How Bisbee earned the score

Let us meet Bisbee, Arizona

Bisbee sits in a narrow fold of the Mule Mountains in the far southeast corner of Arizona, about 92 miles from Tucson and a short drive from the Mexican border. It is the county seat of Cochise County, and it is high. The old business district sits at roughly 5,538 feet, comfortably above a mile, which is why summers here stay cool while the desert floor below bakes. The town does not spread out because it cannot. It is wedged into Tombstone Canyon and its side gulches, so the houses climb the walls in stacked rows, connected less by streets than by public staircases cut into the hillside. That geography, an accident of where the ore was, turns out to be the whole story of how Bisbee survived.

The 2020 census counted 4,923 people, down slightly from 5,575 in 2010. That is a rounding error next to what Bisbee once was. In 1910 this was one of the largest and richest towns in the Southwest, and by 1960 it still held 9,914 residents. What Bisbee has now is not scale. It is character, preserved almost by chance, and a visitor economy built on the ruins of the industry that made it.

How Bisbee found its thing, twice

Bisbee was founded in 1880 and named for Judge DeWitt Bisbee, one of the financial backers of the Copper Queen Mine. The ore in the Mule Mountains was extraordinary. Over nearly a century of digging, the district produced something on the order of 8 billion pounds of copper, along with roughly 102 million ounces of silver and 2.8 million ounces of gold, plus zinc, lead, and manganese. That is not a boomtown footnote. That is one of the richest mineral districts on earth, and it built a real city. By 1910 Bisbee had running water, a streetcar, an opera house, and the grandest hotel in the territory. Brewery Gulch, the canyon that ran up from downtown, was said to be the wildest street between El Paso and San Francisco, lined with saloons and brothels and gambling halls that never quite closed.

The Phelps Dodge Corporation ran the town, and not gently. In 1917, during a labor strike, the company and a deputized posse rounded up more than 1,000 striking miners at gunpoint, loaded them into cattle cars, and shipped them sixteen hours out into the New Mexico desert, an episode now known as the Bisbee Deportation. It is one of the darker chapters in American labor history, and Bisbee does not hide it. The point is that this was a company town in the fullest sense. When the company left, there was every reason to think the town would simply die, the way a thousand other Western mining camps had died before it.

By 1974 the ore reserves were running out. Phelps Dodge curtailed the open pit that year and ended underground mining in 1975. The Lavender Pit, the enormous open scar on the edge of town, went quiet. The mine had been the only employer that mattered, and its closure did to Bisbee what closures do. The real estate market collapsed. Hundreds of houses went up for sale at once, and there were almost no buyers, because who moves to a company town after the company is gone.

How Bisbee built the second act

Here is where the accident of geography paid off. Those stacked Victorian and frame houses, built cheap for miners and clinging to the canyon walls, were now some of the least expensive character homes in the American West. That drew a very particular crowd. Through the late 1970s, artists, retirees, back-to-the-land hippies, and a fair number of dropouts started buying Bisbee house by house, often for the price of a used car, and fixing them up. They were not developers. They were people who wanted a strange, beautiful, cheap place to live, and Bisbee was exactly that.

One purchase mattered more than the rest. In 1970, ahead of the full collapse, a man named Stephen Hutchison and his wife Marcia bought the Copper Queen Hotel from Phelps Dodge. The Copper Queen, built between 1898 and 1902, was the town’s architectural anchor, a Victorian pile constructed into the solid rock of the hillside with two-foot walls. It is the oldest continuously operating hotel in Arizona, older than statehood itself. Hutchison renovated it and went on to buy and restore other downtown buildings, and in doing so he gave the incoming creative population something to organize around: a living, working historic core rather than a boarded-up one.

The second, and cleverer, move was to stop treating the dead mine as an embarrassment and start treating it as the attraction. In 1976, volunteers cleared thousands of tons of fallen rock out of the old Queen Mine workings, re-timbered the tunnels, and reopened the mine to visitors on February 1. The genius of it was who would guide the tours: retired Phelps Dodge miners, the same men who had worked the rock, now leading small groups 1,500 feet into the mountain on the original ore train. Visitors put on a hard hat, a headlamp, and a yellow slicker, ride into the cold dark, and hear the work described by people who did it. It is not a diorama. It is the real mine, guided by the real workforce, and it converted a closure into a product almost overnight.

