With Tools to Cool, Phoenix Is Red Hot

Long before our grandparents were born, the Sun God smiled upon the land. And there was warmth.

Trouble was, the Sun God didn’t know when to stop smiling. So there was more warmth--300 sunny days a year, so many that they named this place the Valley of the Sun. By this time the Sun God was grinning like a butcher’s dog. Like a dental ad. Like an Osmond.

And from the desert rose a wondrous civilization called the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. But the asphalt and glass only made it more torrid. And people wondered if the Sun God was one of those demons from the hot place down below.

Just how hot was it? Birds burrowed into cactuses to stay cool. Drivers clutched potholders while steering. People rose at 4 a.m. to mow and garden and golf, then retreated from the searing morning before 9. “Are you getting enough shade?” became a pleasantry.

Finally they found a tool that could keep the blistering deity at bay--but only indoors. There came to be two distinct realms in the valley. Outside, the Sun God still prevailed, smiling that infernal smile. But inside, at last, it was cool.

They called their tool air-conditioning; by the tens of thousands, they put it to use. It changed the Valley of the Sun forever.

*

On the Loop 101 Freeway, just northwest of downtown Phoenix, it’s rush hour. But less than a mile from the corridor of climate-controlled cars, the streets of suburban Sun City on this bright summer morning are utterly, surrealistically empty of humanity.

Nobody on the sidewalks of Del Webb Boulevard, named after the guy who laid out Sun City. Not a posterior planted on any of the 55 outdoor public benches at Lakeview Center. And, in the neighborhoods where so much of the nation comes to retire, same story. The lawns of Tropicana Circle--not a soul. The fairways of Lakes West Golf Course--deserted.

It was different at 4:30 a.m. Before dawn, walkers crowded the streets, gardeners the lawns, golfers the links. In the middle of what other people consider the night, Sun City was alive. Understandably so: It was only about 95 degrees. And dark.

But by 9 a.m. it’s 108, heading to a 116-degree high. And Sun City, like most of the rest of metro Phoenix, is indoors with its indispensable accessories--air conditioners and evaporative “swamp coolers,” contraptions that cool the air by making it moist and that work only in low humidity.

“People simply wouldn’t live here if they didn’t have the tools to keep them cool,” says Ivy Wixson, manager of Sun City’s Olive Branch Recreation Center, a senior center where a sign in the lobby advertises an upcoming “indoor picnic.”

From June to August, this is how metropolitan Phoenix exists--a flurry of mad dashes from air-conditioned home to air-conditioned car to air-conditioned office to air-conditioned mall. Determined 15-minute searches for shady parking spots. And rising thermometers: Phoenix’s normal high temperature in July is 106--the highest of any major American city.

Well, what do you expect when you build a city smack in the middle of the Sonoran Desert? Of course the heat--face-slapping, shirt-drenching, foot-blistering, sear-your-elbow-on-the-pay-phone heat--is the arbiter of lifestyle.

“Everybody understands what it’s like to get ready for winter,” says Jim Belnap, owner of a 44-year-old air-conditioning installation and service company called George Brazil. “Here, we spend our time getting ready for summer.”

How hot is it? Hotter than where you are. Car manufacturers use Phoenix to test the endurance of their paint. Saudi Arabian hospitals recruit foreign staff from here so they get people who are accustomed to the heat. A few years back, the Daily News-Sun, Sun City’s newspaper, cooked a TV dinner in the back seat of a car and popped microwave popcorn in the trunk during a 122-degree day.

Arizona, it’s worth noting, defiantly doesn’t use daylight savings time. Conventional wisdom says Arizonans want to distinguish themselves from Californians, but people also joke that it’s because the daylight isn’t worth saving.

“But it’s a dry heat,” insists Phoenician after Phoenician (the term, believe it or not, for a Phoenix resident), trying to explain what draws so many retired Americans to this region. There’s even a popular T-shirt sold here that shows a sunbaked skeleton uttering the dry-heat mantra.

