Iconic Americana Just North of the Mexican Border
It’s not just the flying saucers painted on this little town’s welcome sign, Lowell is such a well-preserved piece of the past that it could make you wonder if its residents were abducted on-site without a moment’s notice. But in the most charming, magical way possible.
The older I get, the more I long for a simpler time. Since I wasn’t alive during the time periods I crave, I suspect that shows like The Wonder Years and movies like The Sandlot have painted a picture of a less complicated, more optimistic way of life, that’s stuck with me throughout most of mine. I’ve found traces of this bygone era in a few small towns I’ve visited. Sometimes I channel the essence of this feeling, this point in time, like an internal happy place, the way some might think of lying in a hammock between two palm trees on a white-sand beach.
Bisbee captures that coveted place and time that I and so many others are enchanted by. You can immerse yourself in the feeling on Main Street which becomes Tombstone Canyon Road, or when you take that road a bit further south, into Historic Lowell. About a half-mile from the wide-open Lavender Pit – a cool piece of history that was once very lucrative for the town, you’ll find Eerie Street, a place that seems so appropriately named to showcase the many abandoned buildings that occupy it. The thing is, Lowell isn’t really a ghost town. It’s not like one of Arizona’s many deserted mining towns that only contain the scraps of building remains, a field full of cemetery headstones, the remnants of days gone by, and a quiet, solemn aura you can almost see. No, Lowell isn’t really a ghost town at all, though all of its residents appear to have disappeared overnight, leaving their 1940s and 50s, American-made vehicles and storefronts behind. And though I’d like to believe that this town’s abandonment was the result of some mass alien abduction, that’s not likely the case. Once mining operations were shut down in the mid-70s, the town grew poorer and lost the bulk of its population; a cultural shift was underway. But despite the town's tragedies and checkered past, Bisbee is the most welcoming, colorful, free-spirited place I’ve ever been. You’ve probably heard of Tombstone, Arizona (23 miles north) being “The town too tough to die,” well Bisbee is known to some as “The town too loved to die.”
Most of Bisbee's districts have survived and transformed with roots still intact. But Historic Lowell is different. Again, not a ghost town despite its abandoned police station and jail, iconic abandoned gas station, and vacant storefronts. The real reason Lowell still so closely resembles its rip-roaring heyday, is because of a group of volunteers, rounded up by nostalgia-inspired, Jay Allen. He and his team have been working hard behind the scenes and right out on that 700-foot-long road to preserve a piece of the past that no one wants to forget. The Lowell Americana Project was founded for and by those who treasure the look and feel of the small-town intricacies that were the hallmark of America in the 1940s and 50s. Classic automobiles and antique gas pumps line Eerie Street, in front of an eclectic collection of stores like a high-fashion hat shop, a five and dime, a once-popular movie theater. Authentic ads for "Lowell life" and Schlitz beer decorate window displays. And one bustling business remains and has grown several other branches throughout Arizona, The Bisbee Breakfast Club – best eggs in Cochise County and right in the heart of an intriguingly desolate destination just north of the Mexican border. For off-the-beaten-path enthusiasts, road-less-traveled wanderers, and vintage Americana admirers this is a part of town that's truly not to be missed.
Being there is a welcome reminder of a simpler time, before the digital age, before texts and tweets, DMs and CRM, and 19+ brands of water were competing for your attention. Before plastic packaging had to be labeled, “This is not a toy." Back when finding a $2 bill would’ve been more common than spotting a German or Japanese car in your travels. I wonder if people who lived during the 1940s and 50s looked back at earlier decades and longed for an even simpler time. I think most people have probably been guilty of yearning for the past, or racing into the future, at one time or another. It makes me think of a particularly powerful quote from the movie Dazed and Confused, “…the Sixties rocked, and the Seventies..oh god..well, they obviously suck...maybe the Eighties will be radical.”
60-some-odd years down the road, or even now, people might be aching for a time when the milkman would hand-deliver milk in glass bottles. How many of us would relish the chance to trade our EarPods and self-driving electric cars in for the keys to something a lot less National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved? Something that may or may not have airbags, something a bit more rickety to take them down that dusty, baron two-lane highway they’ve pictured in their minds for all time. You know, the one with hand-painted, hand-nailed, wooden signs that say “13 miles to Aunt Paula’s Home-Grown Pecans.”
I’m happy to drive a Subaru with airbags intact, and I can’t imagine my life without my MacBook, but simple times still call. I guess the moral of the story is to find happiness in the present moment. Looking forward or back too much deprives us of right now. But, if in this moment in my central-air-conditioned room, typing on my precious laptop, daydreaming about a fantasy world I never got to live in, where diners were great for date nights,
and warm summer nights were complete with two rocking chairs on a front porch, and gas was 17 cents a gallon, I’m finding a way to enjoy what was and what is simultaneously.
For more food for thought and tidbits on places few tourists go, follow me @ArcticTumbleweed.
