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Vital Signs
Downtown Development News—
A Tucson Two-Fer
by Lee Allen
 t’s rare in the world of politics and business to see such a textbook example of cooperation and efficiency between parties on both sides that resolves issues and ultimately benefits the community at large. Such an event took place at the March 9 meeting of the Mayor and Council Strategic Focus Area Subcommittee on Rio Nuevo/Downtown, Arts, Culture and History.
The committee moniker may be a bit awkward, but its gavel-wielding chair, Ward 6 Councilmember Nina Trasoff, knows how to conduct an efficient meeting that produces tangible results. By the time she had gaveled the meeting to a close, the committee had okayed a “two-fer,” approving plans for both a new Fourth Avenue underpass and a revised downtown Thrifty Block, to be called “The Post.”
“I’m thrilled City planners and developer Jim Campbell worked together to resolve what appeared to be irreconcilable differences to come up with a mutually agreeable Plaza Centro II underpass plan,” Trasoff said. “One of the likable things about this concept is that it blends transportation needs with land-use planning so we’re not looking preferentially at one versus the other, but meshing the two together.”
 The new underpass design would require gutting most of the nearly 90-year-old underpass that now connects North 4th Avenue and Congress Street at the east end of downtown. In its place would be a modern tunnel designed to address public safety needs along with commercial, transportation and aesthetic issues. “A variety of concerns had to be hashed out, but we eventually found agreement on an expanded and relocated single underpass that will serve all access needs between the Fourth Avenue shopping district and the Congress Street entertainment district,” said City Transportation Director Jim Glock. “The new blueprint has room for both the historic and modern streetcar traffic as well as automobile, bicycle, and pedestrian lanes,” said Trasoff.
The new Thrifty Block proposal emerged after developer Don Bourn met with city staff for two weeks before deciding to drop the idea of a high-rise on Congress Street between Stone and Scott Avenues in favor of a less grandiose but more attractive option.
Said Bourn, “The goal is to look from one end of the block to the other and have a good-looking project from the (Indian Village) Trading Post to the Chase building as a catalyst to a Congress Street downtown gateway. We’re taking the attitude that we’re going full steam ahead on this.”
The rapid subcommittee action means the proposal for The Post will be forwarded for consideration by the full mayor and council. Before Trasoff, Councilmember Jose Ibarra, and Vice Mayor Steve Leal voted unanimously to approve the proposal, Trasoff noted that although teamwork was evident, “a lot of carrots and sticks are built into the contract performance criteria so both sides know what to expect.”
Bourn told the full-house audience, “While we recognize additional feedback may require some minor adjustments, we have been responsive to feedback to date and our goal is to get this wrapped up as quickly as possible. We’d like to put the initial design behind us and start work on final drawings.” Bourn Partners anticipates having the final concept plans ready for submittal to Mayor and Council by mid-April.
Responding to queries about Bourn’s development agreement with the City, Rio Nuevo Director Greg Shelko said, “We’re all but done, 98 percent complete. Now that Bourn has moved away from their taller building concept (a 13- or 14-story development with nearly 100 condominium units and above-ground parking) and re-scaled to a five-story, 40-unit facility with underground parking, the plan is contemporary but respectfully local in a historical context.”
No negative feedback was expressed from the 50-60 attendees who crowded the Ward 6 conference room to witness Bourn’s revised multimillion-dollar residential and commercial development or the “Jim-and-Jim show” featuring the revamped underpass plans.
“The initial Fourth Avenue underpass proposals tried to cover a myriad of issues with a lot of constraints, and we ended up with a camel instead of a horse,” said Jim Glock. “We re-grouped and revisited earlier discussions on how to improve area development potential with an entryway feature into downtown that actually greets people instead of offering them a maze of streets and a sea of asphalt.”
“Three years from now, we’ll be able to enjoy a ribbon-cutting for a new underpass,” said Glock. “We didn’t have to go back to Square One, we just had to take a couple of steps backward to come up with something everyone could live with,” noted Jim Campbell. In offering his ‘aye’ vote, Councilmember Leal said the hybrid plan was impressive.
Assuming a rapid City stamp of approval, officials believe that 16 months would be needed to complete permitting, engineering, and other pre-build necessities before the start of construction, which would require an additional 12 to 18 months. “This allows adequate time to look into all facets of a downtown entryway to solve circulation needs in the best fashion over the long run,” said Glock. The lengthy construction time is due to the complexity of the project: half of the underpass would be built before railroad tracks are laid there, and the second half of the underpass would then be completed. “Each phase takes about six months to accomplish,” Glock said.
Both Glock and Campbell acknowledged that access between Fourth and Congress could not be maintained during construction but that the short-term hardship in losing that linkage during build-out would allow a better end result.
