Narrative: Star Dust House

On Friday, February 3, 2006 Dr. K and the rest of the Urban Studies class met at Stardust House located in between Baseline and Southern off of 16th St. When we met there we were greeted warmly by two representatives one of AmeriCore (Volunteer work) and the Stardust director, Gail LeGrander. We were then introduced by Dr. K to Sara Griveski, who is almost finished getting her doctoral degree in Sociology. Sara gave us a brief 1 hour history about Phoenix and how it’s changed over the past 150 years or so. There were a lot of things I learned about Phoenix that I had no idea of or even heard of before. The most interesting bit of information was when the Salt River flooded only those who could afford to move away from the river were of “higher class”. At that point it seemed like there was a huge societal change and attitude towards those who could not move away from the River.

            There were many other topics and parts of Phoenix’s history I found interesting and Sara was a brilliant speaker. After Sara was done the director gave us a tour of the Stardust House. When we walked through the second portion of the house I noticed pictures on a wall that had in big font “I have a dream…when I grow up I want to be…” and underneath there were drawings made by the children of the Stardust House. I noticed pictures of Firefighters, Police Officers, Doctors, and so on. This hit me on an emotional level simply because this just shows that society always seems to neglect the lower classes by unconsciously ignoring them. The higher class including many politicians seem to forget that like themselves everyone has a dream to become something. This was my favorite part of the day simply because of the drawings I saw done by the children of South Phoenix.

            The rest of the day was pretty much a blur since the time went by so quickly. Me, Ash, Jackie, and Thomas traveled back to the “Excellent Market” where we met the police officer the other week; we just took a quick picture. After that we drove around for a while looking for a place to eat but at the same time observing South Phoenix. One of the conversations we were having was about how South Phoenix isn’t as bad as many other cities we have traveled to and we concluded that we actually feel safer here than other “Barrios”. After lunch we headed to South Mountain High School where we talked with an employee of the school and sat down for a while discussing the possibility of interviewing students of the campus. Since this took up most of our time we simply got the information that was required from us to do these interviews. We were then told that we would be notified early next week if we were going to be permitted to do so. To conclude our day we met back at the park near Stardust House and discussed what we had seen through out the day.