Walk on by: A fact-filled stroll through historic Tucson

It's fairly early for a Saturday, but the parking lot in the back of the Tucson Convention Center is stocked with cars. The Sosa-Carillo Fremont house sits awkwardly parallel to the lot, trees and gray modern buildings shading the rectangular white adobe.

It's the starting point for the walking tour of historic downtown that the Arizona Historical Society gives every Saturday morning. A handful of people mill around the inside of the Fremont house as the music box in one of the side rooms plays loudly. The house is over 100-years-old and yet it feels just like being inside any other home in Tucson. The tour, which is attended by residents and tourists alike, is a scenic glimpse into the heart of the Tucson arts district.

Downtown Tucson is saturated with architecture that creates the perfect backdrop for the everyday activity of the city.

"All of the historic buildings in this area were bulldozed to make way for the Convention Center except the Fremont house," tour guide Fred McAninch says as the group stands outside looking back and forth between the old and new buildings. As things stand now, St. Augustine Cathedral, across Church Avenue from the TCC, represents the largest concentration of non-residential historic buildings left in Tucson.

We jaywalk in a diagonal across Church Avenue, and McAninch leads us through an ocotillo-rib gate into a small dirt yard. To our right is the Brown house, the "second oldest, if not oldest" building in the city, McAninch tells us. It was occupied by the Brown family who ran the Congress Hall Saloon in the 1860s, the namesake of Congress Street. The house, which still has its original adobe exterior, can even be found on old civil war maps.

Ceilings are always important when looking at historic buildings; most in the Southwest were made out of saguaro ribs, with large wooden beams spaced 24 inches apart for support. In the Brown house, the ceiling is made from redwood cut in the Santa Rita mountains sometime in the 1830s or '40s. The beams were so valuable that they actually appeared in people's wills.

Ian C. Mayer McAninch points out interesting architecture in the Pima County Courthouse.

Part of the building is now an art gallery, the walls displaying Hispanic and American Indian art. On one wall hangs a drawing of El Niño, the patron saint of kidnapped children. Apparently, kidnapping was a common occurrence around here during territorial times.

We exit the building via the old-style front porch on Broadway Boulevard and cross the street again to the park in between Congress Street and Broadway Boulevard off of Church Avenue. Most people know it as the park where the Pancho Villa statue is, but actually, it was the site of the first St. Augustine cathedral. Lying in the grass is a plaque with an engraving of the old cathedral, and next to that are a few insignificant-looking brown and reddish bricks, which are the last remnants of the old church wall.

We continue on down Church Avenue and McAninch briefly tells us the story of the original Hotel Congress, and how in 1934 it burned down, causing the entire John Dillinger gang to be captured without the police ever firing a shot.

In the Old Pima County Courthouse patio, a crooked tile line runs across the brick walkway. The line represents the east wall of the old Tucson Presidio, which was the walled encampment that spawned the desert territorial town and, later, the modern-day city of Tucson. As we stand on the grass, McAninch talks about how Roy Place, the architect who built the courthouse in the late 1920s, discovered the old wall about 4 feet underground when they started digging to put the fountain in.

The courthouse itself is by far one of the more interesting works of architecture downtown, one of the "first really grandiose buildings in Tucson," as McAninch says. It's a member of Spanish and Colonial revival style of architecture. Most of the buildings around Tucson are very Spanish influenced - a combination of American architecture with the Spanish style.

Underneath Alameda Street, just north of the old courthouse, are the remains of the old Presidio graveyard. Hundreds of human bodies dating from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s were found in an excavation there in 1992.

Near the Tucson Museum of Art on Meyer Avenue and Telles is Casa Cordova, the back part of which is presumably the oldest standing building in Tucson, dating back to 1854.

Ian C. Mayer The tour group stands in front of the Charles O. Brown House as Curator McAninch elaborates on the history of the Brown family.

We continue on, stopping momentarily outside a white building. "Two buildings claim to have a part of the Presidio wall," McAninch explains, and this was one of them. The Romero family, who built the structure, claimed that they used part of the still-standing wall as their north wall. Across the street going south, the Telles building claims to contain part of the wall as well, which may be true; the wall runs crooked along the street.

Main Avenue is lined with fantastic old buildings in a style characteristic of Eastern America at the time of the first railroad in Tucson, the 1860s, and some are in the Spanish colonial revival style. The tour group gets a rare chance to venture into a small private garden behind one house. A dirt path circles around desert trees and flowers and only when you look up to see the high-rise buildings do you remember it's 1998 in Arizona and not 1860 in the territories.

We walk by more historic homes of prominent members of Tucson history and stop at a curious place at 378 N. Main Ave. Built by Henry Trost, an architect known for building skyscrapers in Chicago, as well pioneering architecture in the Southwest, it looks almost like a small church. A portal over the door is reminiscent of Spanish and Colonial themes, but the relief sculpture pertains to the desert. Horned toads climb on the capitals, desert plants creep up the sides, saguaros and geckos cover the decoration. In the middle sits an owl, the root of the building's name; it was a sort of bachelor pad for some wealthy and influential men around 1905 called the "Owl's Club."

McAninch announces that the tour is over and we all head back toward the Convention Center. Standing on the bricks and concrete right in the center of downtown, where the ground has settled into small hills, in a place that has seen buildings rise and fall with the coming of the Spanish conquistadors and the American pioneers, this small town suddenly seems wise - perfectly suited for morning walks around the well-crafted homes and buildings that add so much character and history to an already compelling environment.

Walking Tours of Historic Tucson run from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturdays, through March. Advance reservations are required, and the cost is $4.50 per person. Call 622-0956 for more information.