Vital Signs
El Presidio Neighborhood Maintains Historic Charm Despite Development Pressures
by James Reel
sk El Presidio homeowners what’s so great about their neighborhood, immediately north of Downtown, and you’ll probably get an answer much like the one offered recently by both Annette Campbell and Margaret Hardy: It’s a place where you can walk your dog at night, feel safe, and chat with neighbors you know.
“It has an old-fashioned feel, like a small town,” says Hardy, president of the El Presidio Neighborhood Association. “It has beautiful architecture and a real sense of place and history. Our neighborhood has everything from the mansions on Main to old row houses and everything in between. It’s multicultural and it has couples with families, DINKs, retirees, gay couples—we have everything here, and that’s the way we like it.”
The neighborhood’s diversity is especially remarkable, since the place started out as the ultimate gated community.
El Presidio takes its name from the 12-acre Spanish garrison, or presidio, built in the area in 1775. The fort defended early European settlers from Native Americans none too happy about the new people moving into the neighborhood (a 1,200-year-old Hohokam pit house lies under part of the neighborhood, so the Spaniards were definitely latecomers). In the 19th century the three-foot walls came tumbling down, and today nothing remains of the presidio above ground, aside from a few historical markers. But contemporary residents still describe the area as a safe, secure place to live.
In the late 19th century, it was also the posh place to build a home. Along Meyer Avenue especially, this meant adobe row houses, built in the century’s middle decades and often expanding room by room with the family’s prosperity. From the 1870s and ’80s, as Anglos joined the Mexican pioneers and the railroad brought in wood building materials, adobe fell out of fashion and new homes began appearing in Territorial, Craftsman, and ultimately California bungalow style, particularly along Main Avenue. The area grew so tony that it earned the nickname Snob Hollow.
El Presidio neighborhood is bounded by St. Mary’s Road/6th Street on the north, Stone Avenue on the east, Alameda Street on the south, and Interstate 10 on the west. Businesses line the perimeter, and although the core remains mostly residential, commercial uses began to rise in the 1950s, when many old homes were torn down and rezoning encouraged the rise of small office buildings. The 1965 Granada Neighborhood Plan advocated redeveloping the area with high-rise commercial structures and apartment buildings. Aside from the Redondo Towers apartments, none of that came to pass, and by the late 1970s the emphasis shifted to historic preservation. But even now, some old homes continue to be converted to office space, to the dismay of many residents.
Colleen Concannon owns the Manning House, a historic mansion near I-10 and Congress. She both lives there and rents out the space for special events, but she talks more like a resident than a business owner. While she voices no complaints about the doctors and lawyers already working in El Presidio, she is alarmed when a family moves out of a house and a commercial interest moves in.
“The neighborhood association went into a legal battle with one person over this, and lost significantly,” she says. “The neighborhood association had bought a house and converted it back to a residence, and sold it to a family. That family was in it eight to 10 years, and then wanted to sell. Who offered the most? A doctor, who wanted to turn it back into offices. The neighborhood association said, ‘You can’t do that, we want it to stay a residence,’ but the owners had the right to do what they wanted. So who bought it? The doctor. Her money is as good as anybody’s, and business owners are willing to pay a lot more per square foot than homeowners. That’s why we’re losing the homes pretty drastically to businesses.”
Things aren’t quite that bad, according to Annette Campbell, past chair of the El Presidio Historic District Advisory Board. “We’re losing some but we’re gaining some,” she says. “Often the buildings that had been zoned commercial were used for residences for a period of time, and now they’ve gone back to commercial use. That’s one way we lose residences. But we also have a new infill project that should be completed sometime this year, and that’s going to add another six residential units.” She’s referring to the affordable housing going up where the north ends of Meyer and Court have been looped, with a new wall separating the parcel from St. Mary’s Road.
This is just the beginning of some significant residential infill projects in El Presidio. A few years ago, people were tearing down buildings to install parking lots, but exactly the opposite is about to happen at two El Presidio sites.
Pending approval by the mayor and council, the City of Tucson is going to make the parking lot north of the Tucson Water building available for residential development; the project is tentatively called Presidio Terrace. The city’s Department of Community Services will be the project manager, cooperating with several other city agencies. City Council approval may come this month, but downtown housing planner Ann Vargas won’t even try to predict when the project might be completed. “Downtown development is not like suburban development,” she says. “There are a lot more variables in terms of environment, design and the market.”
Even so, Vargas describes this project as “a wonderful opportunity. It’s adjacent to a historic district and incredible cultural assets, and it’s walkable to some of the landmark activities here. The neighborhood is very involved in the planning process and has been supportive.”
Another parking lot likely to be peeled away is Block 175, across the street from El Charro restaurant. Neighborhood association president Margaret Hardy would like to see a private developer create some affordable housing there. El Charro’s Carlotta Flores said in an interview published in the August Downtown Tucsonan that she’d prefer a mixed-use development at that spot.
