Bisbee strikes it rich: through good and bad times, the Arizona copper town has always tapped a mother load of character - includes a Bisbee travel planner

Sunset, March, 1999 by Matthew Jaffe

Bisbee, Arizona, is a company town without a company. It sits just 5 miles north of the Mexican border and more than 100 miles from Tucson. It has no skiing, river rafting, ocean, theme park, or national park nearby. So how could Bisbee possibly be one of the best towns to visit in the Southwest?

Try all of the above.

Tucked into a pocket of the Mule Mountains. Bisbee's isolation and its very lack of a defining attraction have let this little town of 6,500 evolve at its own pace and according to its own sometimes eccentric heart. And maybe because it seemingly had nothing going for it for so long, today's Bisbee has it all.

A thriving art scene. Antiques stores. The right blend of hipness and history. A classic American streetscape as picturesque as a backlot - made better, of course, because it's real.

You approach Bisbee after a long, lonely drive through the empty high-desert grasslands of the San Pedro Valley. The fringes of town are as undistinguished as those of many others in the Southwest - trailers, a convenience store, a nondescript shopping center. As you get closer, there's no mistaking that this is, or at least was, a mining town. The land has been beaten up pretty good, which isn't surprising when you consider that nearly 8 billion pounds of copper came out of the local hills.

But mining ended here almost 25 years ago. And, frankly, the place looks kind of rusted. By this time, the unbearable blightness of Bisbee's being may have you wondering why you ever bothered to come here instead of Sedona. Then you finally arrive in the town's historic center.

People are hanging out, having beers on the terrace of the old Copper Queen Hotel, the grandest spot in town back in the days when Bisbee was one of the grandest towns in the West. Narrow streets, winding up hills as steep as San Francisco's, are lined in stretches by impressive brick and stone buildings.

Stairways lead to side streets that are lined with both old miners' shacks and larger, more ornate Victorian homes. A big drainage ditch built in the early 1900s runs through the center of town to channel away the floodwaters that often run down through Tombstone Canyon. Across from it, a classic New Deal-era art deco statue of a miner looks out over the main drag.

Bisbee is more storehouse than museum piece. There's plenty to rummage through, and you'll find yourself poking around a lot, visiting and revisiting streets, and always noticing something a little bit different. Parts of the town look pristine and sandblasted. Other parts look weathered, revealing the flaws - and the character - that come with age. After a while, you get a sense of where Bisbee has been. And where it may be going, too.

DIGGING BISBEE

If you were to condense this town's history, it would go something like this: Bisbee booms, Bisbee busts, Bisbee bounces back.

But as any local artist (and there are a lot of them) could tell you, this isn't a place that can easily be painted with such broad strokes. It has always had a certain eccentricity, not surprising for a town named for one DeWitt Bisbee, the attorney for a local mining company. Towns are usually named after the founding father or, like Sedona, for the founding father's wife (otherwise, people would be traveling to the New Age mecca of Schnebly). But to the best of anyone's knowledge, DeWitt Bisbee never set foot in his namesake city.

Despite its isolation, Bisbee developed into a remarkably cosmopolitan city, reflecting the country's changing demographics at the beginning of this century. The population more closely resembled that of an Eastern city than it did nearby Tucson, as waves of eastern and southern European immigrants came to work the mines. Bisbee grew to 20,000 people, becoming the world's largest copper mining town.

It rode out the ups and downs of the copper market until 1975, when low prices and declining ore led its major mining firm, Phelps Dodge, to shut down its operations. It would be an oversimplification to say that dying was the best thing that ever happened to Bisbee. After all, a copper mining town with neither copper nor mining isn't really much of a town at all.

But keep your eyes on demise: Bisbee began to draw a new wave of immigrants, bohemian in outlook rather than birthplace. If nothing else, Bisbee was cheap. Dirt cheap. So, in a pattern often seen in larger cities after a neighborhood bottoms out, artists moved to Bisbee to pursue their work in an affordable place.

BISBEE GETS BUSY

"Poverty is a great advocate for preservation. There were no demands to change," says Jeff Shriver, a furniture maker and the chairman of the Bisbee Arts Commission. "The town was vacated, empty, and ill-used. As the artists moved in, they liked the historic aspect and preserved it." Now tourism, along with retirees and government jobs, is what brings the bucks into Bisbee.

Shriver moved to Bisbee in 1980 after he visited friends here on his way to California. "I was stunned at how beautiful it was. How odd, quirky, and idiosyncratic it was. And 1 thought, 'This is the place.'"