Mill Avenue is a collision of multiple cultures and a forum for both fun and exchange. We see lots of people gathering who want to visit the bars, stand on street corners, or simply carouse and hang out with their friends. As a result of this mixing of locals and tourists from both Phoenix and the rest of the United States, we see our own share of crime.

Some of that crime, of course, takes the fashion of vandalism.

This happens to be the problem Mill Ave is facing this year regarding the lights that get hung over the Yule season to make the trees look like they’ve been dusted with snow. According to an article in the State Press, Nancy Hormann, president and executive director of Downtown Tempe Community, Inc., spoke in front of a city quality of life council meeting to address the problems vandalism has brought to the red bricks,

“For some reason this past year, we had an amazing amount of vandalism downtown,” said Hormann, referring to the holiday lights on Mill Avenue.

“It was an everyday occurrence with our contractor to fix the lights that went around the tree trunks, and we said we need to do something in order to change the design,” she said. “We had a tremendous amount of trouble when the bars closed … (Vandals) would pull (the lights) out, cut them, (and) take lights out of the sockets.”

Hormann said it cost $3,000 to $4,000 last year just to maintain the lights from vandalism damage.

I like driving down Mill Ave during the winter holiday and seeing those lights on the trees, it reminds me of distant days in the northern US when I experienced fog and light. Arizona isn’t for wont of fog, so much, so instead I use my imagination.

It strikes me that vandalism will happen. It saddens me that it was possible for $4,000 to happen from people just yanking down the lights and fixtures. Yes, most of the population has a tendency to act like toddlers and hang off everything they can—including the lampposts—but there’s no reason to rip down strings of lights wrapped around trees or take a swing at an unlit snowflake.

I am not a fan of The Festival Of Lights.

It’s a gigantic waste of electricity, even if it is essentially a marketing gimmick for APS. Yes, it’s pretty and interesting and brings interest to Mill Ave; however, we could do it much better with other things. In fact, the lights on Mill Ave are themselves expensive to operate and we might want to look into alternatives that use less electrical power for a similar effect.

The General Manager of Blondie’s Sports Bar and Grill on Fifth Street and Mill Avenue, Kevin Rodgers, weighed in on how drunk people behave on Mill Ave. “These people were ripping the decorations down, for no other reason but to be destructive,” he said.

As a result, the city will focus on decorations that are harder to damage.

Problems with vandalism have led Hormann and the DTC to focus clusters of star and snowflake-shaped lighting in the sidewalk tree canopies alone from Rio Salado Parkway to Third Street and Seventh Street to University Drive this year. Swooping lights will hang between Fourth Street and Seventh Street.

“We’re not going to put anything in the trees low enough to reach without a ladder,” Hormann said.

With luck, we’ll see the lights along Mill Ave return on the Saturday after Thanksgiving until they’re extinguished again after December 31. This has been a tradition for Tempe and Mill for the last 20 years.

I’ll see you then.

It’s been a long low legend for Mill Avenue, the way that the Hayden Flour Mill has lurked on the periphery outside of the scintillating lights of the Ave itself. As a result, it’s something that I have been watching with heavy eyes from through my windscreen for some time now. It’ll be an interesting fact to put this one in the rearview, but first I’m going to have to see where this goes.

The flour mill is our best and brightest historic structure right off Mill Ave between the main drag and the Tempe Town Lake. Constructed in the 1870s, it’s been a strange edifice that has soaked up every sight, sound, and smell of Mill culture—so much in fact, the street itself is named after it. As a historic structure, it’s been defended from the certainty of being crushed beneath the wheels of the Backhoe-of-Progress and has stood there abandoned and derelict for many years.

In fact, when I started taking fares on Mill Ave in my cab, it’s one of the first landmarks I recall using to orient myself.

According to Benjamin Leatherman over at the Phoenix New Times blog, we may be seeing some dramatic changes coming to the old mill within weeks. Decisions that will affect the future of the structure have finally come to fruition and even Tempe Mayor Hugh Hallman is talking about it. As such, we can expect a renovation by Valley architect Bill Tonnesen who intends to transmogrify the old mill into a space for events and a Tempe history museum.

Something that I’ve been arguing for since I first put foot on the red bricks.

As one of the oldest and most iconic structures in Tempe, the Hayden Mill has undergone a number of changes in its lengthy lifetime. Constructed in 1874 by legendary Arizonan Charles Trumbull Hayden, the mill ground wheat into flour for generations. It was rebuilt twice in the late 1800s after being destroyed by fire, and functioned as an operating mill until it was closed down in 1998.

Ritzy redevelopment projects utilizing the property were announced in 2001 and 2008, only to be sabotaged both times when the economy tanked.

Besides giving a new lease on life to Hayden Mill, the renovation will also eliminate a blighted and abandoned property along the city’s main thoroughfare. Furthermore, Hallman says it will fix a “dead zone” and help better connect Tempe Beach Park with the rest of downtown.

Amid the attractions that should attach themselves to the newly reconstructed mill, we can expect the Tempe Urban Garden. The garden will move itself from its current location on Forest Avenue and will even include some picnic tables and benches. Perhaps the mill will become a romantic sweet spot for people to pause while moving between the Tempe Town Lake and the Ave proper.

As the place is being turned into a museum, the city expects to leave some of the ancient machinery in place as well as other fixtures as part of the display.

“The goal is to turn it into an operating museum,” Hallman says. “Opening these windows to allow visitors to view inside the building and the historic equipment to show people what’s been going on inside the mill for more than a century.”

There have been numerous attempts to do this to the Hayden Mill in the past, and yet we’ve seen them all fall by the wayside due to politics, economic recessions, and just bad planning. It’s been over a decade since anyone did anything with the structure and it’s about time that we actually set about preserving it.

As of July 3rd, the MADCAP (Mill Avenue District Community Art Project) Theaters have closed up shop for the summer. The reason? They need to upgrade their air-conditioning system. This venue has done an amazing job for Mill Ave in introducing a lot of new and upcoming artists to the street and I’d like to see it stay.

You can help out. Here’s some information about the campaign and what you can do as a resident of Tempe (or anywhere else) to be part of this:

MADCAP Theaters is a nonprofit organization located in downtown Tempe, AZ and opened in 2009. MADCAP was created to give smaller up and coming artists an opportunity to showcase their talents at a fraction of the cost of larger production spaces.

However, being located in a hot, desert, climate, we have run into an obstacle.  The 16 year old building has over 50,000 square feet, 6 auditoriums, two lobbies and two service floors that require air conditioning. Currently the A/C units are not functioning properly which means we cannot create a comfortable environment for our artists and patrons.

This is our 3rd summer duct taping our air-conditioning units together, and with so much potential, we must reach out for community help or MADCAP will need to close indefinitely. In order for MADCAP to operate, we need working A/C, and ask for your help to reach our financial goal.

I’ve been participating on and off in MADCAP since it appeared in 2009. I’m not a huge player, but I’ev enjoyed what they’ve been doing for Mill. However, with them having trouble with the A/C—and I can attest that’s a huge problem with my cab sometimes—this means that we won’t have them until we can get that fixed up again.

They need to raise about $40,000 for replacement parts for their lobby A/C units (about $15,000) each and the large auditorium unit (about $10,000). There are multiple tiers of donations in the “stay cool” campaign that you can take part in—see the web page for details. Some of them amuse me greatly, such as having your name on the THANK YOU posters at the venue.

So far, only $500 has be raised and there’s 62 days remaining.

Link, via IndieGogo; link to madcaptheaters.com.