For the second time in three days, a writer for a big-city paper has found a hidden gem in this oft-ignored city.
On Thursday, Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune praised Tucson's KXCI community radio station while in the same breath trashing most Chicago terrestrial radio as boring, predictable and corporatized.
Friday, Guy Trebay of the New York Times raised the ante on the lofty rhetoric, posting a piece headlined: "An unsung architectural oasis," with a subhed saying, "One of the city’s better-kept secrets is how often you can find significant examples of mid-20th century architecture."
Trebay is a regular visitor to the February gem show--it was during his detours from that event where his admiration of mid-century architectural Tucson was first nurtured.
His long but highly entertaining piece goes on to paint this city as an outpost of architectural treasures found in such unlikely places as a Chase Bank Building. Hardly ignoring the city's rougher edges, he describes Tucson as follows:
"It is a dusty outpost on the fringes of the Sonoran Desert, a cyclical boomtown that suffered badly in the financial crash of 2008 and that, even beforehand, had in many ways seen better days."
But he also says:
"It is also a city whose loopy retail landscape skews heavily toward yoga studios, thrift shops and vape stores. And one of the city’s better-kept secrets is how often these places occupy structures that could easily be counted among the more significant examples of mid-20th century architecture in the country. That is, if anyone were bothering to look."
Mr. Trebay, an alumnus of the Village Voice's salad days, has long been one of New York's and the country's finer feature writers, a practitioner of an increasingly unappreciated art. Read his assessment of mid-century Tucson architecture here.