“C’mon,” snaps David Tatum, curator of collections at the Arizona Historical Society. “You cook a chicken in dry heat too.”

Lives Shaped by the Desert

In the historical society’s archive sits a cylinder of pink flannel strips attached to a tiny fan--one of Arizona’s earliest swamp coolers, built by a man named Gust Goettl to cool his niece’s room. Goettl and his brothers became pioneers in keeping Arizona cool; their company is still around today.

The society’s exhibits show how heat, and fighting it, has defined the region: The ice-lined coffins that 19th-century Phoenix morticians employed to keep bodies cool. The adobe huts that insulated Indians. The people who’d pick spots on the buttes and mesas outside Tempe, carry up sheets (or even entire beds), wet them down, wrap themselves up and go to sleep. The state hospital that hung soaked cloth in the windows and hoped for wind.

“Every part of our lives is shaped by the desert,” a sonorous voice intones in the society’s history film. “We who live here are continually forced by the desert to think ahead and invent our future.”

The future, for Phoenix, would be the air conditioner.

Electric-Bill Sticker Shock

Years ago, a disgruntled Arizona Democrat, grumbling about how the state’s politics turned toward the GOP after World War II, came up with a theory. Maybe, he said, air-conditioning brought in the Republicans.

He was partially right. You’ll hear it over and over here: Air-conditioning brought ‘em in. And not just Republicans.

Air-conditioning may mean comfort in Boston and safety in Atlanta, but in Phoenix it’s related to existence itself. True, the Southwestern desert was home to Apaches and settled by pioneers, but it was mass-marketed by artificial cool.

“You just don’t go to Phoenix or Dallas or Houston without air-conditioning,” says Chrysanthe B. Broikos, curator of an exhibit on air-conditioning’s history at the National Building Museum in Washington. “You certainly don’t make your home there. And corporations don’t decide to go there.”

In the years after the war, as air-conditioning became cheaper and more available for homes, people and corporations did decide to go: Between 1950 and 1995, Arizona’s population grew by 462%.

In 1969, a Phoenix city councilman proclaimed his town “Air Conditioned Capital of the World.” And today’s culture of air-conditioning defines Phoenix’s very existence as much as the heat itself.

People get arrested for smuggling banned coolants from Mexico. They assault one another when air conditioners break. Air-conditioning has even impacted how people build their homes: The high ceilings, deep porches and wide eaves of traditional architecture, designed to keep occupants cool and hot air rising, have been replaced by the flat ranch-house home fronts and huge picture windows of the air-conditioned subdivision. Worried about the glass letting in heat? Just crank up the a/c.

In the Phoenix phone book are 35 pages of air-conditioning stores, contractors and repair outfits. (Pittsburgh, by comparison, has five pages.) In summer, their employees race around in vans, trying to keep up with the people whose air conditioners are broken and who are sure it’s a life-and-death issue. It can be.

George Brazil’s Belnap has heard all the pleas: “I have an elderly mother.” “I have an elderly mother and a baby.” “I’m going to sue you if we die.” But he’s sure that if people took care of their air conditioners in the off-season, they’d be better off when the Big Heat comes.

“They won’t maintain the things,” he grouses. “We spend all spring trying to get people to let us come to their house and check things out. But the reality is, we spend April playing cards with the Maytag man.”

Then there are the electric bills--up to $300 a month in the hot months. Virtually all cooling in Arizona--fan, swamp cooler, air-conditioning--is electric, and the many newcomers aren’t expecting what comes from the power company in the mail.

“Their first summer here, it’s like buying a car. It’s sticker shock,” says Scott Harelson, a spokesman for the Salt River Project, a Phoenix power company.

In Sun City five years ago, an elderly woman on a fixed income decided to turn off her air conditioner during a 120-degree day. She flipped on her evaporative cooler; it blew out hot air. They found her expired on her bed, her dog dead beside her.

