Postcard Collection: Greetings From Arizona, Part One
Published October 2nd, 2007 in Obsessions, Treasure Tags: Arizona, History, Links, Squalor, Travel.
It’s finally starting to cool off around these parts. Soon enough, I’ll able to once again take actual road trips to parts of the state I haven’t seen yet. But the internet still continues to offer an adequate substitute for real experience. I’ve recently found a few great sites that are new to me at least.
Aaron Walton’s Western Mining History site is probably my favorite, if only for the sheer perversity of its presentation. Clustered around its prominently displayed Google ads, the site’s photo galleries offer exquisite views of dilapidated small towns throughout the western United States. Its brief tour of Miami, Arizona is a real treat. The town’s hovels, back alleys and shuttered buildings are lovingly exhibited without commentary or any trace of irony, as barren as the streets of Miami themselves. Meanwhile, Globe and Bisbee look positively opulent by comparison.
I had varying degrees of success finding photos of the others towns in my personal pantheon of destinations. I enjoyed Jeff Knapp’s photos of Superior, even if they were all in black and white. The Library of Congress American Memory page has a lot of great pictures of Tombstone from the mid-20th century, before the place was tarted up for the tourist trade. But you’ve got to use their cumbersome search engine to find them. All I could find about Yarnell were pages about the Shrine Of St. Joseph, of which this one is my favorite.
None of the above, however, can match Prescott’s Sharlot Hall Museum site for sheer volume. Stretching from the mid 1800s to the present day, exhaustively documented and annotated in most cases by by accompanying articles, the collection has no rival that I’ve found. The also voluminous Arizona Memory Project, to which the Sharlot Hall Museum is a major contributor, comes awfully close though.
Readers as equally bitter as I am about the modern state of things might enjoy whiling away a few hours lost amidst these fantastic photo collections from Arizona’s past. The rest of you can get a quick fix from my latest batch of postwar postcards from the fine folks at Curt Teich:
I didn’t really see a whole lot of difference between Globe, Bisbee, and Miami….
Look again!
I’m flattered to have made your cut! Thanks for the shout out. However, for the record, I have posted other pieces fromYarnell. Go back to the Shrine post & type in “Yarnell”
in the search box at the top of the page. It’s a splendid little town that’s grown, but not explosively. However, if you want to see another sad little town, there’s Ashfork or Holbrook, left behind by the modern highway system.
Ahh! That’s more like it:
http://walkingprescott.blogspot.com/search?q=yarnell
Thanks!
I took a look at the Miami photos andI must say they belie part of what you said about the town. Severl of the photos show old commercial buildings that have been quite gentrified, meaning that, if things don’t get too bad, more will follow. Looks like the arty folk have found new cheap digs that won’t stay that way long.
I never said there weren’t antique stores and gift shops in Miami. No doubt , siince Globe is pushing outward and Miami is just a couple miles down the road, it too is doomed to one day lose its squalorous charm. But for the near future, it’ll remain a nice out of the way place to live, provided you don’t mind living amid boarded up buildings and doing all your shopping at WalMart.
Hello, Derrick.
Your site never ceases to amaze and impress. The recent postcard postings led me to your Flickr pages and the collection of ghost town photos, which in turn led me to unearth old photographs of me ‘n’ the gang visiting many of these same crumbling buildings back in the early 80’s…one photo in particular showing me and a friend scampering atop a swaying wooden thingy outside a mine near (I think) Gleason, AZ, several hundred feet off the ground…these days, of course, I am hard-pressed to ascend past the fourth rung of a ladder without experiencing nausea and vertigo. Ah, those beer- and mushroom-fueled exhibitions of youth.
May I also say that I am quite impressed by the literary quality of your entries? I say this only because I once fan-ishly accosted you and your bandmates outside a club in LA as you were loading in, and my earnest queries were greeted with an alarming barrage of incomprehensible, feral, vaguely threatening grunts from you, leading me to posit all sorts of theories about the cognitive damage you must have sustained growing up in the Valley. As the great comedian Joe E. Lewis was wont to say: it must have just been part of the act.
Two more bits of business: my friend Andy, a cartoonist for the Tucson Weekly, has some charming photos of Cris Kirkwood as a young cub scout, which I think he would be happy to scan and submit to the MP website, if you are interested. Also, you simply must come down to Tucson in late October to see Ernie Menehune, “Hawaii’s Suntanned Irishman,” live at the Kon Tiki. This may be one of your last chances to witness the embodiment of old-school Vegas “culture.” The particulars can be found at http://www.velvetglass.com/erniemenehune/kontikishow.html
Thanks for the kind remarks, FK; we aim to please!
Sorry you got the shitty end of the stick in LA all those years ago. Here’s a tip: few musicians enjoy hauling their own gear. Avoid them during this phase of the evening’s festivities.
Tell your buddy that if he can get the cub scout scans to me in a timely fashion, they would make an excellent Halloween post over on the Meat Puppets blog.
I actually have Mr. Menehune’s on the town album in my collection. If he happens to be playing during one of our scheduled Tucson excursions, a visit might be arranged.
By the way, the mosaic work is very nice indeed!