What the second act created

The reinvention worked, and the numbers show it. The Queen Mine tour, reopened in 1976 as a rescue project, now draws on the order of 50,000 to 60,000 visitors a year to a town of under 5,000, which is a remarkable ratio for a paid attraction in a place this remote. In 1971 the city took the old Phelps Dodge General Office Building, built in 1895 as the company’s headquarters, and turned it into the Bisbee Mining and Historical Museum. In 2000 that museum became the first rural museum admitted to the Smithsonian Affiliation Program, a genuine credential for a town this size and a sign that Bisbee had built something serious out of its own past.

The creative population kept layering on more. Bisbee’s gallery scene now runs to more than twenty spaces for a town of a few thousand, including the Artemizia Foundation, which shows heavyweight street artists such as Banksy, Shepard Fairey, and Swoon inside a renovated 1917 schoolhouse. Brewery Gulch, once the wildest street in the territory, came back as an arts and entertainment strip rather than a saloon row. And the town found a way to make its own punishing terrain into an event. The Bisbee 1000 Great Stair Climb, first run in October 1990, sends participants up 1,034 concrete stairs along a 4.5-mile course that threads nine public staircases, many of them built by the Works Progress Administration during the Depression. Cynthia Conroy started it after reading about the stair-climbing fitness craze, and it grew by word of mouth from 200 people in its first year to a capped field of 1,500. In 2012 it won the Governor’s Tourism Award for a special event in a rural area. Only in Bisbee would the staircases people once cursed become the reason to visit.

The heritage became the product

What makes Bisbee a useful case is that it did not import a new identity. It did not build a water park or a factory outlet or chase a theme that had nothing to do with the place. It took the exact thing it already was, a copper camp, and re-sold it. The mine tour sells the mine. The museum sells the company. The stair climb sells the terrain the company left behind. The Copper Queen Hotel sells 1902, ghost and all. Even the town’s reputation for being haunted, anchored by the Copper Queen’s famous resident spirit, is really just the mining past refusing to leave, packaged as a reason to book a room. The creative in-migration did not paper over the industrial history. It curated it.

The score reflects a town that is unusually strong on the things that make a place worth the drive and softer on the things a small, steep, remote town struggles with. Bisbee’s anchor, its brand, and its ability to hold you overnight all grade well, because the mine tour, the Copper Queen designation, and a deep bench of lodging and events give visitors a real reason to come and a real reason to stay. The downtown vitality and curb measures grade lower, which is honest. Bisbee is charming and a little rough, its steepest blocks are hard to keep polished, and its year-round street life is thin outside the events calendar. Those are audit-tier categories, provisional here until a field visit, and they are exactly where a town like this has the most room to climb.

What is next for Bisbee

The open question for Bisbee is the one that hangs over every successful reinvention: what happens as it gentrifies. The cheap houses that seeded the whole revival are not cheap anymore, and the same forces that let artists buy in for the price of a car now price the next generation of artists out. Tourism in Cochise County is real money. A 2019 to 2020 study put visitor spending in the county at about 56 million dollars, supporting hundreds of jobs, with Bisbee taking a meaningful share of the overnight stays. That success is precisely what threatens the oddball authenticity that made Bisbee worth visiting in the first place.

The town’s task now is not to find its thing. It found its thing twice, once in copper and once in the artists who came for the wreckage of copper. The task is to protect what makes it strange while the money rolls in: keep the mine tour guided by people who mean it, keep the galleries independent, keep the staircases climbable, and resist the pressure to sand Bisbee down into just another pretty mountain town. Bisbee is the clearest proof in this study that a post-industrial place does not have to erase its industry to move on. It can charge admission to it. For a fuller version of that argument, see our flagship look at how Thomas Dambo’s trolls boosted tourism and the local economy in Detroit Lakes, another small town that turned one distinctive idea into a reason to make the drive.

Why other towns should study Bisbee’s lead

Bisbee ran a play any faded industrial town can study. Do not be ashamed of what you were. Find the cheapest true asset you have, in Bisbee’s case a canyon full of characterful housing, and let it pull in the people who will do the slow work of restoration. Then take the story of your old industry, the part everyone else would bulldoze, and turn it into the thing visitors pay to experience. A closed mine, guided by the men who worked it, is worth more to Bisbee today than the copper ever was per visitor. That is the whole lesson, dug out of a hole in the Mule Mountains.