48 Fun Facts About Phoenix, Arizona

Phoenix is the county seat of which Arizona county?

Maricopa County was carved out of Yavapai County in 1871, when Phoenix was a farming settlement only a few years old, and the young town became its seat.

Where did Phoenix rank among US cities by population at the 2020 census?

Fifth, after trading places with Philadelphia: Phoenix slipped to sixth in the 2010 census, then edged back ahead in 2020 by fewer than 5,000 residents.

Phoenix lies in the northern reaches of which desert?

Sonoran Desert is the only place the saguaro cactus grows wild, because the giant cactus can't survive long freezes; Phoenix sits near the desert's northern edge.

Which mountain town lost the Arizona territorial capital to Phoenix for good in 1889?

Prescott had already lost the capital to Tucson once and won it back before the legislature voted in 1889 to move it to Phoenix for good.

Which director premiered his first feature film in Phoenix?

Steven Spielberg was 17 when his father rented a Phoenix theatre for one night in 1964 to show Firelight, a film that cost about $500 to make; ticket sales left a profit of one dollar.

Which Confederate veteran founded an irrigation and canal company near Phoenix in 1867?

Jack Swilling, prospecting at Wickenburg, saw the valley could feed the mining camps; the ex-Confederate wanted to call the settlement Stonewall, after the general, but another name won.

Which ancient people dug roughly 135 miles of irrigation canals in the Phoenix area?

Hohokam is an O'odham word usually translated as "those who have gone": the farmers had left centuries before the 1860s settlers cleared out their old canals and founded Phoenix.

Cotton, cattle, citrus and climate were four of Arizona's Five C's; what was the other?

Copper earned the star at the centre of the Arizona state flag: the state has long mined more of the metal than any other in the country.

What nickname for the Phoenix area began as a 1930s tourism slogan?

The Valley of the Sun was coined in the 1930s by a local advertising agency working for the Chamber of Commerce, to sell winter visitors on a desert valley until then named after its river.

Which waterway runs westward through Phoenix, though its bed is often dry?

Salt River water is held back by a chain of dams and diverted into canals east of the city, so the bed through Phoenix usually runs dry except after heavy storms.

Arizona became a state, with Phoenix as capital, on which holiday in 1912?

Valentine's Day 1912 ended a long wait: President Taft had vetoed statehood over a clause letting voters recall judges, so Arizona cut it, joined the Union, and restored it later that year.

Which Phoenix airport did the city buy in 1935?

Sky Harbor was nicknamed The Farm when the city bought it in 1935, because of its isolated, rural setting.

Phoenix's record 122 °F heat did what at its airport in 1990?

Grounded flights: the hot, thin air cut lift so much that airlines halted takeoffs, and most flew again later that afternoon once the temperature slipped back under 120 °F.

Which company brought high-tech industry to Phoenix in the late 1940s with a military electronics laboratory?

Motorola sent research chief Daniel Noble to set up a Phoenix electronics laboratory after the war, and it grew into the company's semiconductor division, the start of the valley's chip industry.

Ernesto Miranda's 1963 arrest by Phoenix police led to which famous police routine?

Reading suspects their rights dates from 1966, when the Supreme Court threw out Miranda's confession; Arizona retried him without it and he was convicted again.

Which name did Phoenix's Piestewa Peak carry before it was renamed for a soldier killed in Iraq in 2003?

Squaw Peak was renamed by the state board weeks after Lori Piestewa was killed in Iraq in 2003; the federal naming board, which normally waits five years after a death, followed in 2008.

Which Phoenix resident became the first woman on the US Supreme Court in 1981?

Sandra Day O'Connor struggled to find a law firm that would hire a woman as an attorney after Stanford, so she started out working for a California county attorney for no pay.

Phoenix and most of Arizona skip daylight saving time; which part of the state does change its clocks?

The Navajo Nation changes its clocks because it stretches into Utah and New Mexico, which do; the Hopi Reservation it surrounds stays on Arizona time all year.

Which of these is one of Phoenix's 15 urban villages?

Maryvale began in the 1950s as developer John F. Long's planned community of affordable homes, which he named after his wife, Mary; Scottsdale, Glendale and Chandler are separate cities.

Which small African parrot, descended from escaped pets, now lives wild in flocks across Greater Phoenix?

Rosy-faced lovebird pairs nest under the dead fronds of untrimmed palms or in holes in tall cacti. On the hottest days flocks crowd around air-conditioning vents to keep cool.

The Arizona Diamondbacks play at which downtown ballpark, famous for its outfield pool?

Chase Field opened in 1998 with a retractable roof and air conditioning to beat the desert heat. Its pool sits beyond the right-centre fence, and the Cubs' Mark Grace hit the first home run into it that May.

Which team did the Diamondbacks beat in the 2001 World Series?

New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera led Game 7 in the ninth until Luis Gonzalez's bloop single won it. Arizona, in only its fourth season, became the fastest expansion team to win a World Series.

The Arizona Cardinals moved to Phoenix in 1988 from which city?

St. Louis was the club's second home after Chicago, where a wartime shortage of players forced it to merge with the Pittsburgh Steelers for the 1944 season as Card-Pitt.

Which Tempe venue hosted Super Bowl XXX in 1996?

Sun Devil Stadium was first awarded the 1993 Super Bowl, but the NFL moved that game to California after Arizona voters rejected a Martin Luther King holiday; their approval in 1992 brought this one to Tempe.

Which guard played all 20 of her WNBA seasons for the Phoenix Mercury?

Diana Taurasi won all three of the Mercury's titles by her 2025 retirement, and sat out only one summer: in 2015 her Russian club paid her to skip the WNBA season and rest.

