Once dubbed America’s “ugliest street” by Life magazine is Speedway Boulevard looking east from Alvernon Way in 2012.

 A.E. Araiza / Arizona Daily Star

“The essence of Speedway never really changes, does it?” local author Leo W. Banks said in a 2020 interview.

“Kids still cruise and go too fast and all the rest. Except now they’re zipping past computer stores and CBD joints. But it’s still stuck in the 1950s, Happy Days and all that. I doubt it will ever be different.

“I think Speedway has become more of a Tucson icon than Sabino Canyon, Old Main, Mount Lemmon, Gates Pass or the Catalinas. It might even be up there with the saguaro. I still today refer to it as a ‘neon kingdom.’”

In 1983, Banks had written a history of Speedway in the Arizona Daily Star, noting that on Saturday nights in the 1950s, college students drove it east to Wilmot Road for beer bashes in the desert, dancing in the arroyo now occupied by Monterey Village Shopping Center.

And yet, while Speedway’s teen-enticing essence and nostalgic character may endure — what the headline on Banks’ ’83 story called “Tucson’s lane for the fast life” — there were many attempts to change the street’s appearance over the decades, until certain improvements finally did take hold.

Seven years after a July 1970 national magazine article calling Speedway the nation’s “ugliest” street, the City Council finally decided to do something about the sign code.

That year, Mark Kimble, a Tucson Daily Citizen writer, wrote that the code allowed “huge, loosely regulated signs to be placed almost anywhere along both sides of the street.”

The City Council spent the next two years debating what should be done, with Councilman George Miller (namesake of the Miller-Golf Links Library) leading the way for a new sign code.

In the end, Mayor Lew Murphy (namesake of the Murphy-Wilmot Library) and Councilman Chuck Ford (namesake of Chuck Ford Lakeside Park) unsuccessfully opposed it.

In February 1980, the council passed a new code that was more restrictive in some ways and less restrictive in others, likely to please both community beautification activists on one side and small businessmen and women on the other side.

For example, it allowed billboards to be bigger than before, but the size of the billboards determined how close they could be to each other. The larger the billboards, the farther apart they had to be. This helped fix the issue of some signs on Speedway being too close together, but added bigger signs to the street. One step forward, two steps back.

The following year, Thom Walker, a Citizen writer, scribed, “The street once dubbed ‘the ugliest street in the world’ is today one of the angriest streets in Tucson.” The comment was related to a city proposal that would ban all left turns along parts of East Speedway, which expectedly brought outcries from small businesses and appears to have gone nowhere.

In 1985, five years after the new sign code took effect, one reader wrote to the Arizona Daily Star to complain: “The present standards used to regulate size, content and location of billboards in Tucson are completely inadequate, given the fact that any placement is as desirable as a toxic waste dump. In the past six months, the rash of enormous, garish and brilliantly lit billboards that has erupted on Speedway makes me itch to move from my neighborhood, which is within spitting distance.”

Around the same time, voters passed a sign code referendum that banned all new billboards within Tucson city limits, which covered most, if not all, of Speedway.

That same year, Councilman Tom Volgy (namesake of the Thomas Volgy Underpass at Speedway and Warren Avenue) created the Community Resource Bank, a nonprofit citizens organization meant to provide “additional assistance — beyond the city’s resources — to help with economic development, quality of life issues, etc.”

In 1986, the Community Resource Bank sponsored a design competition aimed at improving Speedway’s appearance, with the winner taking home $500. The winning plan by the Pima County Urban Design Commission Streets Subcommittee included “distinctive trees at intersections, red-painted pedestrian crosswalks and the closing of side streets for parks and parking ... coordinated bus stops and crosswalks, distinctive signs, the use of public and private art on street medians, landscaping at wash crossings and distinctive shopping centers.”

It’s believed that only the landscaping part — if anything — of the plan was ever carried out.

In February 1990, the Los Angeles Times ran a story about a new arts festival in Tucson christened the “Festival in the Sun.” The article described the city this way: “Much of Tucson is generic suburb — the San Fernando Valley with cactus. Home of Speedway Boulevard, long and widely touted as ‘the ugliest street in America.’”

It seems possible, even likely, that this mention — the umpteenth of that moniker — in such a widely read newspaper finally led city fathers to action, as this was the year a huge improvement project began on the boulevard, utilizing money that had been earmarked six years earlier.

In 1994, Speedway faced its first real threat to its title. Johnson-Brittian & Associates Inc., designers of a renovation of the thoroughfare from Tucson Boulevard to Alvernon Way, were awarded a commendation from the Arizona Society of Professional Engineers for its beauty.

“Johnson-Brittian apparently feels no shame,” wrote Paul Allen, a Citizen columnist, tongue in cheek, “at having spoiled Speedway’s image of ugliness and happily accepted the Outstanding Engineering Project of the Year award at the Society’s annual meeting.”

Speedway’s swan song as the ugliest came soon after when city officials gathered at El Rancho Center, 3360 E. Speedway, for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the end of a four-year, $50 million widening and beautification project from Euclid Avenue to Alvernon Way.

“It’s the biggest locally funded and administrated street-widening project Tucson has ever had,” said Benny J. Young, director of transportation for the city. “No federal funds were spent. The project was funded by local bond money and state gasoline taxes.”

The thoroughfare was expanded to six lanes, with landscaped medians; dual left-turn lanes at Country Club Road and at Alvernon Way; bicycle lanes; extra-wide sidewalks with shade trees; improved bus shelters; and bus pull-through lanes.

Several of the billboards that dominated the strip were eliminated, but the project managed to save a few historical homes, including the Prof. G.E.P. Smith house and the Cannon/Douglass abode, named for botanist William Cannon and tree-ring expert Andrew Douglass.

City officials were so proud of the improvements to the route, according to a Star article, that they contacted Life magazine to inform the editors.

While our ugly duckling never became a beautiful swan as happens in fairy tales, Speedway still reigns as the Queen of Tucson Streets.

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Special thanks to Leo W. Banks, author of Champagne Cowboys.

David Leighton is a historian and author of “The History of the Hughes Missile Plant in Tucson, 1947-1960.” He has been featured on PBS, ABC, the Travel Channel, various radio shows, and his work has appeared in Arizona Highways. He named two streets in honor of pioneers Federico and Lupe Ronstadt. If you have a street to suggest or a story to share, email azjournalist21@gmail.com