Ghosts, call girls and bootleg liquor. County employees work in historic Phoenix building

Those who work in Maricopa County's historic office building in the heart of downtown Phoenix can tick off a list of its best features.

They include marble floors in the opulent lobby, a formal ballroom and a rooftop deck — a lot of perks for an eight-story government office.

But the building, located near the intersection of Central Avenue and Van Buren Street, hides other secrets.

It boasts a scandalous past filled with bootleg liquor, gambling and call girls. And, the building might be haunted.

The man at the head of the syndicate that built it was one of the most powerful men in Roaring '20s Phoenix, a transformative time for the city.

"It's been pretty interesting working here," said Julie McKee, human resources supervisor for the Justice Courts of Maricopa County.

The structure might not house government workers for much longer. While it works well enough as an office building, some of its features are unnecessary, officials said.

The ballroom, for instance, is only occasionally used — usually for employee award ceremonies and other county events. At one point, county officials considered renting out the space for weddings and other celebrations but decided they didn't want to be in the hospitality business.

"Ultimately, it was too much of a security risk," said county spokesperson Fields Moseley.

Historic structures are also expensive to maintain, officials said, and the county has spent $26 million on renovations and upkeep since it purchased the building in 2001.

Those costs prompted the county to advertise the building in February. It received no bids at a May auction, so officials say they will hang on to the building for now.

If it ever is successfully sold, Moseley said, there's "a long list" of county staffers who would need to be rehoused. In auction documents, the county estimated that process might take up to 18 months.

They would leave behind a structure imbued with history.

The building's illicit origins

The Security Building was constructed in the late 1920s by the Security Investment Company, a syndicate headed by Dwight Heard. He was an investment banker, rancher, publisher of The Arizona Republican and one of the most powerful men in the state.

The Republican — predecessor to The Republic — devoted a full front page spread to the new building upon its completion. At the time, it was the second-tallest office building in the city, and one article heralded it as "a jump ahead of its time." The structure, The Republican's journalists wrote, represented its builders' confidence in the future growth and development of their desert city.

But the newspaper's reporters neglected to dig into the tale of how the building was financed. Total development cost about $750,000 — roughly $13.2 million in today's money, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

About 50 years later, attorney and politico Henderson Stockton revealed the full story. Stockton was one of the building's first tenants. Long after those involved in the construction had died, he told The Republic that the project was partially funded by a casino and a brothel that operated out of the half-finished building.

For two weeks, Heard and other wealthy, powerful men behind the construction turned a blind eye while Wirt Bowman, an influential and wealthy national Democratic committeeman who owned several gambling establishments in Tijuana, ran booze, games and girls through the eighth floor of the building.

When Stockton told The Republic all of the details in 1978, columnist Paul Dean called it "one of the better skeletons in Arizona's closet."

"Word travelled like a gullywasher and so did the customers," Dean wrote. "One corner of Phoenix in 1928 became busier than any block of Las Vegas in 1978."

County employees say there's a ghost

Security guards sometimes hear the sounds of children playing late at night.

The doorbell rings at random in the Justice Courts' office.

And janitors occasionally report strange footsteps and clicking noises.

Numerous county employees told The Republic that they believe their workplace is haunted.

The second elevator likes to open up by itself, said Gary Martin, a security guard in the building. He sometimes hears people talking in the basement, even when he knows he's alone — an experience he describes as "a little unsettling."

"I came to find out that a lot of other guards have seen things and heard things, so I realized I wasn't crazy after all," he said. "Other people have experienced this stuff."

Scott Davis, spokesperson for the Justice Courts of Maricopa County, said he's also a believer.

"Once you have things happen, then you know it's real," he said.

When McKee, the Justice Courts' human resources supervisor, tells people her ghost stories, they often find it funny. But McKee, who has worked in the building for six years, said the spirits in the building are no laughing matter.

She's heard doors opening and closing while working alone, she said, and the temperature sometimes drops drastically in different areas of the office. Not too long ago, her window suddenly shattered. When facility repair workers came to her office to inspect the damage, they told her it had broken from the inside.

"The window shattering — to me, that wouldn't be something of a happy ghost," McKee said.

But her scariest moment came while she was walking around the building's basement.

It was the middle of the pandemic, she said, and the building was mostly empty. The county had set up a walking path in the basement to help employees move around during the day, and McKee said she frequently visited it to get some exercise — until the day she heard a set of high heels following her.

McKee said she stopped and looked behind her, but saw nobody. She took a few more steps, and the noise returned. All of the hair on her body stood up, she said, and she was so unsettled that she began recording video on her phone. She speed-walked around the basement to confirm that no one else was there with her, and escaped upstairs.

"I was terrified," she said. "That overwhelming sense of, 'I'm scared.' And I was like, 'I need to get the heck out of here now.'"

Since then, she's avoided the basement.

"There's something down there," she said.

No spirits could be reached for comment. An elevator in the building's lobby, however, was observed opening and closing its doors seemingly unprompted several times. No other elevator in the lobby displayed the same behavior.

A Roaring '20s relic in the modern era

Today, the Security Building is no longer the second-tallest office structure in Phoenix.

It sits within a rapidly developing downtown skyline where it is now dwarfed by its neighbors, such as the attached 12-story Security Center, built in the 1960s. Other nearby buildings include the 40-story Chase Tower and two new residential towers that are currently under construction on the north side of Van Buren Street.

Still, the building's history lives on. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. Documents describing why it should be included on the preservation list noted that the building is "a good example of Second Renaissance Revival design" and that Heard, its builder, was "one of the city's most powerful and influential men from 1897 until his death in 1929."

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The register also lists other skyscrapers built in downtown Phoenix during the 1920s, including Hotel Westward Ho, the Luhrs Tower and Hotel San Carlos.

But as Stockton told Dean for his column: "They can't possibly have as much fun as we had building this one."

Sasha Hupka covers Maricopa County, Pinal County and regional issues for The Arizona Republic. Do you have a tip about county government or county services? Reach her at sasha.hupka@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter: @SashaHupka.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Phoenix building has historic features, an illicit past and ghosts