“I think that it can be done in a really nice way,” she said. “I think that there can be some parking, some type of retail, and some housing. … I’m very verbal about saying that I don’t think it helps to have either high-end housing or low-income subsidized housing. Moderate or middle of the road is the best way to go. Also, I think that if housing is not done correctly, we can end up with a lot of housing no one lives in because I think there are other things we need to look at. We have no markets. If we are going to be a Downtown that’s going to have so many houses then we need amenities for people who live Downtown and open at the time where people can do those things. Downtown can’t be everything for everyone, but if it’s going to have this blend of people and houses then they need to think of amenities.”
More concrete than either of those projects is a job about to be undertaken by Michael Keith, who has developed several historic-style new homes in the barrios south of Downtown. He’s now about to build nine owner-occupied houses on the northeast corner of Franklin and Court. They’ll be in a variety of historic styles that can be found within a few blocks of the site, and will range from 1,880 to 2,150 square feet. The selling prices will be $325,000 to $380,000.
Keith intends to break ground by the end of October and hopes to complete the project in nine months to a year. But the actual finish date, he warns, is anybody’s guess. Because of zoning issues and the historical nature of the site, this is a more complex job than Keith has undertaken in the past.
“I wasn’t really prepared for the difficulty of getting approvals for this kind of a high-density residential development Downtown,” he says. “Everything is complicated because of the tightness of the site and the fact that we are still trying to apply suburban zoning to an urban development zone.
“This site will also require that we pay an archaeologist to stand there for every inch of footer that we dig, for every inch of electrical and plumbing line we put in, and for any other digging we do on this site. If the archaeologist finds anything that’s significant, then they have the power to stop the project, catalog that information, and then tell us when we can proceed again. I don’t even have an idea how much this can add to the cost of the project, in terms of salaries and time delays—you have to send all your subcontractors home until you get the green light.
“But despite all the frustration, I love participating in the renaissance down here. Everything that all of us have hoped would happen in the last 20 years finally looks like it’s going to happen in the next five years. This is going to be a very, very exciting place to live.”
The shops, restaurants, entertainment options and new houses people like Keith envision will, of course, lure more traffic to an already congested Downtown. This is of particular concern to El Presidio residents, some of whom complain that Granada is already a menace to the neighborhood.
“Granada is a feeder street into Downtown that physically divides the neighborhood, which is not what that street was intended to do,” says Campbell. “When they realigned Main as it crossed over St. Mary’s, they realigned it to continue on Granada. So you have a neighborhood street trying to accommodate commuter traffic for the Downtown offices.”
“Granada cuts through the middle of our neighborhood,” complains Hardy. “It’s very pedestrian-unfriendly and unsafe, whether you’re in a car or on foot.”
The neighborhood association advocates downgrading the street from four too-narrow lanes to one lane in either direction separated by either a turn lane or a median, and trying to enforce the widely ignored 25 mph speed limit. “There are so many accidents that a lot of people in the neighborhood take a different route to avoid making a left-hand turn off of Granada,” says Campbell.
Not every neighborhood denizen supports this idea. “I think it would contribute to more congestion and traffic Downtown, especially during rush hour,” says Mary Lou Focht, owner of Old Town Artisans. Frontage roads along I-10 could reduce the pressure—but only if motorists would use them, which is no sure thing. Thus, some business interests south of El Presidio hope the idea will be seen as impractical and die quietly.
No matter how people get into the area, they have to park somewhere, and that’s a source of frustration for the neighborhood’s business owners. Focht, of Old Town Artisans, points out that several parking garages and surface lots do lie within the district, but visitors either don’t know where to find them—that should change with the new Downtown signage that’s on its way—or they’re simply disinclined to venture into garages, which are rare elsewhere in town. “That’s just going have to change as Downtown develops,” she says.
Trouble is, El Presidio’s residential and mixed-use infill projects will eliminate or complicate parking at the water building/Tucson Museum of Art and El Charro. “We’re good at creating demand for parking, but not fulfilling that demand,” says Focht.
Focht doesn’t live in El Presidio, but she’s managed to make her block of retailers thrive over the course of several years. Although she’s a business owner, her interests and sympathies tend to coincide with the neighborhood association’s.
“For the housing development proposed on the museum lot, Lot 7, the suggestions of the neighborhood were that it be market-rate housing and that there be a variety of sizes of condominiums so that people who own a business and run it out of their residence would have a small, affordable space, and young professionals would have an affordable place to live, and there would be room for families with children, too. We’re all very excited about that project.
“I feel like we’re adequately supplied with businesses here,” she continues. “The neighborhood would not want a great deal more traffic, and I agree with them. They have a lovely neighborhood, and it should be kept that way. It’s beautiful, it’s quiet, it’s friendly, and simply put, if you use a little imagination it makes you feel that you’re in Tucson long ago.” 
