Brewery Gulch and Warren: Two Towns for Two Classes

Bisbee is not one town but several towns layered on top of each other. The downtown canyon, called Tombstone Canyon, holds the Victorian commercial buildings and residential streets that cling to steep hillsides in defiance of ordinary urban geometry. Below the canyon, and separate in identity if not in distance, lies the gulch called Brewery Gulch, which at its peak in the early nineteen hundreds was a corridor of dozens of saloons, gambling halls, and brothels that miners called Hell's Half Acre.

German and Swiss immigrants had established actual brewing operations here in eighteen eighty-one, but the name Brewery Gulch outlasted the breweries. Arizona went dry in nineteen fourteen, before national Prohibition, and the saloon era ended abruptly. The oldest continuously operating bar in Arizona, the Saint Elmo, opened on Brewery Gulch in nineteen oh two.

A mile south of the main canyon, in an entirely different world, the Calumet and Arizona Mining Company hired Warren Henry Manning, a nationally recognized landscape architect working in the tradition of Frederick Law Olmsted, to design a planned community for its managers and skilled workers. Manning laid out the Warren townsite in nineteen oh six as a garden suburb, with a half-mile green park at its center, wide boulevards, and Craftsman bungalows built for under one thousand dollars each. It was Arizona's first master-planned community, designed for people who never had to go near Brewery Gulch if they preferred not to.

Bisbee today preserves both townscapes almost intact, the hillside Victorian commercial district and the garden suburb below, because the economic collapse that followed the mine closure in the nineteen seventies left no money for redevelopment. Poverty, in this case, was preservation.