The Coyotes began play in 1996 after which NHL team moved to Phoenix?

Winnipeg Jets money troubles sent the Canadian club to the desert in 1996. In 2024 the Coyotes' hockey assets were sold to create a new NHL team in Utah, leaving Arizona without one.

Which Phoenix preserve, at over 16,000 acres, is one of America's largest city-run parks?

South Mountain Park began as a bargain: in 1924 the city bought its first 13,000 acres for $17,000, a little over a dollar an acre.

Papago Park is home to the Phoenix Zoo and which attraction opened in 1939?

Desert Botanical Garden grew from a campaign by Swedish botanist Gustaf Starck, who found allies by posting a sign reading "Save the desert". It now shows more than 50,000 plants.

The Phoenix Art Museum's architect Alden B. Dow was a student of which famous figure?

Frank Lloyd Wright taught Dow at his Taliesin studio in Wisconsin in the summer of 1933. Wright later built his own winter home and studio, Taliesin West, in nearby Scottsdale.

Barry Goldwater gave the Heard Museum 437 of which carved figures?

Hopi kachina dolls began as gifts, not collectibles: they are carved for girls and presented at ceremonies, where they teach each child the spirit beings the dolls portray.

The 1953 Phoenix McDonald's franchise was the first location to feature what?

The golden arches first rose at Neil Fox's Phoenix stand, the chain's first franchise, which opened in 1953. Ray Kroc joined the business a year later and bought the McDonald brothers out in 1961.

Who was elected Phoenix's first female mayor in 1975?

The city has trended Democratic in recent years, though Hispanic voters shifted right in 2024.

How was Phoenix reporter Don Bolles murdered in 1976?

A car bomb went off under the Arizona Republic reporter's car outside a Phoenix hotel, where he had gone to meet an informant. Reporters from across the country then came to Arizona to finish his work.

Which Hitchcock film's opening sequence is set in Phoenix?

Psycho opens on the Phoenix skyline before the camera slips through a hotel window. Marion Crane, a secretary in the city, soon flees with $40,000 of her employer's money.

Which sitcom, on air from 1976 to 1985, was set in a Phoenix diner and made "Kiss my grits!" a catchphrase?

Alice followed a widowed singer who took a job at Mel's Diner after her car broke down in Phoenix. The catchphrase belonged to Flo, her sharp-tongued fellow waitress.

Which national pet-supplies chain has its headquarters in Phoenix?

PetSmart opened its first two stores in the Phoenix area in 1987 as PetFood Warehouse, selling pet food in bulk at discount prices.

The "Phoenix Lights" of March 1997 rank among America's most famous examples of what?

UFO sightings were reported by thousands who watched lights cross the valley that night. Governor Fife Symington mocked them with an aide in an alien costume, then said in 2007 he had seen the craft himself.

Fifteen Major League Baseball teams hold spring training around Phoenix each year in which league?

Cactus League ballparks sit so close together that fans can watch half of baseball's 30 teams without a long drive. The other 15 clubs train in Florida's Grapefruit League.

What name do Phoenix forecasters give the towering walls of dust that sweep over the city during summer storms?

Haboob was borrowed from the name for the violent dust storms of Sudan. Around Phoenix the wall rises when cold air rushing out of a summer thunderstorm hits the ground and scoops up desert dust.

Tom Barnum won which Phoenix-area office unopposed in 1871 after his two rivals had a shootout?

County sheriff was the job all three men wanted. Candidates John Chenowth and Jim Favorite shot it out during the campaign: Favorite was killed and Chenowth withdrew, leaving Barnum alone on the ballot.

Which president issued a land patent for the site of Phoenix in 1874?

Ulysses S. Grant issued the patent to John Alsap, the county's probate judge. Seven years later, when Phoenix became a city, voters made the same man its first mayor.

Which explorer, nicknamed the Pathfinder, signed the 1881 bill making Phoenix a city as Arizona's territorial governor?

John C. Fremont had been a Gold Rush multimillionaire and the Republican Party's first presidential candidate, but he lost his fortune and took the territorial governor's job in 1878.

Which president's name is on the dam east of Phoenix that he dedicated in person in 1911?

Theodore Roosevelt, two years out of office, told the crowd that Western reclamation ranked with the Panama Canal among his achievements. The dam grew out of the 1902 irrigation law he had signed.

Which Phoenix Suns point guard was named the NBA's Most Valuable Player in both 2005 and 2006?

Steve Nash was drafted by Phoenix in 1996 and traded to Dallas two years later. He came back as a free agent in 2004 and won the award in each of his first two seasons back.

In 1913 Phoenix became one of the first US cities to adopt which form of government?

Council-manager government won a special election in October 1913 by nearly two to one: voters chose to let a hired manager, not elected politicians, run the city's departments day to day.

Which Phoenix-area community did builder Del Webb open in 1960 as a town designed for retirees?

Sun City had a small forerunner next door: Youngtown opened to retirees in 1954, and the national attention it drew led Del Webb to try the idea on a far bigger scale.

Which city north of low-lying Phoenix sits almost 7,000 feet above sea level?

Flagstaff stands nearly 6,000 feet higher than Phoenix, which lies at about 1,100 feet, so a drive of under 150 miles swaps desert heat for pine forest, a ski resort and heavy winter snow.

Which desert antelope, wiped out in the wild by 1972, was saved by a breeding herd started at the Phoenix Zoo?

Arabian oryx numbered just nine at the Phoenix Zoo when its herd began in the early 1960s. Their descendants stocked other zoos, and in the early 1980s captive-bred animals were released in Oman.