resort that the first two are meant to prevent.

Culture

The first cool morning

The first cool morning is the town’s one movable feast, and it is not a date. It is announced by the Heat Office on the first day of autumn on which the Abernathy Index falls below the threshold for outdoor exercise, usually in the last week of September or the first of October, and it is announced at six in the morning by a sounding of the old ferry’s bell, which the Office keeps for the purpose on the roof of the town hall.

The town climbs the butte. By seven there are several thousand people on the stepped path, the old families in front by long habit and the students behind, and at the summit the first-year students of the university paint the A, the whole of its west face, in an hour, with brushes and rollers and a great deal of white. The Lord Mayor wears the chain. The Heat Officer reads the night’s low, and the morning ends with breakfast at the mill. It is the one day in the year on which the whole town is in one place, and the old families regard it, unselfconsciously, as the best of the town’s institutions.

The autumn vigil

The town holds a vigil for the dead each autumn, in the park by the butte, on the evening after the Heat Office publishes its count. The names of the town’s heat dead are read, street by street, where the families have consented, and a candle is lit for each, so that a summer with a bad count has a long evening. It is held in the open, in the cool, and is attended by the Lord Mayor, the parish priest, the imam, the rabbi and the Sikh temple’s president, and by a large part of the town.

The vigil began in 1998, the year after the Heat Office’s founding, at the request of a student group who had campaigned for Article 4, and it has not missed a year. The unhoused who died along the river are among those named, in the order of the streets they were found on, and the Council’s critics note that the vigil is the one occasion on which the town says their names aloud.

The Avenue

Mill Avenue is the town’s long main street, running from the butte’s foot to the campus, and the Valley’s best-known strip of cafés, bookshops, bars and music rooms, which students call the Avenue. By day it is cafés and bookshops and the old shops under the shade structures that the heat law requires; by night it is bars and music rooms, closing early in the summer because the curfew on outdoor amplified sound above the heat threshold drives the crowds indoors. The old mill stands at its foot.

The street is the town’s public room. The Avenue’s shops are small and independent, its pavements are shaded by ordinance, and its bookshops are the Valley’s best. Its character is the character of a long street that has been used by a university for a century and a half: young, dense, argumentative and a little shabby, and perfectly aware that the old town above it regards it as a nuisance and cannot do without it.

The music

Tempe is a music town. The Avenue has produced the Valley’s bands since the 1960s, and a reputation for loud, short, heat-bleached rock, played in small rooms to audiences who have come in from the heat. Three rooms are the ones the town names: the Sump, a basement; the Lantern, a former hall; and Mesquite Hall, the largest. The heat law’s curfew on outdoor amplified sound above the threshold is the scene’s great grievance.

The scene’s character is that of a college town’s: bands form, play for three years and disperse, and the best of them leave the Valley. The town’s one regular boast is that it has produced more of them than its size would suggest, and its one regular complaint is that they do not come back.

The Tempe Center for the Arts

The Tempe Center for the Arts stands on the lake’s north shore and was built in the 2000s, opening in 2007. It is the town’s principal theatre and concert hall, a low, curved building of pale stone looking at the water, and the lake’s most important public room. It is also, by the Heat Office’s order, one of the town’s cooling places on the hottest days, and its foyer is open to anyone from morning until the last performance.

The festival

The Tempe Festival of the Arts is held each spring for three days on the Avenue, and has been since the 1960s. It draws about 300,000 visitors, a juried craft fair, music stages on the Avenue’s cross streets and the one weekend each year when the town’s old families and its students are in the same crowd. It is the nearest thing the town has to a civic fair, and the Council regards it with affection and a degree of alarm.

The press

The town has a weekly, the Tempe Daily News, founded in 1885 under a name that its first editor hoped the town would grow into, and the university’s student daily, the Devil’s Advocate, which the town reads more than the weekly. The American Broadcasting Corporation has a Valley bureau in the Rio corridor, which covers the east Valley, the university and the lake.

The Devil’s Advocate is the town’s real paper. It is run by students and read by everyone, it has broken more stories about the Council than the weekly has, and its editors have a tradition of going on to the Arizona Gazette and the Phoenix Herald. The weekly is the paper of the old families, and it prints the Council’s minutes in full.

Museums and libraries

The town’s collections are small, because Phoenix has the Valley’s great ones. There is a town history museum in the old library, the university’s art museum, a planetary science museum on the campus, and the old mill’s own museum. Nothing is larger, and the town does not pretend otherwise.

The libraries are better than the museums. The town’s public library is a serious institution, open late, and is one of the cooling places the Heat Office runs, and the university’s libraries are open to residents. The library is the town’s most reliable shade, and the Heat Office’s heat-season opening hours are the busiest part of its calendar.

