What is the Papago Park/City Boundary Project?
Most city limits are a change in the color of the street signs. In 1992 Phoenix and Scottsdale marked theirs with a stone tree.
The Papago Park/City Boundary Project is an earthwork of almost two acres at the northern entrance of Papago Park, on the Phoenix side of the line. The two cities commissioned it together as both a boundary marker and a gateway to the park. The artist is Jody Pinto, a New York-born environmental artist (born 1942) best known for site-specific public works, and her collaborator was Steve Martino (born 1946), the Phoenix landscape architect best known for gardens built from native desert plants. Pinto’s own title for it is Tree of Life.
It is built from stone and earth. A 240-foot main wall runs across the site to catch rainwater. Seven stone walls branch off it, and the water they carry feeds seven stone terraces that were seeded with native plants. Seen from above, the plan is a tree. The main wall is set on an alignment with the summer solstice, and stone markers stand along it: two 16-foot markers by Scottsdale Public Art’s count, seven of varying heights by Pinto’s.
The point was regeneration. When the project was conceived, the ground had no cacti and no trees. This land was Papago-Saguaro National Monument from 1914 to 1930, and the artwork was meant to help bring the desert park back. It won design awards the year it was finished. Today hardly anyone knows it is there.
How to visit
Find it at the north end of the park. Pinto places the work at the northern entrance of Papago Park. Scottsdale Public Art’s listing gives 1201 N. Galvin Parkway, which is the Desert Botanical Garden’s street address, so treat that as a pointer to the area rather than a front door. We haven’t yet logged GPS coordinates for the markers. Until we do, look for low dry-stacked stone terraces and tall granite markers near the park’s northern edge. The earthwork itself is free and open ground, not a ticketed attraction.
Go early, and not in summer. This is a stone earthwork on open desert. There is no shade on it, and from May through September the stone holds heat well into the evening. A winter or spring morning is ideal. Papago Park’s parking areas east of Galvin Parkway close well before the trails do, so check the times on our Papago Park page before you plan a sunset visit.
Read it as a water system. The terraces only make sense when you trace where the rain goes: off the main wall, down the branch walls, into the planted stone steps. The best time to understand it is the morning after a soaking winter rain or a monsoon storm. Our monsoon field manual covers storm-season safety. Don’t walk washes in a storm, and don’t climb on the stacked stone, which is dry-laid and not built to carry people.
The solstice shot. The obvious picture is the summer solstice, June 20 or 21, with the sun on the axis of the main wall. The sources say it aligns with the summer solstice without saying sunrise or sunset. Go for both, and expect heat even at dawn in late June.
Make a morning of it. The earthwork is a short walk from the rest of Papago Park: Hole-in-the-Rock, the lagoons, the Crosscut Canal path along the park’s eastern edge. The canal path leads to the tunnel marker for Camp Papago Park, the WWII prisoner-of-war camp, and to Scottsdale’s own canal art, which we cover in public art on the water.
Two cities, one stone tree
The commission was unusual from the start. Public art programs usually stop at their own city limits. This one was a joint Phoenix–Scottsdale project, credited by Pinto to the Phoenix Office of Arts & Culture and the Scottsdale Arts Commission, and it was meant to do two jobs: mark the line between the cities and announce the park.
What Pinto and Martino built
Scottsdale Public Art and the artist describe the same object in slightly different terms, and both are worth having.
Scottsdale Public Art’s version:
- The site covers almost 2 acres of Papago Park.
- The main line of the 240-foot-long stone and earth work was designed to catch rainwater and nourish seven stone terraces, which were seeded with native plants.
- The main wall is capped by two 16-foot-tall stone markers and aligns with the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.
- Seven radiating stone walls branch off the main wall, making a tree-of-life design.
- The intent was to restore the site “through ancient water-harvesting processes and native seeds.”
Pinto’s version, from her project page:
- It is 2 acres of dry-stacked fieldstone terraces and plant material, with local granite stone markers from the Fort McDowell Indian Reservation quarry of the Yavapai Tribe.
- She calls it “a symbolic and functional construct of alignment and regeneration.”
- Its axis “brings into alignment the cities of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, the Casa Grande ruins and Squaw Peak.” That mountain is now officially Piestewa Peak.
- The axis is the point where a plant form begins. Its seven branches become desert farming terraces, and seven stone markers of varying heights indicate the alignments.
- The park “had a dying ecology,” and the design “calls attention to and celebrates the basic life forces of the desert and its timeless methods of survival.”
The two accounts disagree on the markers: two 16-foot markers, or seven of varying heights. They may both be right, two tall markers on the main wall and five shorter ones elsewhere, but neither source says so. A count on the ground will settle it.
The awards
Pinto’s résumé lists two 1992 honors for the Papago Park Tree of Life: a design honor award from the American Society of Landscape Architects, listed with the Arizona Chapter, and a Crescordia environmental excellence award in Phoenix. Wikipedia’s article on Pinto says she and Martino received an Honor Award for the project in 1992.
The same year, the same corner of the map
Papago Park was getting a lot of artistic attention in 1992. That year Portals and Loops, a design team made up of artist Laurie Lundquist and the firm Studio MA, won a national competition to design the Papago Loop Trail, a trail linking the Old Crosscut Canal, the Arizona Canal and the new Crosscut Canal into the park. The same team later made Swimming Dream (2008) on the Crosscut Canal path in Scottsdale. And Martino’s firm would turn up again two decades later on the design team for the Soleri Bridge and Plaza on the Arizona Canal.
What’s still missing
The basic facts are settled. The finer ones are not. The Phoenix Office of Arts & Culture should hold the commission records, the budget and the original drawings, since Phoenix was a co-commissioner. Martino’s office should hold the planting plan, including which native species went into the seven terraces in 1992. Comparing those lists with what grows there now would answer the most interesting question about the piece: did the desert come back? Nobody has published the GPS position of the markers or a photograph of the solstice alignment.
Why it matters
Most of what Scottsdale Public Art owns is meant to be looked at. This one was meant to work. It is a piece of land art that tries to repair the ground it stands on, built by a sculptor and a landscape architect at the moment Valley cities were starting to take the desert seriously as something worth keeping rather than replacing. It also sits on a line that matters here. Scottsdale has spent its whole history defining itself against Phoenix, and the two cities chose to mark the border between them with a shared tree rather than a sign. Thirty-odd years on, the least the rest of us can do is go and find it.