Turquoise and Turboprops

This chapter examines how manufacturing passed agriculture as the Phoenix's largest economic sector. By 1960, manufacturing employed thirty thousand people and generated income of $435 million in Phoenix, compared to fewer than one thousand employees and income of $5 million twenty years earlier. It also remade the landscape. In Phoenix's industrial boom, the “clean” factories of companies located operations outside of Phoenix's traditional industrial areas south of downtown, creating a landscape labeled “industrial garden”—a booster dreamscape in which “neighborhoods and factories, workers and managers, homes and highways were to coexist in a delicate balance.” The demand of “clean” industries for ever increasing amounts of electricity grew at double-digit rates annually from 1950 to 1965. This demand represented not only the manifestations of a new industrial landscape, it also reflected the increasing political power of Phoenix's boosters and others like them across the West within the postwar American political economy.