Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

Q. Did you go to downtown Phoenix much
A. You know, a fair amount, it seems to me, not all the time. We would go down
there, the department stores were down there. Sometimes you would have to go
down to go to the bank. I remember going down with my mom to go to the bank.
Where the Chase Tower is now, which I still think of the Valley Bank Tower, there
was a parking garage. It was the only parking garage in the entire metro area.
Unlike the parking garages today you didn’t drive up in it. You pulled your car in
and there was a big steel frame structure and you pulled your car in and you got
out and they put it on an elevator and they ran it up to a floor and then they drove
it and parked it somewhere. It was like a vending machine for cars. You’d come
back and they’d deliver it and your car would kind of slide out. I thought it was
very cool.
I remember driving to downtown Phoenix when what was then the Guarantee
Bank, which was the bank that David K. Murdock started, opened at Central and
Osborne, the northwest corner of Central and Osborne. It was nineteen stories
tall. We drove down there, so we could go to the top of a nineteen story building.
It was big excitement.
Q. You were probably here when they opened the Valley Bank, the one at Rural and
Apache that they just tore down.
Interview with Grady Gammage
Page 9 of 91