The present-day Phoenix doesn't pass up any opportunity to celebrate those roots. Phoenix, incidentally, was given its name because it sprang up like a Phoenix from an ancient Native American city.
Phoenix is also host to a number of museums, most notably the Heard Museum, with its extensive collection of Native American art and artifacts. North Mountain Park is on 7th Street and Peoria for the South Mountain Park, take Central Avenue south and Camelback Mountain is at the east end of Camelback Road, with trail entrances off Echo Canyon Parkway and Cholla Lane. Several of the mountains that surround the city feature popular hiking trails. You don't have to go far from downtown Phoenix to be in the heart of the rugged desert. And you will get great ideas of what to come back and see when the tour is over.
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He's a retired local newspaperman and TV journalist with an encyclopedic knowledge of the area and the tour is entertaining as well as extremely informative. The four-hour-plus tour is usually given by Chuck Hawley. The best way to see everything in the Greater Phoenix area and to hear a great history of the place is to take the Valley of the Sun Gray Line bus tour. By the way, ASU is now the largest university in the country in terms of student enrollment, with more than 57,000 students on campuses in Tempe, Mesa, and Phoenix. Many other parts of town, including Phoenix's Biltmore neighborhood and Tempe's Mill Avenue District, which borders the main campus of Arizona State University, are considered very LGBT-friendly, and offer an eclectic mix of restaurants, shops, and nightspots. There is no gay neighborhood in Phoenix but the greatest concentration of gay nightclubs and businesses can be found in central Phoenix, particularly in the two-mile wide area between 7th Avenue on the West and 7th Street to the East, which the locals sometimes call the "queer corridor." The Greater Phoenix area is banking on tourism to help support its growth and it is aggressively promoting its desert climate and wall-to-wall resorts as a hot destination for gay visitors.Īlmost all the gay bars and nightclubs in the Greater Phoenix area are in Phoenix, with the notable exception of the popular BS gay bar in Scottsdale. Its population is 1.4 million but when you add in the surrounding cities, including Scottsdale and Tempe, you are talking well over 3 million people. It is the fastest growing city after Las Vegas and at 514 square miles, has plenty of undeveloped land. But few would dispute that in a few years Phoenix will soon leave Philly in the tumbleweeds.
The city has jockeyed back and forth in recent years with Philadelphia for the ranking. State Representative Kyrsten Sinema, (D) is openly bisexual.ĭepending on whose numbers you use, Phoenix is either the nation's fifth or sixth largest city. Phoenix has an openly gay city council member, Tom Simplot, and Arizona boasts three openly gay state politicians, state Senators Ken Cheuvront (D) and Paula Aboud (D), and state Representative Robert Meza (D).
Congressman Jim Kolbe (R-Tucson) and the former mayor of Tempe, Neil Giuliano, also a Republican who is now president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. The state of Arizona has elected a number of openly gay politicians, including retiring U.S. While the blazing hot summers and the sunny dry winters are alien to most San Franciscans, the LGBT-positive political climate of the two cities is more similar than different.
Think the opposite and you will get a pretty good idea of what it's like in Phoenix most of the time. Think of a typical foggy day in San Francisco.