Tempe, Arizona — the ferry crossing that became a college city

Tempe is a city of about 180,000 people packed into 40 square miles in the middle of the Valley — an inner-ring city that grew up around a river crossing, a flour mill, and a teachers' college that became Arizona State University. Few Arizona cities pack so many eras into so few miles: Hohokam canal country, an 1870s ferry landing, Tempe's oldest intact neighborhood of 1900s–1950s homes, postwar subdivisions, the 1970s lake community of South Tempe, and the glass towers now rising around Tempe Town Lake. This page is our guide to the city itself — how it started, what it's like to live here, and what Tempe's age, growth, and water do to the plumbing inside its homes. City Plumbing and Rooter AZ LLC serves Tempe from our San Tan Valley service area, 24/7.

A short history of Tempe

Tempe's ground was valuable long before it had a name. The Hohokam built canals here between roughly 500 and 1450 A.D. — the City of Tempe notes that their canal system became the foundation of the canals the Valley uses today — before abandoning the area in the 15th century. The next chapter opened in 1865, when the Army established Fort McDowell about 25 miles northeast and farmers settled along the Salt River to feed it. On the west side of a lone butte, one of those settlements changed everything: Charles Trumbull Hayden filed a homestead claim in 1870, put up the settlement's first building in October 1871, opened a store, dug a canal along the base of the butte to power a flour mill, and ran a cable ferry across the river. The mill was completed in 1874, and the settlement became known as Hayden's Ferry.

In 1879, pioneer Darrell Duppa looked at the valley below the butte and thought of the Vale of Tempe in Greece, at the foot of Mount Olympus — and Tempe had its name. The town kept stacking firsts: the Maricopa and Phoenix Railroad crossed the river here in 1887, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors incorporated Tempe on November 26, 1894, and in 1885 the Territorial Legislature had already placed the Territorial Normal School here — a four-room schoolhouse on 20 donated acres that opened with 33 students in 1886 and grew, name by name, into Arizona State University in 1958. The street out front of the mill tells the story too: Mill Street, later Mill Avenue, was Tempe's first named road. Hayden's mill ground on into the modern era — rebuilt in fireproof concrete in 1918 after fires destroyed its predecessors, fitted with 14 grain silos in 1951 that stood as Tempe's tallest structures until 2007, and milling until 1998. The white mill still anchors the north end of Mill Avenue. And in 1999 the city dammed its stretch of the Salt River to open Tempe Town Lake — 220 acres of water where the ferry once crossed (the original rubber dams were replaced with steel gates in 2016).

Living in Tempe today

Tempe runs on desert time with a college pulse. Summers are serious — average highs of 104–106°F from June through August — winters are mild, and the year's roughly 9 inches of rain arrives mostly in winter storms and the summer monsoon, June 15 through September 30. The landmarks are stacked close together: Tempe Butte — "A" Mountain, whose letter has evolved from N for Normal School to T to today's A — rises about 300 feet above the river beside Mountain America Stadium (the old Sun Devil Stadium, opened in 1958). Tempe Town Lake draws rowers, anglers, and runners to its five-plus miles of paths, Mill Avenue runs south from the lake past the bars, venues, and the ASU campus, and Papago Park's red buttes spill across the city's northwest edge.

Where you live in Tempe says a lot about your house. Maple-Ash, just south of downtown, is the city's oldest intact residential neighborhood — its Gage Addition (1909) and later streets hold some 338 households, mostly built between the 1900s and the 1950s. Mitchell Park and the mid-century neighborhoods around it carry the postwar building boom. South Tempe is the suburban layer: The Lakes, a master-planned lake community developed in the 1970s with around 1,500 homes, and subdivisions like Warner Ranch from the city's biggest growth decades — the 1970s and 1980s. And the newest Tempe is vertical: condos and apartments around downtown, the lake, and ASU. With a university at its center, Tempe is also a majority-renter city — only about 42% of its homes are owner-occupied — so a large share of its plumbing lives in rentals, duplexes, and student housing that see heavy, rotating use.

What Tempe does to your plumbing

The water is hard, and the blend changes. Tempe's water comes mostly from the Salt River Project — in a typical year, SRP watersheds supply about 87% of the city's water, with groundwater and Central Arizona Project water making up the rest. The City of Tempe's own water quality reports put average hardness roughly in the 12–15 grains-per-gallon range, with reported values spanning wider depending on the source blend — hard to very hard water by any measure. Scale builds inside water heaters and on fixtures accordingly; heaters that rumble or lose capacity are usually carrying Tempe's minerals in the tank. Regular flushing is routine upkeep here, not an upsell.

Old neighborhoods have old plumbing. Maple-Ash and the historic core near downtown and ASU hold homes from the 1900s through the 1950s that have been plumbed, replumbed, and patched across a century — those are the streets where repeat drain problems and tired lines concentrate. South Tempe's 1970s–80s housing stock is hitting middle age all at once, and the City flags one era specifically in its own water report: homes built between 1982 and 1988, when lead solder was used to join plumbing and fixtures, are the households it monitors most closely for lead leaching. Knowing which era your home belongs to tells you what to watch.

Rentals and roots round it out. In a majority-renter city with a major university, much of Tempe's plumbing serves tenants and turns over constantly — problems get reported late, and small leaks can run a long time before anyone calls. Mature landscaping means mature roots working toward aging sewer joints, so the same line can back up again after a simple clearing. And when the monsoon drops an inch of the year's nine inches of rain in an afternoon, weak drains announce themselves citywide at once. The smart move in a city this layered is to look before you dig: a camera inspection shows what a line is doing before anyone recommends a repair.

Plumbing services in Tempe

City Plumbing and Rooter AZ LLC serves Tempe from our San Tan Valley service area, and we're in the city every day. The services Tempe homeowners, landlords, and property managers call us for most:

• Drain cleaning and hydro jetting for slow and repeating clogs
• Leak detection and slab leak detection when water shows up where it shouldn't
• Water heaters — repair, replacement, tankless, and the flushing Tempe's hard water makes necessary
• Sewer camera inspection and sewer line repair and replacement
• Water line repair and replacement
• Emergency plumbing, 24/7

For service options, pricing conversations, and booking, see our main Tempe plumbing page — and our San Tan Valley page covers the service area we're based out of for the southeast Valley.

Call your local Tempe plumber

Century-old bungalow in Maple-Ash, a rental near ASU, or a family home in South Tempe — if it's leaking, clogged, or running cold, we'll explain what we find and what your options are before any work starts. City Plumbing and Rooter AZ LLC, AZ ROC #362148, open 24/7. Call 928-361-9755.