El Amor Yo No Sabia
(by Hugo Connor)
The Irish Cultural Center near Central Ave. / Portland St.
Local world music ensemble performing in the Irish Cultural Center’s Great Hall.
The Irish Cultural Center near Central Ave. / Portland St.
Local world music ensemble performing in the Irish Cultural Center’s Great Hall.
Near Central Ave. and Adams St. is the Heard Building, the original home of The Arizona Republic, the local newspaper published by Dwight B. Heard, a man from Massachusetts who had moved to Arizona after developing a lung condition while working in Chicago and became a successful entrepreneur in ranching and the news business. This building was the first high-rise (higher than 75 ft.) in Phoenix and can also be spotted in Psycho. Heard’s former mansion is located about two miles north near Central Ave. and Monte Vista Rd. What remains of it has been incorporated into the museum of indigenous art that Heard’s wife, Maie, opened up next door to their home just a few months after Dwight’s death in 1929. Just the prior year, Heard had seen the completion of his Hotel San Carlos along Central Ave. at Monroe St. The stars embedded in the sidewalk outside marked the hotel’s 65th anniversary in 1993, and they name celebrity guests from throughout its history, including Marilyn Monroe and Gene Autry. It often competed with the local landmark Westward Ho, which also opened in 1928 and hosted its own list of celebrities, including John F. Kennedy. The antenna atop the Ho was added in 1949 to broadcast Phoenix’s first TV station. The Ho then closed in 1980, and the building was converted into subsidized housing for seniors and individuals with disabilities. It now contains apartments serving the same population, an Arizona State University research center for behavioral health, and a community clinic serving residents. A relatively large community lives outside in the area around the Westward Ho and in nearby Civic Space Park, the location of the historic Post Office—built from 1932-1936 as part of a federal works project in the middle of the Great Depression. Most of these historic buildings are already surrounded by newer, shinier ones. There used to be a parking lot where a pair of taco trucks would set up shop across from a bar called the Grand. One of them served the best quesabirria tacos ever to be tasted by human tongues, but in 2023 the lot was closed off for the construction of a new residential tower. It’s not the first time that developers have capitalized on the allure of this land by destroying the very things that give Phoenix its unique character, pushing away the people who already reside here in the process. A dozen more high rises are under construction in Downtown Phoenix at any given moment, but there is no affordable space for many local entrepreneurs, and no space for the hundreds of people who continue to live on the streets, forced to endure the blazing hot sun and the cold desert nights in these concrete canyons. Near the northern edge of Downtown is Margaret T. Hance Park—a deck park built over the Interstate. On Central Ave. at the South end of the park is a small castle. This is the McLelland library, the centerpiece of the Irish Cultural Center, constructed in phases between 1999-2012. Next to the castle is a small cottage and a Great Hall, where theatrical and musical performances are held as well as monthly traditional dances. The group we recorded here, Hugo Conor, is a neoclassical world-pop collective of musicians from the Valley. Their name is a nod to Hugh O’Conor, an Irish aristocrat who joined the Spanish military in Aragon, served in Cuba, Mexico City, rose through the ranks to become Governor of the province of Texas in New Spain (Mexico), and is credited with founding the city of Tucson by establishing a presidio (Spanish colonial fortification) near the Santa Cruz River in 1777. However, a Jesuit mission, San Xavier del Bac, had already been started in 1692 just ten miles to the south, and even O’Conor’s new fort took its name—San Agustín del Tucsón—from the name of the O’odham settlement that was already thriving nearby called Cuk Ṣon [tʃʊk ʂɔːn]. The piece they perform in this recording is a Sephardic melody from the period of Al-Andalus in Spain and North Africa (711-1492), reconstructed by musicologist Yitzhak Levy in the 20th Century.
(Some of the information in these liner notes is fictional, presented here in the attempt of satire)
(Some of the information in these liner notes is fictional, presented here in the attempt of satire)
LYRICS
N/A
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