After Phelps Dodge: The Art Colony at the Bottom of a Mine

When Phelps Dodge shut down the last underground mining operations in June of nineteen seventy-five, the town of Bisbee lost its reason for existing. Workers sold their homes for almost nothing. Houses that had taken decades of mining wages to buy sold for a few hundred dollars.

Decent houses on the canyon walls went for as little as one thousand dollars. The vacancy was an opening, and people took it. Artists arrived, followed by retirees, followed by people who simply wanted to live somewhere beautiful and strange and cheap.

The transformation was slow and without a master plan. Studios opened in former mining offices. Galleries moved into shuttered mercantile buildings.

The Queen Mine became a museum almost by accident, as a way to employ the miners who knew it best and give the town something to show visitors. By nineteen ninety, the town had found itself again as an arts destination, capable of hosting the Bisbee Thousand, a four-and-a-half-mile race through downtown that crosses nine staircases and more than a thousand steps. The staircases were mostly built by the Works Progress Administration in nineteen thirty-six, following paths that mules had worn into the canyon walls over decades of hauling ore.

The race literally runs on mining infrastructure. Today Bisbee has more than two hundred working artists and roughly forty restaurants and bars for a town of fewer than five thousand people. It is, by any measure, a more crowded arts economy than you would expect in a canyon in southeastern Arizona, which is part of what makes it interesting.