Longtime residents differ on prospect of water flowing in portion of Santa Cruz

Growing up in downtown Tucson and the south side, Bertha Sanchez was an irregular visitor to the Santa Cruz River in the days that it carried water. Matt Perri, who grew up in Menlo Park west of the river, saw it several times a week.

Today, their reactions to the prospect of water running downriver again are also different, with Sanchez receptive to the idea and Perri turned off by it.

Sanchez, born in 1932, spent her childhood on Alameda Street downtown, and moved with her family to the south side at age 14. She remembers crossing over the river as a child with her family, seeing it as attractive and fun to look at: “Sometimes it would be slow-running, all of a sudden it would be fast-running, but I never went in. I guess I was afraid of the water.”

Living on the south side in the 1940s and ’50s, she recalled, “My dad had an old car; he would take us just to go visit and see if there was any water. Sometimes there was water. Sometimes there wasn’t.”

She also has a vivid memory of the river from October 1983, when the river’s worst flood in modern history delayed her grandaughter’s baptism for two days. By then she was living in Menlo, and her daughter and her 4-month-old granddaughter were living on the southeast side, planning to drive on Oct. 1 to have the child baptized at St. Margaret’s Catholic Church on Grande Avenue. But the river was overflowing at Congress Street and they couldn’t get over via the bridge. So they had to come two days later after the floodwaters receded.

Perri, like Sanchez now in his 80s, moved to Menlo in 1946 with his family when he was 9, and when “it was pretty much in the country at the time,” he recalled.

When Perri was 12, he would walk his family’s two goats — one of each sex — down to the river a few times a week to feed off its low-lying grasses, and occasionally saw water there, he said.

“When the river flowed; it flowed for a couple of days. It would be quite an event. People would go out and have picnics down there. They would bring their families.

“Since there was no river bank, it would flow without any boundaries. We would see big waves of water flow. You could hear the frogs at night.”

He also remembers walking to the river, seeing ponds and occasionally watching ducks fly by. He had a slingshot rifle, and he would do target practice down there, shooting at “birds, rabbits, anything.”

Perri, now a real estate broker, left Tucson in 1961 and returned in 1980. That year, he watched city work crews start dredging, digging and grading the river to line it with soil cement to protect its banks from erosion.

Its purpose was flood control to make possible the future development of the long-planned, long-delayed Rio Nuevo west-side redevelopment project, a project that Bertha Sanchez dismisses as “Rio Nada, because there’s really nothing there (on the west side).”

“They were cutting down the trees. I saw them up in the trees, with chainsaw; cutting branches and stumps that would hit the ground, hit sandy bottom,” recalled Perri, who had unsuccessfully fought the soil cement project when proposed. “It would break my heart. I went berserk challenging them to no avail, seeing them cut all these cottonwood trees.”

He acknowledged the cement lining probably saved his neighborhood from flooding in the same October 1983 deluge that delayed Sanchez’s granddaughter’s baptism. But he doesn’t think the city has made the most of the river as a recreational opportunity.

“A river is the heart of any city. Usually rivers are enjoyed and appreciated and without channeling them, like they did here,” he said. “It still is an eyesore. The city, with all the money and time, it has never done anything to improve the river scene at all.”

Today, Sanchez doesn’t miss the river water, since she never spent much time in it. But she’s open to the idea of releasing reclaimed water, saying, “Everything is so dry in that area. I’d probably go and stick my feet in there now.”

Perri dismisses the city’s plan as tokenism.

“It’s not a very sincere gesture. The excess water that’s already being dumped upriver, they want to bring it down over here, to try to make this eyesore a little bit wetter or greener,” he said. “It’s sad, a lost opportunity. It doesn’t look like a river anymore; it looks like a big trench, just a big ditch that goes through the neighborhood.”