As the nation marked its 250th anniversary this Independence Day, a short drive through the core of Phoenix prompts a question that many residents and visitors notice: why do so many streets in the downtown grid bear the names of U.S. presidents? The pattern of presidential names is not accidental, officials say; it grew out of deliberate choices made during Arizona’s years as a U.S. territory and the earliest days of Phoenix’s development.
City Historian Steve Schumacher traces the practice to a time when Phoenix leaders were intent on demonstrating the community’s American identity and making their town legible to newcomers and to federal officials. “When you dig into the history, you realize some of the older communities around the country went ahead and did that,” Schumacher said, describing how other cities had already named main downtown thoroughfares for presidents and Phoenix adopted a similar approach. Naming streets after presidents, he said, was an expression of civic pride and part of a broader effort to present Phoenix as an unquestionably American place.
Arizona’s long stretch as a U.S. territory factored into the decisions, Schumacher added. The territory status lasted three decades before statehood, and during that period local leaders pursued obvious, tangible ways to promote their community to the federal government and to settlers. “One of the things that people need to remember is Arizona was a territory for 30 years before it became a state, so anything and everything that we could do to sell ourselves to the federal government, they were probably going to do,” Schumacher said. That desire to be noticed and to claim a place in the national story helps explain why so many presidential names clustered in the city’s central street grid.
The original city plan for the central core was more orderly than the map looks today. Early planners set out to name streets in a sequence tied to presidents, a design meant in part to make navigation of the young business district straightforward. “It started off in a certain order. Washington has always been the main street, that was the center of town, and that was planned to be the business district,” Schumacher said. That sense of an ordered sequence did not hold perfectly; as additional presidents took office and local preferences shifted, some names were never added and the intended pattern unraveled. Schumacher pointed to a few examples that illustrate how the scheme became uneven: “There was a bunch of presidents: Grover Cleveland, Rutherford B. Hayes, Johnson, he was impeached, so they decided not to put him in there, so it just got messy real quickly.”
Washington Street sign above a downtown Phoenix intersection, with palm-lined sidewalks and storefronts — illustrating one of the president-named streets in the city.
One notable exception to the earliest wave of names is Roosevelt Street. Schumacher explains that the choice to place Theodore Roosevelt’s name north of many of the other presidential streets came later and reflected Roosevelt’s specific connections to the region. Roosevelt was a prominent supporter of projects that mattered to Arizona, most notably the construction of the Roosevelt Dam, and he made repeated visits to the territory. “He was always a big supporter of Phoenix, and Arizona, as a territory he made numerous trips here definitely pushed the [Roosevelt] damn idea,” Schumacher said. Schumacher also invoked local ties between Roosevelt and influential Phoenix figures, noting Roosevelt’s friendship with Dwight Heard and the local institution-building associated with the Heard family. “He was good friends with Dwight Heard. He and his wife built the Heard Museum and the Heard building downtown,” Schumacher said.
Today, that patch of central Phoenix contains a total of 17 streets named for U.S. presidents. Reading from north to south, the roster of presidential street names in the downtown grid is: Roosevelt Street (Theodore Roosevelt, 26th), Garfield Street (James Garfield, 20th), McKinley Street (William McKinley, 25th), Pierce Street (Franklin Pierce, 14th), Fillmore Street (Millard Fillmore, 13th), Taylor Street (Zachary Taylor, 12th), Polk Street (James K. Polk, 11th), Van Buren Street (Martin Van Buren, eighth), Monroe Street (James Monroe, fifth), Adams Street (John Adams, second), Washington Street (George Washington, first), Jefferson Street (Thomas Jefferson, third), Madison Street (James Madison, fourth), Jackson Street (Andrew Jackson, seventh), Harrison Street (William Henry Harrison, ninth), Buchanan Street (James Buchanan, 15th), Lincoln Street (Abraham Lincoln, 16th), and Grant Street (Ulysses S. Grant, 18th).
Schumacher said he hopes the presence of presidential names in the downtown grid prompts curiosity about the city’s early years and the political environment of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He framed the naming choices as part of a broader historical arc in which the presidents and national leaders of the era recognized the potential of Arizona and Phoenix even before statehood. “I think even the main thing is that even though our involvement with Presidents really go back to Taft, and even though we're relatively young city compared to Boston, Chicago, New York, our history is very, very colorful,” Schumacher said. “The presidents of the United States up until we became a state recognized the opportunity that we had in Arizona and Phoenix.”
The cluster of presidential names that persists in central Phoenix is thus the product of intentional civic design, territorial-era ambitions and later adjustments tied to local relationships and projects. For residents and visitors navigating the downtown grid today, those names remain visible markers of the city's formative decades and of the municipal choices made as Phoenix moved from frontier settlement toward its modern identity.
According to the City of Phoenix's official history page, the presidential naming originated with the October 20, 1870 townsite selection. Capt. William A. Hancock laid out the grid with Washington Street centered, Adams immediately to the north and Jefferson to the south, alternating outward in that pattern until later changes; north-south roads originally carried Native American names before shifting to the current numbered system of streets east of Central and avenues to the west.
The Roosevelt Dam that helped cement Theodore Roosevelt’s ties to the region was authorized under the federal Reclamation program and was formally dedicated by Roosevelt on March 18, 1911. (nps.gov)
The dam began supplying electricity to Phoenix before its 1911 dedication—the first commercial power from the project reached the city by September 30, 1909, and was used to operate the new streetcar system. (asce.org)
Arizona became the 48th state on February 14, 1912, less than a year after the Roosevelt Dam dedication, a timing that helps explain the territorial-era urgency to attract federal projects and attention. (en.wikipedia.org)
A replat of Phoenix’s original townsite in 1895 was the first official map to show numbered streets and avenues starting from Central Avenue, which formalized the shift away from earlier named north–south streets. (en.wikipedia.org)
Early plats show many north–south streets originally carried Indigenous names—examples recorded include Yavapai, Hualpai, Cocopa, Papago and Pima—before the later transition to numbered streets. (kjzz.org)