Retention of the historic Stone Avenue underpass allows Tucson to keep one of the three original downtown underpasses and the new underpass proposal will have a complementary design. “We will probably leave very few, if any, true historical features associated with the 1916 underpass, so it probably will not maintain its historic standing,” said Glock. Vice Mayor Leal then noted, “The Fourth Avenue underpass was probably never attractive even when it was brand new. But it would be a happy thought if we made the new underpass look somewhat like the Stone Avenue underpass to provide some symmetry in the aesthetics of two parts of downtown.”
From the Top of the Watershed Down
Downtown Tucson is home to a leading permaculture advocate and model of sustainable desert living
by Nancy Hand
Water as a Human Right
Water is a limited natural resource and a public good fundamental for life and health. The human right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity. It is a prerequisite for the realization of other human rights.
 ucson came very close to losing one of its best local assets. Environmental educator and newly published author, Brad Lancaster, almost moved away from the town he grew up in when he learned, as a college student at the University of Arizona, that human water consumption had dried up the Santa Cruz River and sucked the groundwater level down by 300 to 500 feet in a span of less than 50 years. Instead Lancaster stayed, and over the course of a decade, carried out what nationally known author and arid land ecologist Gary Paul Nabhan calls, “a worldwide survey of water-harvesting practices, humbling his predecessors by compiling a dizzyingly diverse portfolio of strategies, techniques, and technologies.” Lancaster painstakingly put those methods to work at his home in the Dunbar/Springs neighborhood, right in Downtown Tucson, creating what Nabhan calls “a walk-through encyclopedia of water-harvesting techniques gleaned from cultures and innovators from around the world.”
And the techniques have worked. Through a combination of rainwater and greywater harvesting--reusing water from sinks, showers and washing machines--and conservation, Lancaster reduced both groundwater and energy consumption so precipitously that city officials visited the home five times, convinced there was a problem with the meters. The household of three not only consumes a whopping 82% less groundwater per person than the typical Tucsonan, but actually helps recharge the water table by harvesting over 100,000 gallons of rainwater per year that would otherwise be lost as runoff.
But surprisingly, the living laboratory at University and 9th looks like nothing more than a lush patch of desert surrounding and shading a small bungalow tucked quietly back from the street, almost hidden from view. The techniques used here seem so simple and sensible that one has to wonder why we’re not all harvesting the rain.
“What makes this landscape different is it produces resources rather than consuming them,” says Lancaster, standing at the front of his property, a step away from where it borders the road. He’s tall and thin, with a soft-spoken manner and the gentle contentment of someone at home with himself and his specific place in the world. “This whole greenway is productive of resources--food, wildlife habitat, beauty, fragrance, natural cooling and heating,” he says. There’s a thriving vegetable garden, fruit trees and a natural habitat bustling with curve-billed thrashers, cactus wren, woodpeckers, thrushes, and Gambel’s quail--all irrigated almost exclusively with harvested rainwater. But Lancaster’s example produces much more than that. It has become a model for a different, more sensible relationship to place and community. It has become a producer of sustainable community, starting at the top of the watershed, working to create a better habitat for people as well.
Lancaster and his brother, Robb, started planting shade trees, food plants and other vegetation as soon as they bought the small house, which was about to be condemned, in 1994. Starting at the highest point on the land, they designed a series of water harvesting earthworks—sunken bowl-like basins, surrounded by raised paths. Rainwater flows naturally into the planted areas, one overflowing into the next, maximizing filtration into the ground—back into the water table. It sounds simple, and it is, but it’s also unusual. Most landscapes in the Western U.S. are designed to drain water off the site. Many properties have one low collection point, not only failing to make use of the opportunity for free, natural irrigation, but often causing problematic flooding.
Like almost everything on the property, the vegetation serves many purposes: it creates a cooler microclimate around the house, which reduces energy and water consumption for cooling, it creates a more pleasant environment for passersby, which, Lancaster says, creates “better neighborhood interaction,” it provides wildlife habitat and produces food—15 to 25% of the food for the household, depending on the season.
Rainwater is also directed into a cistern, which is then used for household use, and reuse. A black PVC drain pipe comes out of the outdoor washing machine and into another pipe marked “peach.” The drain pipe is easily removed and placed into the next of four open pipes, in a clockwise rotation. Each load of laundry waters one of the fruit trees close to the house: peach, fig, white sapote, orange. Lancaster found that the household wasn’t doing enough laundry in the driest months to adequately irrigate the fruit trees, so he turned the household washing machine into a community Laundromat. Neighbors come and wash clothes here, paying what they would spend on a coin-op machine into a pool that will eventually fund a lower water use washing machine. Guest launderers from the neighborhood are also invited to harvest and consume some of the fruit their dirty clothes help produce.
