Phoenix Rising
Four years ago, Caroline Van Slyke was at a meeting in downtown Phoenix when she looked out the window, saw a forlorn little house, and decided “it needed some love,” she says. “It was like the house was speaking to me, telling me to adopt it. I know it sounds crazy.”
Today, the old Tharaldson house—now the Van Slyke place—is a must-see on the annual neighborhood house tour, and its lively new terrace is something of a local watering hole, complete with an 8-foot-tall wood-burning pizza oven crowdfunded by happy regulars.
The story of how all this came to be is one of personal renewal, urban renewal, and homage to the city’s pre-statehood days.
While very much a modern metropolis, Phoenix has lately trained its sights onbecame wards of the city. The one Caroline spotted was just 1,733 square feet, with a sagging front porch, on a bare lot. It sits in the Roosevelt historic district; a leafy streetcar subdivision when the 1903 house was built, it was a shrinking dot in the urban orb by the 1970s.