Such restraint is not exactly common. Most people crank up the thermostat and worry later. On Aug. 28, 1998, between 5 and 6 p.m., the Salt River Project had its highest usage ever--4,666 megawatts at one time. Given that one megawatt is enough to power 100 homes, this was no small affair. No coincidence, either, that it was at the time when people are getting home from work and cooling down.

A big chunk of it that evening came from Bank One Ballpark, where the Arizona Diamondbacks beat the Milwaukee Brewers, 6-3. (This season, the team is, well, red hot; it’s leading the National League West.)

Below the indoor ballpark’s third-base line, inside room 1309, sits one whompus of an air conditioner--a jungle of consoles, control panels and John Goodman-sized pipes that carry chilled air to the baseball faithful on triple-digit evenings. In charge of it is Greg Myrick, who operates the coolers from a personal computer in a nearby room.

During ballgames, Myrick’s men roam the stands with hand-held thermometers, measuring temperatures and barking results into walkie-talkies. The target: 74 degrees.

Chillers are turned on five hours before game time to cool the park after its retractable roof has been open to let the natural grass grow. Outside, across railroad tracks, sit four cement towers, each filled with water and a 12-foot fan that cools it before it’s pumped into the stadium.

It makes for a better experience than Myrick remembers in outdoor minor-league parks around here. “We were sweating at 7 p.m.,” he recalls on a recent afternoon. “With this, I think people are really starting to enjoy baseball.”

Then he opens a stadium door to emerge into the 115-degree heat and pushes it closed behind him. WHOOSH! Maricopa County’s most formidable air conditioner blows it open once more.

*

Beyond the swamp cooler, beyond the air conditioner, in a realm all his own, Steve Utter is master--mister, you might say--of all he surveys. This is a guy who must be from central Arizona. He makes statements like this: “Ever since I was a boy, I dreamed of creating an artificial environment you could take with you wherever you went.”

He did. Utter is the inventor of MistyMate, a personal-sized “mister” that uses a fan to blow a fine spray of water on its user. He built it to comfort his landscaping company’s sweltering employees; he liked it so much that he founded a company. Now he hawks misters on QVC.

Misters--the large, institutional ones and the smaller ones like those Utter manufactures--are Phoenix’s most recent answer to heat. Larger ones, built into the masonry of public buildings, allow the brave and the hardy to eat lunch at outdoor tables and stand in lines without collapsing. Smaller ones, like many MistyMates, are aimed at the consumer.

Only in a climate where the average yearly rainfall is 7.7 inches would people tolerate machines that squirt water at them in public places.

Utter’s MistyMates--he favors the “Arctic Blast Professional” model--are used on cattle, outside warehouses, on some NFL sidelines and, in one PR masterstroke last year, on a Phoenix football crowd, thanks to a “cool cannon” that Utter shot into the stands like a bazooka. His latest model is worn like a fanny pack. You spray water, and a battery-operated fan blows it up toward your face.

“This isn’t about seeking comfort. You walk out there and you feel the pain,” he says. “This was invented because I live here.”

And so it goes in Phoenix, where cool has become a birthright and the air conditioner mere background noise, changing our instincts about where to spend time, allowing us to cultivate major cities where none existed before. Perhaps even changing us forever.

Think of it: a society of indoor people, hiding from global warming, taking refuge in cooled buildings from an ever more vicious Sun God. The apparatus of comfort making us weak. Will it happen? Maybe it already has. But in the Valley of the Sun, it was hot yesterday, it’s hot today and it’s going to be hot tomorrow. They do what they can.

For now, it’s just another Phoenix summer afternoon--hot, parched and deserted, cement, glass and desert. And everywhere you turn, another environment waiting to be cooled, another innovation waiting to happen, another chance for man to find a way to beat or cheat the sun, if only for a few comfortable, necessary moments.

But there’s one consolation: It is, after all, a dry heat.