Greywater harvesting—reuse of household water from sinks, showers and washing machines--is the second most important source of water for the site. An outdoor shower, enclosed in a thick, spiral wall of bound palm fronds, has three drains that channel water to different areas of the landscape.
Lancaster’s work has also permeated the larger neighborhood. He and his brother started a neighborhood tree planting program that has planted 1000 trees over the last decade, significantly cooling the whole neighborhood and reducing runoff and flooding.
“Temperatures have risen 10° in Phoenix, 4° in Tucson,” says Lancaster. This is because of the “heat island effect.” “When there’s too much street hardscape exposed to direct sun, it will absorb that heat during the day and radiate it out in the afternoon and evening. It’s so bad in Phoenix that this may be the first year that the summer temperature never dips below 100° even at night.” Shade trees can cool the area around a home up to 20° in the summer and a whole neighborhood by up to 10°. The neighborhood has also lobbied for and obtained seven traffic circles, one in the intersection in front of Lancaster’s house. “The traffic circle reduced pavement in the intersection by 26%, calmed traffic, reduced flooding and runoff,” says Lancaster.
Not long ago, rainwater and greywater harvesting were relatively obscure practices, considered marginal or counterculture. But recently Lancaster and other local permaculture specialists were asked to help Tucson Water draft guidelines—now available on the city’s web site—to assist people interested in implementing these conservation techniques at home. New tax rebates designed to encourage homeowners to reuse greywater will go into effect in January of 2007. The former fringe-dwellers have become valued experts.
What turned things around for him, Lancaster says, was learning from a farmer in Zimbabwe who used water harvesting to create a lush tree orchard in an arid environment, that you can’t escape the problem—it will just follow you. The important thing is to “set roots where you are and work to turn things around,” he says. Over time Lancaster learned that it was relatively easy to do things differently, when he set his mind to thinking differently. “I realized how backwards I used to do things in my own life and how easy it is to turn things around,” he says. “It juices me. It’s fun, exciting, stimulating to live in. I don’t like seeing resources wasted. When I see it going the other way it’s soul sucking, depressing. I want to live in a community that’s stimulating and exciting.”
Water as Commons
Water is a commons because it is the ecological basis of all life and because its sustainability and equitable allocation depend on cooperation among community members.
--Vandana Shiva, Water Wars
Lancaster’s new book, “Rainwater Harvesting For Drylands: Volume 1 Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain Into Your Life and Landscape,” is both a practical manual for implementing rainwater harvesting techniques and the principles of permaculture and an invitation to others to help build that larger community that is stimulating, fun and sustainable. The first in a series of three volumes, the book provides a comprehensive overview and specific guidance for assessing your site’s water resources, harvesting rainwater with earthworks and tanks, and making the best use of the sun and vegetation for passive cooling and heating and resource conservation. The book also includes detailed appendices with water-harvesting calculations, water requirement calculations, an overview of patterns of water flow and erosion and water harvesting traditions in the Desert Southwest. It’s a well-organized, well-written guide that can help anyone use the principles Lancaster advocates to do as little as raise pathways and sink planting areas to capture rainfall for irrigation, or to redesign an entire home site from the top of the watershed down.
Lancaster’s about-face, from believing that the best response to the region’s water crisis is to move away to becoming a leading figure in the permaculture movement and a living example of sustainable community, parallels his understanding of the choice before us as a drylands community: “We can follow the wasteful path to scarcity or the stewardship path to abundance,” he says.
With Tucson’s water supply projected to be exhausted by 2025, it’s not difficult to imagine these principles and techniques one day being adopted by industry and government to harvest this essential public good from the roofs of parking lots, banks and city buildings.
And with access to water widely projected to be a major cause of armed conflict and social unrest in coming decades, the principles contained in Lancaster’s book are likely to become key peacekeeping tools in the future. “At a time when surface and groundwater is becoming increasingly privatized, fought over, and transferred between watersheds and aquifers as if it were but one more globalized commodity,” writes Gary Paul Nabhan in the introduction to Rainwater Harvesting, “Brad demonstrates a diversity of strategies that can quench our thirst, sustain local food production, and keep peace among neighboring cultures….What Brad’s genius safeguards for us is ‘water democracy.’
A former producer for KUAT-TV’s Arizona Illustrated and co-host of Reflexiones Domingo, Nancy Hand (nancyhand@cox.net) is a freelance journalist based in Tucson. Her work has aired on NPR’s Living on Earth and has appeared in the National Catholic Reporter and the Tucson Weekly.
