Home & Garden Publications

Queen of the desert: artist. Beekeeper. In Bisbee, Arizona, you can be whatever you want to be

Sunset, April, 2005 by Lawrence W. Cheek

On the morning of August 4, 1998, all hell broke loose in Bisbee, Arizona. Nothing new in principle--hell has visited Bisbee regularly for as long as the town has existed--but this time it happened in fresh and sensational form.

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A resident of Brewery Gulch, the infamous canyon furrowing north from downtown, decided to spray a beehive wedged in an old brick warehouse. The hive had been a neighborhood fixture for as long as anyone could remember, but its recent Africanized residents, once aroused, formed a weapon of mass destruction. The "killer" bees boiled into the street, attacking people, dogs, birds, even telephone poles. Two women almost crashed their cars into each other trying to escape. A desperate policeman frantically wrapped himself in a blanket. Eight people landed in the hospital. By one newspaper account, it was "a Keystone Cops scramble with overtones of an Alfred Hitchcock horror film."

But in the weird though pragmatic reverse universe of Bisbee, there's always a creative soul to seize the day. In the wake of the media buzz, Reed Booth, the original offender of the Brewery Gulch bees, began billing himself as Bisbee's "killer-bee guy." He self-published a book, and opened a shop on Main Street for his killer-bee honey mustard and honey butter. He says he did about $150,000 of business last year, which in Bisbee's rickety economy is a substantial pile of money.

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"I became a killer-bee expert because I was unemployable," Booth quips, then turns semiserious. "In Bisbee, people will tell you, 'I only want to work three days a week, I don't want to get up early'--they aren't crack-of-dawn people; they're more like crack-of-noon," he says. "But the truth is that this town is full of passionate people. We find something we love and figure out a way to keep doing it."

That's the story of the town, too--against all rational alignments, it finds a way to keep going.

For its first 100 years, Bisbee was a mining town, but one more substantial--and more notorious--than most of those spattered about the mountain West. In the early 1900s it had the air of a cosmopolitan, if not refined, city. A 1917-18 city directory listed about 15,000 residents, including miners from Ireland, Germany, Italy, and Serbia. It was one of the largest burgs in Arizona. But brothels and bars lined Brewery Gulch, and floods, fires, and epidemics beset Bisbee as if by subscription. In a fond memoir, Going Back to Bisbee, writer Richard Shelton termed it "a town built directly in the path of disaster."

But in an effort to convince investors that Bisbee was for real, the mining companies commissioned a few architectural landmarks that echoed Boston or Philadelphia, albeit at dollhouse scale. The Italian villa-style Copper Queen Hotel, opened in 1902, still presides over the town with baronial dignity. The 1905 Muheim Block boasts a Roman temple portico--except that over the columns, instead of a sculptural frieze depicting gods at play, there's a bold proclamation: BREWERY. A mining town reveres its beer. And its machismo. Bisbee's sculptural centerpiece is a 1935 socialist-realist statue of a bare-chested miner with Superman pecs and an expression of world-dominating confidence. The inscription reads: "Dedicated to those virile men--the copper miners ..."

The last mine closed in 1975, and for a while, that looked like Bisbee's final disaster. Most of the remaining 8,000 miners and merchants dribbled away, and their homes--spindly rooming houses, teetering cottages, and substantial Craftsman bungalows--tumbled onto the market at preposterously low prices. Word spread, and a wave of late-blooming hippies lapped into town. Judy Perry arrived in 1976 and became a poster child for the wildly unstructured opportunities of Bisbee.

"I bought a house for $7,000 and paid it off in seven years at $100 a month," she recalls. "I didn't have a car for 12 years, but I had a garage, and people tended to leave their cars in it and let me drive them. I played in a comedy band, started a satirical vaudeville troupe, learned to paint, and opened a gallery. I did things here that I never would have done in Tucson or anyplace else, because I didn't have the credentials. People would have laughed at me." Today Perry paints fetching acrylic pictures of a cozy, cluttered Bisbee, makes less than $10,000 a year, and seems profoundly happy with her life. "I want to paint what makes me happy, not what will sell. I've just been lucky that it has sold."

But there is a structure underlying the liberal, laissez-faire social order of Bisbee, Perry says. "It's intense in that everybody knows almost everything about you. You can't have a secretive life here. If you're a bad plumber, you're not going to get any work."

Tourists who stumbled across Bisbee in the '70s and '80s might've assumed it was full of bad plumbers, as well as bad carpenters, bad painters, and bad pothole repairers. Actually, it was just poor--no economic base, few real jobs. Someone printed up T-shirts that captured the moment perfectly: BISBEE--RUBBLE WITHOUT A CAUSE. But even at its scruffiest, the town had a physical allure that couldn't be snuffed out. It's so different, faintly European and thoroughly Wild West at the same time. It's as if a tornado scooped up a wedge of San Francisco, battered all the buildings down to half-size, then tossed them like a shower of Monopoly houses into a desert canyon where they all landed at crazy angles on precarious ledges. A tangle of linguine-wide streets lurches among them, but many houses don't have a street on their level. Residents park somewhere 50 feet higher or lower and trek home on the public stairways.