New Jersey Star-Ledger - January 29, 2008

 

From farm fields it grew
A mega sports complex blossoms, changing Glendale forever

By Brad Parks
 

lendale, Ariz. — It sprouts out of the flat, semiarid landscape alongside Loop 101 like a huge, futuristic mushroom, looming above the tightly packed single-family houses nearby.

A spaceship. That's what locals say University of Phoenix Stadium looks like.

Across the street, dwarfed by the stadium, is the Jobing.com Arena, home to the Phoenix Coyotes. Adjacent to that is Westgate City Center, an outdoor pedestrian mall with billboards meant to invoke Times Square, a water fountain modeled after the Bellagio in Las Vegas and 500,000 square feet of what will eventually be 6.5 million square feet of retail and residential space.

All of it is franchised, themed, prepackaged and carefully branded. And five years ago, all of it was farmland.

"Crops and cows," Glendale Mayor Elaine Scruggs said. "Five years ago, that's all this was: Crops and cows."

Now it is home to Super Bowl XLII, where this Sunday thousands will descend on a massive sports-entertainment complex that is, depending on your point of view, either a post-modern nightmare of placeless, character-deprived, homogeneous sprawl — or, to quote Westgate City Center's marketing, "a capital city of the new century ... the new, breathtaking standard in urban development."

And none of it existed — not on a planning board, not even as a concept — the last time the Giants went to a Super Bowl in 2001.

It's breakneck development that turns traditional notions of urbanism — with its adherence to a Manhattan-like city center around which all revolves — on its ear.

Here, the development takes place around a multitude of smaller cores that can crop up just about anywhere, a model predicated on smooth freeways, dogged American consumerism and the hunch that a few million more people will someday relocate to a valley that boasts 320 days of sunshine a year.

For the 4 million already here, the pace of the growth can be a bit disjointing.

"Sometimes it's hard to keep up," said Glenn Vick, a bouncer at Hell's Half Acre, one of a half-dozen bars that are opening just in time for the Super Bowl. "You drive around and you say, 'Where did that come from?'"

For folks from "back East," as New Jersey is known around here, it can be downright dizzying.

Take the stadium itself: In an era in which real universities with real football teams don't put their names on stadiums anymore — preferring to auction them to the highest bidder — the University of Phoenix, an Internet university with no football team, paid $154 million to put its name on a professional football team's facility.

Or there's the incongruity of Clarence Pendergast's cows. A few hundred yards from where Eli Manning will be huddling with his offensive line to do battle against the Patriots Sunday evening, Pendergast still has about 150 head of dairy cows mucking around in falling-down corrals, wading in a few shallow pools of muddy water.

Through the years, Pendergast, who is 79 but gives his age as "too damn old," has raised cows, cotton and alfalfa. A third generation farmer whose family first came here in 1879, he has lived in the same house and worked the same land his entire life. Even as the Phoenix area experienced explosive growth, Pendergast's corner of the world was far enough from the interstate to stay rural.

That changed in 2000, when the final length of Loop 101, the beltway that encircles the northern half of the valley, was completed.

"Out here in the West, your future is your proximity to the freeways," said Scruggs, who has been mayor 14 years. "We had three miles of frontage alongside 101. Our goal was to make the most of our three miles."

Residential developers lined up to subdivide and conquer. But Glendale — which was known for retirement communities, affordable housing, a few antiques stores in an aging downtown and not much else — already had enough of those. So, when the National Hockey League's Phoenix Coyotes announced they were searching for a new home, the city's leadership bet heavily on sports.

With other area cities balking at the Coyotes' overtures, Glendale welcomed them, working out a too-good-to-be-true deal: The city floated a $150 million bond to build the arena; and one of the Coyotes' owners at the time, developer Steve Ellman, agreed to build what is now Westgate City Center, giving the city the sales tax revenue it needed to pay back the bond. The arena opened in 2003.

Around the same time, the Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority was looking to locate a new stadium for the National Football League's Cardinals. Again, where other cities hemmed and hawed, Glendale was the kid sitting in the first row of the class, waving its hand in the air, asking to be picked.

"What you really have in the Phoenix area are cities that act like independent enterprises competing against each other," said Joel Kotkin, author of "The City: [a] Global History" and a presidential scholar at Chapman University who has studied the Valley of the Sun. "This was Glendale's strategy to fight back against the Tempes and the Scottsdales."

In short order, AZSTA put up $350 million worth of state tourism taxes, the Bidwill family, which owns the Cardinals, contributed $200 million, and Glendale was breaking ground on a state-of-the-art stadium that would soon be awarded the Super Bowl.

That, in turn, has served as a catalyst that has Westgate City Center already at 90 percent capacity.

"This is a blessing," said Maribel Pina, a local Realtor who sells two-bedroom condos in the low-400s. "It's given us something to be known for."

Of course, what exactly that is can be a little hard to define. The retail tenants include a Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville, one of eight in the country. The Bar Louie is one of 42, and it's not even the only Bar Louie in Glendale — there's also one in Glendale, Wis. Cold Stone Creamery? There are roughly 1,400 of those.

In the middle of all this sameness are directional signs pointing to various destinations — Stuttgart, Germany 5,715 mi; Stockholm, Sweden 5,426 mi; Jakarta, Indonesia 9,312 mi; and so on — that reinforce the point: You could be anywhere in the world right now. You just happen to be here.

Yet no one here seems to mind.

"Other than people who occasionally don't want things in their backyards, you're not really going to find an organized anti-growth effort out here," said Jay Butler, director of Realty Studies at Arizona State University. "The thing here is most of the people are brand new. So the theory is, if you really don't like it, you can move."

Even the local Sierra Club chapter waves a flag of surrender to much of the growth.

"There are so many bad developments blighting the landscape with these cookie-cutter houses, where do you start?" said Sandy Barr, president of the Grand Canyon Chapter of the Sierra Club. "We've had to focus on just trying to limit the worst of them."

The local residents, who tend to vote with their feet, certainly aren't objecting.

"Over there used to be a strawberry field," said Daisy Ramirez, 17, pointing to a large patch of dirt where development phase 2 is set to begin just as soon as they can get all these pesky football players out of the way. "It makes me sad when a strawberry field is removed. It was fun driving around with your friends, playing hide and seek in the cornfields. There aren't a lot of those anymore."

Still, when asked which she would rather have — the cornfield or the AMC — Ramirez didn't hesitate.

"The movie theater," she said. "Definitely the movie theater."

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