A Definition of Permaculture
Bill Mollison and Scott Pittman
Permaculture (Permanent Agriculture) is the conscious design and maintenance of cultivated ecosystems which have the diversity, stability & resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape, people & appropriate technologies, providing good, shelter, energy & other needs in a sustainable way. Permaculture is a philosophy and an approach to land use which works with natural rhythms & patterns, weaving together the elements of microclimate, annual & perennial plants, animals, water & soil management, & human needs into intricately connected & productive communities.
Resources
brad lancaster: www.harvestingrainwater.com
permaculture: www.sonoranpermaculture.org • www.permaculture.net
city of tucson water guidelines: www.ci.tucson.az.us/water/harvesting.htm • www.ci.tucson.az.us/water/greywater.htm.
1930 All the Time
by Anne Seidler
he Congress Tap Room holds memories for many Tucsonans, and has been featured in various travel publications and even novels such as Almanac of the Dead . Yet, it’s sometimes hard to see, when you’re looking at a brown formica table or a silk-tigerlily wreath that belongs in your grandmother’s foyer, just how it gained this fabled status in the minds of native Tucsonans and inspired visitors.
 That’s why Hotel Congress’ owners, Richard and Shana Oseran, are planning a major renovation of the Tap Room, set to begin in early April. The man in charge will be Cliff Taylor, who may be better known as Chick Cashman, the blonde bombshell frontperson of The Countrypolitans. Taylor’s ties with Congress go beyond his experience performing there; he also used to work the front desk of the hotel. While he is primarily a musician and also worked as a film editor in Los Angeles, Taylor (who studied architecture at the U. of A. before dropping out to join a band) is a renovator by day. Although most of his skill has thus far been used to revamp historic Joesler homes, Taylor should feel comfortable restoring a commercial space. He learned the trade from his father, who renovated Ye Olde Lantern, one of Tucson’s oldest drinking and dining establishments. Taylor says he plans to transform the tap room into “something more like an Old West drinking bar. More like the Crystal Palace” (think mirrors and chandeliers). Those who are attached to the sooty charm of smoke-stained Pete Martinez drawings and the vintage jukebox needn’t worry, though. Making the Tap Room feel like one of the restaurants in the frontier-themed section of Disneyland is the farthest thing from Taylor’s mind. “Everybody’s got memories of this space”, he says, “So you can’t really change it.”
What the Oserans and Taylor want to change is the currently anachronistic feel of the bar. “This room should feel like 1930 all the time”, Taylor says. Currently the space includes art ranging in time frame from Martinez’s 1930s cowboy scenes to a more recent tribute to Mr. Benny, one of Congress’ most infamous patrons. There are plans to introduce more era-specific and western-themed art and to replace the “diner-esque” formica tabletops with wood. The television above the bar, however, will stay (good news for Adult Swim fans). While a television may seem blatantly post-1930s, Taylor says he likes “the half-assedness of it. At least it’s not a plasma screen.” The Martinez drawings above the bar, which have been darkened by decades of cigarette smoke, will be cleaned up a little, but not too much. The object is, after all, to bring back the past rather than make things look brand-new.
Besides the changes in the Tap Room’s décor, there are plans to renovate the ceiling, which is actually four feet higher than the acoustic tiles would suggest. Removing the dropped ceiling will allow for more light from the leaded windows on the north wall, and hopefully the room will be re-wired for new overhead lighting. Taylor says that surveying the building and exploring crawl-spaces has not simply been business as usual, but an adventurous undertaking full of reminders of the building’s colorful history – like the rafters and beams still charred from the 1934 fire which led to the capture of John Dillinger and his gang.
The currently hidden upper walls of the Tap Room also hold a surprise for fans of early Tucson art. They were actually painted by Pete Martinez – a little-known fact that is sure to excite enthusiasts of all things vintage Tucson. Sadly, though, the artwork is now nearly invisible due to years of smoke, dirt, and lack of attention. Martinez’s work on the upper walls included brands from several local ranches, as well as a classic landscape. A cowboy and horse from the scene are still somewhat visible, and Taylor plans to have this section of the wall removed, framed and hung in the restored Tap Room.
If you’ve ever stopped by the bar on a weekday afternoon, chances are you’ve had the pleasure of meeting Tiger, who has been tending the bar for forty-six years. He remembers the days when there was a turquoise jewelry shop in what is now the main room of Club Congress, and when Mr. and Mrs. Kent, the hotel’s former owners, would provide a complimentary Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner for the guests. When asked what has kept him happy with his job for so long, Tiger replies, “I like the atmosphere. I love my people that come in here. You really get to know them over the years.” Taylor stresses that he wants to keep the Tap Room as close to its roots as possible while making it more ambient. “Doing all this dolling-up [stuff] is fun”, he says, “but it’s really these old salty people who work here that are important…We just want Tiger to be comfortable.”
The renovations are set to begin in April and should be completed by some time this June, hopefully restoring a bit of Old West romance in the heart of Downtown.
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