Two huge Celtic crosses keep silent watch over the landscape of Cochise County. One graces the Holy Trinity Monastery, a Benedictine community just south of St. David. The second is on a hillside overlooking Our Lady of the Sierras Shrine near Hereford. Both tower more than 75 feet over their surroundings, and both are the result of a journey Pat and Gerry Chouinard made to a shrine in Medjugorje, in what was then Yugoslavia. When they retired in 1995, the couple decided to build a similar shrine on their property near Hereford.
The Pima County Courthouse has been a Tucson landmark for eight decades, but it took a long time for the community to accept it because of a lingering controversy over the colors and style. But over the years, the Spanish Colonial Revival structure has become became a city icon.
The building, designed by Roy W. Place and built by Herbert Brown, is the third courthouse to occupy the site.
Most communities adorn their water towers and tanks with either the town’s name or first initial, but in Yuma they opted for something more artistic — a giant tryptich that spreads across the city’s three huge water tanks. The city council received gallons of flak when it approved the $50,000 project in 1999, but the criticism died down a year later when the work received an award from the Governor’s Pride in Arizona Committee.
The Diamondback Bridge in Tucson can probably lay claim to a variety of different titles — “the world’s longest rattlesnake,” “the world’s largest rattlesnake” and even “the world’s most artistic use of steel floor grating.” The pedestrian bridge is 300 feet long, 16 feet high, 16 feet wide, and it spans Broadway, one of the city’s major traffic arterials. It’s the creation of Tucson artist Simon Donovan, who observed that “the proportion of the bridge seemed to be perfect for depicting a large snake.” And so he made one.
