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.

Q: If Tucson and Phoenix are both in the desert, why is it always just a little bit cooler in Tucson than it is in the Valley?

A: Tucson is usually a little bit cooler than Phoenix because it is a little bit higher up. You may not actually have a sense of ascending when you drive there because you are lulled into a state of semiconsciousness because it is the most boring drive in the world.

Q: What is the meaning of the stars with the names of old celebrities in them on the sidewalk at the northwest corner of Central Avenue and Monroe Street?

A: This was a deeply disturbing question, not because of the stars themselves, but because we had to get up off our pert little butt and actually walk over there and check it out.

And it occurred to us that we had trod that very stretch of sidewalk hundreds of times and never noticed the stars before.

The stars—eight of them—are a reflection of the past glory of the Hotel San Carlos, 202 N. Central Ave., which is still a very nice hotel, but at one time was Phoenix’s premier hostelry.

And when Hollywood stars were in town, that’s where they stayed. After all, it offered elevators and “automatic cooled air,” a kind of forerunner of air-conditioning, and ice-water spigots in the rooms.