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Jerome, Arizona
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Jerome is a small town of a few hundred people,
but it is also a community of transplants that have created
a unique, postmodern environment. It is a scrappy old mining
town, half fallen down and half tarted up, which, like much
of the New Old West, has a facade of restored storefronts that
serve the tourist trade. But behind this facade is a settlement
composed of an unusual and haphazard assortment of people, almost
all of whom arrived in recent years, who share an attraction
to the mixture of geography, architecture, decay, and potential
that make Jerome stand out.
Jerome is geographically isolated, a thousand
feet above the Verde Valley, in Northern Arizona. The town was
built on a precarious slope, with the buildings perched on a
system of terraced walkways and roads, and the town has suffered
many floods, landslides, and fires as a result. A literal boom-town,
Jerome rocked with the excavation blasts from the mine, now
a big abandoned pit right next to town. From a peak population
of 15,000 people, the town was almost entirely abandoned when
the mines shut down in 1953.
Many old Southwestern mining towns were transformed
in the late 1960's when people seeking different ways of living
moved out of the cities. Unlike the commune option, where the
building usually had to be done from scratch, these communities
were already built (and had romantic, abandoned Victorian houses
that could often be had for a song). With enough "alternative"
minded transplants to reach some sort of saturation point, local
politics and community standards could remain favorable to these
liberal-minded transplants.
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Bisbee, Arizona
CLUI photo
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Like Jerome, Bisbee is an old mining town that
was revitalized with an influx of alternative-seeking city folk
in the late 1960's. But Bisbee was never close to being abandoned
(the mines didn't shut down until the mid 1970's), so it's population
is a mix of transplants and tenacious old-timers. The town sits
in a gulch, and houses built on the hillsides are on an often
ridiculous slope, making for some interesting and precarious
architecture. Unlike Jerome though, Bisbee is basically solid,
both structurally and economically, with a more established
tourism/handicraft industry to sustain it.
