The Workers and the Desert

~ John Owens

This is lightly modified from a Twitter thread that covered the same topic.

You know of Sun City. But have you heard of Circle City? Halfway between Sun City & Wickenburg, it was intended to be for members of the Workmen’s Circle, a quasi-socialist Jewish organization. We’ll explore it’s history in this thread, though we may end with more questions than answers.

See, even after spending hours and hours researching Circle City, I still have a lot of questions. Unlike other dives I’ve done, there’s no clear narrative here – no neat ending. There were lots of references to it in old Jewish News editions, but no photos. There were announcements about the plan for Circle City, but very little about it’s progress. And after a few years, it stops showing up in the Jewish News or other papers completely. What’s detailed here is what I could cobble together, though it’s almost certainly incomplete. I want to make it clear that Circle City still exists today – it’s not some ghost town. People live there. In fact, I drove out there to see it myself and it’s very much a living place. This is important to remember as we go through its history. Anyway, let’s dive in.

So where is Circle City? As I mentioned, it’s about halfway between Sun City and Wickenburg, right off US 60. You’d miss it completely if you weren’t looking for it (I have many times) because it is pretty isolated. You can see an aerial image of the location below.

Now that we know where it is, it’s time to explore the story of Circle City. As mentioned, it was intended to be a retirement community for members of a quasi-socialist Jewish org called the Workmen’s Circle. Let’s talk a bit about who they are. The Workmen’s Circle (now The Workers Circe) is a Jewish organization focused on social & economic justice. I call it quasi-socialist because in the org’s early days (1900’s-1930’s), it was pretty openly supportive of socialist ideas. By the 1960’s, this had more or less faded away.

At its peak in the 1920’s, the org had over 80,000 members. Eventually it had hundreds of chapters around the United States, including in Phoenix and Tucson, though its total membership was slowly declining. As of 2010, it had about 10,000 members. It is still active today. In approximately 1957, the group announced that the it intended to build a retirement community for its members in Arizona. Caring for the aged was nothing new for the org and with the rise of places like Youngtown, master-planned retirement communities were suddenly fashionable. You’ll notice I didn’t say it intended to build in Phoenix. Interestingly, it appears that there was a genuine competition between Phoenix and Tucson for the development. You can get a sense of that from this December 1957 article from The Arizona Post, the Tucson Jewish paper.

In a January 1958 blurb from The Arizona Post, you can see that the Tucson group wined and dined the org’s national leaders as part of that effort. During my research I didn’t find any similar stories about a Phoenix effort. At least Tucson didn’t send a saguaro back then.

Ultimately, in 1958, the project was announced for the site Northwest of Phoenix. As we’ll see, this shouldn’t have been a surprise because of the man charged with developing the site, Ben Schleifer. In fact, some accounts credit him with pushing for the idea to Workmen’s Circle.

Who is Ben Schleifer? As it happens, he developed Youngtown, the first master-planned retirement community, located Northwest of Phoenix. Born in 1901, Schleifer was Jewish and came to the US from Russia when he was 13, later moving to Arizona in 1947. He’s on the left in the photo.

That Schleifer was involved makes Circle City’s story so much more interesting to me. Here’s a visionary developer attempting to push the boundaries of what his initial concept could accommodate. And as we’ll see, he may have pushed a bit too far with Circle City. Circle City broke ground in 1958 on 240 acres. While homes were intended for members of the Workmen’s Circle, they were not restricted to them, and were offered to all races and religions. The project planned to have a health club, pool, and other amenities.
It was supposed to have anywhere between 500-1,000 homes, depending on the report you read. Homes started at $7,200. It was age-restricted to those 50 and older. And, surprise surprise, it was laid out in a circle. Below, you can see the original plat map for the site.
By 1960, about 40 homes were built on the site. The “City” elected a Mayor and was hosting out of town guests. It had a community center of sorts and civic organizations. It even had a Synagogue, which is now a residence. You can still see the menorah on the side of the building.
As a fun side note, take a look at the names of the streets. Notice anything? They’re all named for famous or important Jewish figures. Okay, back to the 1960’s. After 1960, it appears that very little new happened on the site. No new homes were built, though Circle City was still advertising to potential residents. In the early 60’s it was mentioned occasionally in the Phoenix Jewish News, but it stopped appearing by about 1964.

This is where the story gets murky to me. Based on the historical aerial below, it appears that even as late as 1976, little, if any, construction had happened at Circle City. There’s no story I can find about it failing, no neat ending. It just sort of disappears from records.

In many ways, it’s like people just stopped caring about Circle City. As I mentioned before, I couldn’t find any photographs of the place or the people from that period. The pool and commercial spaces were never built. Did it run out of money? Was it to far away? Why did it fail? Perhaps failure is too strong of a word, because as you can see in the aerial below, it has built out quite a bit between 1976 and today. As I said, it’s not some abandoned ghost town. We saw plenty of people there during our visit. The park is even maintained.

So Circle City lives on, though not as it was originally intended. It failed as a Jewish retirement community, to live on as an isolated, growing subdivision. In fact, it appears that yet more of the site is going to be developed. This sign was posted while we were there.

There’s a Surprise (literally) twist to this story in modern times too. Circle City had a water company. It drilled a well in 1968 and had an allotment of Colorado River water. In it’s final iteration, that company was creatively called the Circle City Water Company (CCWC). In May 2018, the City of Surprise (see, I told you it was literal) asked its voters if it could acquire the Circle City Water Company, increasing the City’s share of Colorado River water from 3.4 to 4.6 billion gallons. That’s a big deal for a growing city.

Also, consider that the CCWC, which had fewer than 200 customers at the time, had roughly 35% of the allotment of Surprise, which was orders of magnitude larger. It’s interesting that, of all the legacies of the community, its the water company that remains the most relevant. Voters approved the acquisition, but it appears that a developer near Lake Pleasant sued. See, that developer made a deal with CCWC to use its water before the Time of Shedding and Cold Rocks. The potential sale of CCWC to Surprise through it’s water source into limbo. I’ll be honest, it’s not 100% clear to me if Surprise has been able to acquire Circle City Water Company yet. I can tell you that as of February of this year, an article appeared in the Arizona Capitol Times referencing it, but it’s behind a paywall, so I can’t read it.

It seems fitting then, that like the rest of the story of Circle City, I don’t have all the answers about the water company.

I still want to know more about Circle City. I want to know about the people that moved there, what life was like, and why it (sort of) failed. It represented the optimism of that era, when the open desert and the car represented endless possibility and opportunity.

Ultimately, as a Jewish person, as frustrating as it was to not be able to find all the answers through researching this, I enjoyed being able to read the pages of the Phoenix Jewish News and see what life was like for Jews in the Valley that era. The paper had a great logo too.

If you know more about Circle City, I’d love if you’d share. I still have so many questions.

Sources for this thread include: The Phoenix Jewish News, The Arizona Post, The Arizona Memory Project, The New York Times, The Youngtown Historical Museum, Maricopa County Assessor’s & Recorder’s Offices, Maricopa County Historical Aerials, City of Surprise, The Arizona Republic, Circle City Water Company, Google Maps, and HistoricImages dot com.

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Published by John Owens

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