The mill and its museum

Hayden’s mill stands at the foot of the butte, where it has stood since 1874, and it is the town’s oldest working building. It ground flour for the town until 1998 and is now a restaurant and a museum. The millstones are in the hall, the Brandts’ ledgers, which record every sack for sixty years, are in a case, and the museum’s best exhibit is the river-stage post of the ferry, with the ferryman’s first readings.

The mill’s museum is the town’s smallest and its most loved. It is run by the Ferry Society and staffed by volunteers who are mostly the old families’ pensioners, and it keeps the town’s memory of itself in a form that does not require a degree, and is open every day in the summer when the cooling places are.

Sunday at the lake

On a Sunday the town goes to the lake. The beach park fills with families by ten, the university’s crews are on the water by seven, the rowing course carries the town’s clubs and its schools, and the north shore’s paths carry joggers, cyclists and a line of walkers that runs from the arts centre to the mill. In the summer the free evening programme begins at six, with music and boats and shade, and the hottest nights bring the town’s largest crowds.

It is the town’s one regular public occasion that is not the university’s, and it is the one on which the old families and the students are seen together without a fair to bring them. The unhoused are not part of it, and the Council knows it.

Sport

Sport in Tempe is the university’s. Sun Devil Stadium stands in the butte country beside the lake, seats about 65,000, and is the Valley’s largest regular gathering on an autumn Saturday. The town hosts the Territorial Cup, the oldest rivalry in the Realm’s college football, whenever it falls to Tempe to play it.

Baseball is the town’s other sport, and it is shared. A professional club, the Los Angeles Angels, trains each February at Tempe Diablo Stadium, in a park at the foot of the butte, and the March’s winter visitors fill the town for the month. The baseball is the common ground of the university and the old families, and it is the one sport on which the two sides of the town have never had an argument.

Food

The town’s food is its Hispano families’, and it is better than the town’s reputation. The barrio’s bakery, in Spanish, survives on the Avenue’s south side; the old families’ tables are as they were in the 1870s, with the canal’s vegetables and the mill’s flour; and the student town’s cheap cafés have brought food from the Pacific and from Sonora that the old town did not have.

The parks

The town’s open spaces are Papago Park, the canal paths, the lake and its beach park, and the butte. The lake’s beach park is the town’s pleasantest public place and runs a free summer evening programme in the heat, with music and rowing and shade, and the lake’s rowing course holds an annual regatta. The canal paths are the quietest part of the town, and the Heat Office recommends them above the rest.

The buildings

Tempe’s architecture is the architecture of a college town that grew fast. Old Main, the college’s first hall of the 1890s, stands at the campus’s centre; the University Auditorium, which the Valley calls the Wright, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the last year of his life and completed on his drawings in 1964; the parish church of 1889 and the flour mill are the oldest buildings in the town; and the Tempe Center for the Arts of 2007 is its newest civic building.

The old town’s streets, on the butte’s flank, are the town’s best architecture, brick houses of the 1890s to 1920s under old trees, and Maple-Ash’s are the best of them. The barrio’s buildings are lower and plainer, and what is left of them, the church, the hall and the bakery, is the part of the town’s architecture that it has most reason to look after and has least looked after.

Failings

Tempe publishes more about its own faults than any other city in the Valley, and it has a settled view of which of them are its own. The list below is the town’s, in the order the Heat Office and the Council’s own committees have put it, and none of it is disputed.

The barrio

The barrio south of the Avenue was the town’s majority until the 1950s and is now student blocks. It was lost without a decision: student landlords bought its houses one at a time from the 1980s, as the university grew and the freeways made the streets unattractive to families, and the rents rose until the people who had lived there for four generations could not stay. There was no clearance and no plan. The families who left were not compensated, because nothing had been taken from them that the law recognised.

The loss is measurable. The barrio’s families, a majority of the town in the 1950s, are now about one in ten of the residents of the streets they built. The church still says Mass in Spanish, the hall still stands and the bakery still bakes, and the people who attend them mostly drive in from Mesa and Chandler. The town knows this about itself and has said so in the Council’s own report of the 2010s, which called it the town’s own version of Phoenix’s story, and which the Council received and did not act on.

The river and the heat

The river is the town’s worst place in the hottest weeks. About six hundred people sleep along it in an ordinary summer, and about eleven hundred in the worst, on its banks and under its bridges, and an average of nineteen of them die of heat each year, about a tenth of the county’s total in an ordinary summer. The Heat Office counts them and publishes the count by street.

