Bill Johnson's Big Apple made Phoenix unique

This week, Bill Johnson's Big Apple Restaurant closed to make way for a parking lot. The land and building have been purchased by Gateway Community College , and some time in the next weeks or months, one of the last remaining landmarks in Phoenix will be razed in the name of progress.

For decades, the restaurant proudly presided over Van Buren Street, the first place most people saw when they drove into Phoenix. In those days the Van Buren was not a place of drugs and prostitutes, but the tourist center of Phoenix, populated by small motels called "tourist courts."

These small, family owned hotels ran the length of Van Buren Street and, with their swimming pools and air conditioning, were the forerunners of today's destination resorts. It was the tourist court that housed the families vacationing in Phoenix or provided a great place to stay while a new home was found. And there, in the middle of the Phoenix tourist mecca, was Bill Johnson's, with its iconic sign beaconing "Let's Eat!"

Built in it's distinctive western style, and sporting worn wooden floors dusted with sawdust, western memorabilia hanging from the ceilings and covering the walls, and waitresses wearing six guns on their hips, Bill Johnson's epitomized the old west, and Phoenix. For the past 59 years, when you drove past the distinctive Longhorn sign, you knew you were in Phoenix.

Once the auction house and bull dozers finish their jobs, more than a piece of history will be lost, Phoenix will lose a big part of it's identity. And why? To build another parking lot.

In November 1962, my family was one of many who rolled into Phoenix and made a temporary home at one of the tourist courts while my father found a job and my mother found us a house.

I remember walking into the The Big Apple on Sunday mornings with my parents and brothers and sisters and standing close to the fire in the pot bellied stoves in the lobby while we waited for our turn at a table. I was awed by the paintings of cowboys and cattle and Indians on the walls and fascinated by the waitresses' guns. This was proof positive I wasn't in Ohio anymore.

And I am not the only one. Tens of thousands of people have seen this restaurant as the very face of Phoenix — of the "Old West." It was a destination for locals to bring their out-of-town guests to give them a taste of the West. When I mentioned the closing to some of my previous visitors, friends from Maine to the Netherlands, one and all expressed sadness and dismay that without The Big Apple, Phoenix would be pretty much like any other town in America.

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To me, the big question here is why Phoenix is not stepping up to declare Bill Johnson's Big Apple restaurant a historic building? Why, if Gateway Community College is in need of additional parking they simply don't build a parking structure and leave Arizona history and Phoenix's identity intact?

What is really more important to our future, a few more parking spaces or preserving a part of Arizona's past for future generations?

Sharon Mathers is a Realtor and a Phoenix resident.