Old Tiki/Googie Motels in Arizona

Before I moved from Phoenix to Florida, I took some photos of my favorite motel signage around town. These are mostly in Mesa/Apache Junction.. the Aloha Motel is in Chandler.

http://www.tiki-shirts.com/gallery/motels?&page=1

These are great, thanks for sharing!

Your pics just solidified my return trip plans to AZ next year. The Phoenix area CoC and Convention and Visitors Bureau owe you one!

Sweet pics fatuhiva. I love old signs. Have you made a collection of signs in our area? If not you should. Theres a cool car one on 520 and 1 in Cocoa that I stare at every time Im stuck at the light.

Havent done that yet flounder, but I will do it as I finish up my Space Coast tiki shoot.

I just saw a great one along the ghost-towned US1 between Ft. Pierce and Vero. Lots of weird old buildings on that stretch. There's a gutted old ChineseRestaurant called the "Moon Garden" with a great old Asian-50's style neon sign.

Alot of sweet modernist signage/motels on Treasure Island on the gulf coast. Sadly, I hear it is becoming endangered.. check out some pics:

http://recentpast.org/groups/treasure/

Here are some nighttime shots me and a friend took of some AZ signs:

http://www.pbase.com/gleemonex/neon_signage

For anyone wanting to find these signs in AZ, you get on Main street in Mesa (or apache blvd in Tempe, which turns into main) and just keep going east. and east. and east. For quite ways. Eventually you will pass them all and end up at a fork in the road way out in Apache Junction, where there are two antique malls that I have, in the past, found tikis in.. the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow perhaps

If you want to make a kitschy daytrip out of it, after you hit those malls, keep going East even more, and make your way through the desert into the old mining towns of Miami and Globe, Arizona. Very odd being wayy out there- almost makes you wonder on the way back if those towns really existed or if it was all just a desert mirage...

[ Edited by: fatuhiva on 2003-11-04 10:37 ]

Maybe this should be mved to Beyond Tiki, but....

I have been archiving this sort of stuff too - I have a few hundred pics I have taken on varous road trips of Deco / Streamline / Googie / Atomic / etc. signs and buildings that I have run across all over the country. I have often thought about trading or sharing these pics, but I like to keep them as big hi-res files, and there are far too many to post at this size (or for that matter, there are far too many to post even at a reduced size). I'm thinking more like swapping CD-ROMs with people, or having one person compile several collections and distribute master discs. Any interst?