The town’s cooling places are open by day, and the March’s Article 3 requires nothing more. They close at night, when most heat deaths occur, and the bridges that give shade do not give enough. The beach park, the town’s pleasantest public place and the lake’s, has been designed in ways that keep the unhoused out of it, and the Council has declined to change the design. A housing-first programme works where it is funded and is not funded at the scale of the problem, and the town has the March’s best heat law and the same bodies at the end of every summer.

The lake’s water

Tempe put a lake in a desert in a basin in deficit, and it defended it with an argument about property values. The lake loses about 2,800 acre-feet to the sky every year, as much water as a town of ten thousand uses, and the university’s own hydrologists have shown it. The town’s reply, made by the Lord Mayors of three decades, is that the lake has raised the value of every property within a mile of it, which is true, and that the value pays for the Heat Office and the town’s shade, which is also true, and neither is an answer to the arithmetic.

The enlargement now before the Council would lose a further 2,000 acre-feet a year. The Basin Report’s figures are against it, the old families who defend the lake are divided, and the town has the unusual experience of arguing about a thing it knows to be wasteful and cannot decide to give up.

The airport’s noise

The airport’s approach crosses about eleven thousand homes in Papago Heights and the north-west, among the poorest and oldest in the town, and their owners and tenants have lived under it since the 1940s. In 1989 the airport’s owner promised to pay for the insulation of the homes, and about four thousand have received it. The rest are still waiting. The town’s claim against the owner has run for decades and the sum in dispute has grown every year.

The town has never cleared a neighbourhood for the airport, which it counts as a difference from Phoenix, and it is a difference. It is also an unflattering one: the houses are still there, and so are the people in them, and the noise has been their only compensation. The Council’s noise ordinance has been in force since 1972 and the town’s own officers say that it has done very little.

The student rental market

The Council refused to touch the student rental market for twenty years, and the refusal is the failing the town finds hardest to defend. A student renter in Tempe pays on average about half a month’s wage more than a family renter for the same flat, and the difference is the mechanism by which the families left. The Council’s quiet reason was its tax base: the property rate falls on landlords and, through rents, on students, and a Council that wanted the town’s income did not want to touch the people who produced it.

The regulation came in the last decade. It is the Valley’s strongest, and it has done what regulation can do, which is to keep the families who had not yet gone. It came too late for the barrio.

The repatriations

In the early 1930s county and municipal drives removed Hispano families from the Valley, funded by the counties and by the towns’ own relief rolls, and some of those removed were citizens. The federal ministry knew of the drives and did not stop them. Tempe’s own relief committee, which was Dr Mabel Tolliver and the parish priest sitting together, fed the families who remained and kept the names of those who went. The list is in the town history museum, and it has been added to by the descendants of the families on it every year since the 1980s.

The town did not stop the drives and says so. The relief committee’s records show that it considered refusing to administer them and decided that refusing would have fed nobody, and the town’s own historians have never agreed with that decision.

The river, and the people before

The town stands on a river that was diverted and a canal that was dug before it, and on ground that people had worked for a thousand years. The Hohokam’s canals, which the Project re-dug in 1902, were not the Project’s. The Akimel O’odham and the Pee Posh, who farmed this reach after them, lost the river to upstream diversion and went from self-supporting farmers to famine within a generation, and the town was laid out on fields they had worked.

The town’s reply is partial and it is on the record. The lake’s lease requires a continuous release that the nations asked for, the Authority has a nations’ observer, the Hohokam line under the Avenue is marked by a plaque the nations wrote, and the Council opens its meetings with an invocation in the O’odham language. None of these returns what was taken, and the nations have said so.

Symbols

The flag

The flag of the city carries five things on a river-blue field, and the arrangement is the town’s account of itself.

Toward the hoist stands a butte in terracotta, rounded and flat-topped, with a thin pale stepped path zigzagging up its face. Behind it rises a plain gold sun, with no rays and no face. Across the whole flag, edge to edge, runs a single white wave edged in a lighter blue, passing in front of the butte’s foot and continuing to the fly. And along the top and bottom edges runs a narrow twisted gold rope, in a regular braid, like a ship’s cable.

Each part is plain, and each is Tempe’s. The butte is Hayden Butte, climbed on the first cool morning of each autumn, and the path is the path the town climbs. The sun is the one that rises on that morning. The wave is the Salt, running full width because since the lake’s lease it runs all year, and it crosses the flag beneath the butte and the sun and does not stop. The rope is the cable of the ferry, from which the Lord Mayor’s chain is made. The empty blue to the fly is the river’s sky.

