Downtown Phoenix.

Nikon F100, Kodak Extar 100 at 160ASA, 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6 AFD Nikkor zoom.

Last gasp.

The New Windsor Hotel in downtown Phoenix, AZ is the last 19th century hotel still operating in the city.

Built in 1893 at the corner of Adams and 6th Avenue, it’s a sad sight today and you can only think the wrecker’s ball beckons. But there are signs of its former glory galore, and the architecture is a throwback to a gentler time.

You can read more of the hotel’s history here.

In 1981 the Chicago rock group Styx released a double album, Paradise Theater, which chronicles the rise, fall and abandonment of a fabulous theater in Chicago, an homage to changing times and the demise of the American downtown. The art work on the large 12″ LP sleeves was exceptional:

The music is as haunting as the art work and I flashed back to that album when snapping the above.

Nikon F100, Kodak Ektar at 160ASA, 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6 AFD Nikkor zoom.

Downtown Phoenix.

Nikon F100, Ektar 100 at 160ASA, Nikkor 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6 AFD Nikkor zoom.

Click!

Adams Way at Third, Phoenix, AZ.

Nikon F100, Kodak Ektar 100 at 160 ASA, 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6 AFD Nikkor zoom.

Just a handful of events did it.

When you look at the causes of success in the wealthiest nation there has ever been, there are but a handful:

• The Revolutionary War. Kicking out the British and keeping taxes for ourselves stopped colonial plunder for once and for all.
• The Louisiana Purchase. President Thomas Jefferson consummated the deal amidst the usual calls for impeachment and rendered America essentially immune from invasion unless you consider Canadians and Mexicans a threat. Nappy proceeded to waste the cash on interminable war with England and an idiotic attempt to capture the misery that was and remains Russia. America gained a vast swath of territory from Louisiana to North Dakota. The cost was less than 9 months of our current criminal spending on perpetual war.
• Lincoln’s Secretary of State gave his name, albeit unwittingly, to the purchase of Alaska from the Russkies in 1867. The cost of $100 million in today’s money saw ‘Seward’s Folly’ remove the Russian Bear from North America and delivered vast sums of gold and oil soon after.
• NASA and the Apollo program. The Russkie Bear did America a great favor in beating us to space time and again – the first unmanned space vehicle, the first man in space, the first spacewalk, etc. at goodness knows what cost to life. It lit a fire under us, stoked by JFK, who said we would put a man on the moon within a decade. The US space program was the Cold War at its most hot and, as with all wars, technology proceeded by leaps and bounds. It’s hard to begin to relate the gains to US GDP from Apollo, but the development of just one technology says it all. The microchip.

These thoughts ran through my mind when I snapped the images below for they speak loudly to the most significant of the wealth creators enumerated above, the first. The other three would have been impossible without it.

When a bunch of throughly pi**ed off Americans chucked 342 chests of English tea (from China, of course, stolen by the British in the first place) into Boston Harbor the movement for independence from a tyrannical colonial power was firmly entrenched. There would be no more taxation without representation and the English protection racket was doomed.

“Your taxes pay for protection”, the English King told us. Uh huh. (‘Colonialism’ is little more than a euphemism for theft).

While the original boats are long gone there’s a replica to be seen in the harbor:

Taken from a high floor of the Intercontinental Hotel, Boston.

Panny GX7, 12-35mm pro zoom.