Paula, an Arizona Oddities reader, recently inquired about the history and creation of Roosevelt Dam. While that’s quite a long story with several sides, we’ve done our best to summarize a few key points in a short blog post.

Whenever I have questions like this about Arizona history, I go to Arizona Oddities contributor and all-around-AZ-expert Marshall Trimble. I asked him for the story behind Roosevelt Dam, and this is what he told me:

Roosevelt Dam was the first major Reclamation Project in the West and was probably the most significant event in the entire history of the Salt River Valley because it provided a reservoir of life-giving water that would make it possible for people to live here. Up until then, the settlers would have to leave during times of drought.

There’s some confusion about the World’s Tallest Fountain. What used to be the World’s Tallest Fountain in Fountain Hills has been usurped by the Gateway Geyser in East St. Louis, Illinois, but the Arizona gusher is still the World’s Tallest Fountain sometimes. The Illinois fountain shots a geyser 627 feet into the air, the best the one in Arizona can do is 560 feet, when operating at full capacity.

Q: Why does Phoenix seem to have two downtowns — one “downtown” and then another grouping of high-rises farther north along Central Avenue?

A: Because many years ago, the city fathers and mothers thought big.

Unfortunately, they also thought wrong, or at least incorrectly.

The result is today we have a downtown downtown and downtown uptown, although we know of people who think of anything south of Northern Avenue as being practically the inner city.

According to Dave Reichert, head of the Phoenix Planning Department, back in the 1960s, when we only had one downtown and it was downtown, the city’s leaders had dreams of grandeur.

Q: How did Sky Harbor International Airport get its name?

A: We take up this question with some reluctance because the entire staff and faculty of Valley 101 has a deep abhorrence of airports, which extends to even writing about them. At the same time, however, we always thought Sky Harbor was a cool name, in a 1950-ish, let’s-go-out-to-the-airport-and-watch-the-planes-land kind of way.

Actually, the name Sky Harbor goes back to 1929, a fact we found in Desert Wings, a history of the airport written by Michael Jones, a city Aviation Department employee.