The flag was adopted in 1999, the year the lake opened, after a competition that the Council ran with one instruction, which was that the entry need not include a motto. The rope was the Ferry Society’s contribution and the wave the students’, and the butte was in every entry. It carries no lettering of any kind, which the town regards as its flag’s best feature: Tempe has argued about a motto since 1894 and a flag with no words in it has never been argued with.

The seal

The seal is older. It was cut at incorporation in 1894 and redrawn in the charter year of 1955, and it is a roundel in blue and gold. Around a rope ring stand the words CITY OF TEMPE over the date 1894, separated by two gold dots. Within the ring hangs the ferry’s bell on its post, a gold bell between two blue uprights, before the butte and the rising sun, and below it runs the river in a white wave.

The seal is used on the corporation’s instruments, on the Council’s minutes, on the cover of the Heat Officer’s annual report and on the medallion at the foot of the Lord Mayor’s chain. The bell is the ferry’s bell that is rung on the anniversary of incorporation and on the first cool morning, and the town’s older families say, with a straight face, that the seal is the only piece of municipal property that has ever been rung.

The motto, and the lack of one

Tempe has no motto. It has argued about one since 1894, in the charter convention, in the Council of 1955 and in the committee of the 1990s, and adopted none, which the town regards as its own joke about itself. The nearest thing is the founders’ reply of 1885, “We will teach the teachers”, which was never adopted and is what everybody quotes.

The other symbols

The Lord Mayor’s chain, made from the cable of Hayden’s ferry, is the town’s one object that everybody recognises. The butte and its A are the town’s image; the flour mill is its oldest building and its mark; and the old ferry’s bell, rung on the anniversary of incorporation, is the sound the town makes for itself. The first cool morning, announced by the Heat Office, is the town’s one movable feast.

Assessment

Tempe is a town that became a city by being useful to other institutions, and has not decided what it wants to be when they do not need it.

The case for the first half is specific. It was given a normal school in 1885 and made itself the place that teaches the teachers. It was given a dam in 1911 and a bridge in 1913 and used both. It was given a flying school, a prisoners’ camp, a university, a headquarters, a lake, an airline base and an instrument corridor, and in each case it found something for the institution to need. The Heat Office, the shade ordinance, the street sensors and the published count are not a gift that anybody gave Tempe. They are what a town did when it noticed that it was the place where the Valley’s heat was best measured, and it measured it.

The case for the second half is equally specific. The town’s largest employer pays no rates, its second is a Crown corporation, and its third is an airline’s base, and the sum the Council gets from the first two is a negotiated payment that the town cannot enforce. The university’s students are not Tempeans and the town’s old families are a minority, and the elections the Council cares about are won by the people who remember the ferry. The barrio went because the market took it and no institution needed it to stay. The question the town has not settled is what it would be if the university moved its centre of gravity to Phoenix, the Project moved its control room to the capital, and the airline moved its base, and nothing in the town’s history suggests that it has ever asked.

The distinction worth keeping is that Tempe has been honest about both halves. It publishes its dead. It names the people it displaced. It admits that the lake wastes water and that the airport has not paid. What it has not done is act on the admissions before an institution or a statute or a flood required it, and the record suggests that it will go on being a town that learns from what it is told and tells it clearly. The question it keeps returning to, what it took from the river and from the people who were there first, has an answer that Tempe itself has written down, and the answer is that it took a great deal and has returned some.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Phoenix: the capital and Tempe’s neighbour, whose Lord Mayor and City Manager the charter of 1955 copied
• The University of the March: the town’s largest employer and the reason for its size
• The Salt River Project: whose headquarters stand on the lake and which keeps the river
• Phoenix Sky Harbor: the airport whose second municipality is Tempe
• Ahwatukee: the town that seceded from Phoenix in 2025, south of Tempe across a strip of Phoenix
• American Airlines: which merged with UKAirways and kept its base at Tempe
• The March of Arizona: the polity whose heat law the Heat Office administers
• The Constitution of the March of Arizona: whose Articles 3, 4 and 5 bind the town
• Mark Kelly: the Speaker, who sits for Phoenix East and Tempe and does his casework from a house in the town
• Elections and constituencies: for the seat and the boundary review of 2022
• The American Broadcasting Corporation: whose Valley bureau stands in the Rio corridor
• The National Health Service of America: whose hospital on the lake has the Realm’s busiest heat-injury unit
• The Church of America: whose parish church of 1889 is the oldest building in the town after the mill
• Barry Goldwater: the High Steward who proposed the referral that made the college a university
• The Second Great War: the war that brought the flying school and the prisoners’ camp

Categories

Land and Landscape · Cities and Places · The March of Arizona · The Valley of the Sun