I love Westerns, especially the ones by Sergio Leone.
I always find myself peeking over the shoulders of the actors at the beautiful town behind them. Western towns are great! They make a powerful statement, even though most towns like that were little more than villages.
Since most American cowboys were of European descent, you'd think that the Western villages would have resembled the old European models (above), but they didn't. Maybe that's because Europeans lived in their villages and the frontiersmen didn't. Our frontier towns were mostly commercial properties. People did most of their living in the outback.
So why were Western buildings built shoulder-to-shoulder in long, straight strips? It doesn't seem like a very practical design from the point of view of fire prevention. If one store burned down, they probably all burned down. Maybe it was a useful design for breaking the wind and dust that came off the prairie. I'm not sure.
If I had to guess I'd say that the design came out of the ethnic origins of the cowboys. Most were English, Irish and Scots, and Britons in the Old Country loved those kind of linked-up, row house structures (above). Even the U.K. Prime Minister lives in a row house!
But wait...where did those tall colonnades (above) come from? I could swear I've seen them somewhere before....wait a minute...they're all over the place in New Orleans! Holy Mackerel! Does that mean Western towns were influenced by New Orleans!? It's not as crazy as it sounds. Wasn't N.O. considered a frontier town way back when? Maybe it influenced the template. It sounds like we're talking about British row house structures trimmed with French American colonnades!
Of course clean, designer-driven towns like the one above may have existed only in movies. Real old frontier towns weren't as photogenic.
Maybe the exception was Dodge City, Kansas. That always looked pretty good relative to other Western towns. No wonder Wyatt Earp wanted to live there.
Notice the colonnades. You can argue that they were there only there to protect pedestrians from the sun, but that's only half true. Notice how high they are. If protection from the sun was the only consideration, they'd be lower. My guess is that people thought a high colonnade was classy...like The French Quarter in New Orleans, or the old Southern Plantation house facades. In fact, I wonder if the colonnades made people in the pre-Civil War North East antsy because they indicated a Southern influence on the frontier, and the possible extension of slavery to the territories.
But I'm digressing from the point I wanted to make: that Westerners may have perceived their structures not as shacks, but as cutting-edge symbols of cultural refinement. The buildings came out of their belief that they were spreading high culture to the wilderness.
Here's (above) a slightly later picture of Dodge. I guess the city had a lot of strangers passing through and the locals thought it wouldn't hurt to advertise. I wouldn't be surprised if the townspeople regarded the glitzy street with awe, the way we think of The Miracle Mile in Las Vegas now. We see a dirty, gritty town, but I'll bet the proud inhabitants saw Disneyland.
Here's (above) Tombstone, Arizona. It looks like Dodge. My guess is that Dodge impressed people so much that everybody wanted their town to look just like it: British row house-type structures with fancy French, Southern trim and lots of those exciting, beautiful, modern signs.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Westerners regarded those signs almost as works of art. They probably got sentimental about them. It can't be an accident that even tiny, remote towns had beautiful, hand-lettered signs.
Here's Tuscon (above), which is also in Arizona, but which was built on the Mexican/Spanish model. The oldest buildings are mostly Adobe and mud brick, which made sense given that the town was in a desert. Even so, my guess is that cowboys preferred what they considered the eye-dazzling, high culture glitter of the Dodge model.
BTW: what do you think of that wide, arid, sun-exposed center space? Maybe they needed it for cattle, or horse auctions. I hope it had some kind of practical purpose, because it sure is an eyesore. You'd think that desert dwellers would be better at creating shade.
I'm amazed that so many of these God-forsaken desert towns had fancy saloons. Walking into one of these places after a day in the dust must have been like entering a starship. The bars even staged Shakespeare! Oscar Wilde went on a poetry-reading tour of frontier towns like this!
Truly, humans are amazing creatures! We don't mind baking in the sun all day, and doing strenuous, boring work, so long as we can periodically indulge our vices and fortify ourselves with romantic, exciting, Utopian visions!
11 comments:
You completely blew my mind when you compared New Orleans to Western towns. A very keen observation!
You've got a vintage picture of the Palace Bar in Prescott Arizona! That bar came around the tip of South America in the 1880s. I can't count how many beers I drank at that bar when my folks lived in Prescott. When Whiskey Row burned around the turn of the century, everyone risked their lives to haul that bar out the door to safety. It shows how important it was to te town.
Joshua: Thanks much! It's fun to speculate about how people in the past regarded themselves and their surroundings. They didn't think the way we do, and the difference is fascinating.
A further bit of speculation: The colonnades in Western towns gave the towns what people at the time might have regarded as a "Southern" look. That might have been significant in the years before the Civil War when the North was antsy about the spread of slavery into the Western territories.
Steve: You actually drank at that bar!? I'm envious! It's funny that people risked their lives to save it.
So much of the social life in frontier towns centered around bars. I'm not a bar guy myself, but my guess is that we've been too zealous about discouraging them. We may have pushed people away from public drinking into private drug use.
Here is the same bar a century later...
http://www.historicpalace.com/
Steve: Aaaaargh! The bar looks entirely different when the room's lit up like that!
When I went there back in the 80s and 90s, it was a biker bar and had the requisite sleeze. It was covered with moldy taxidermy bobcats too. Since then, Whiskey Row has gone upscale and the Palace is a supper club now.
One other wonderful anecdote.... Little Egypt danced on that bar!
Steve: A biker bar!? And Little Egypt danced there? Who's Little Egypt?
AAAHH! Eddie doesn't know Little Egypt! Amazing!
Little Egypt was a middle Eastern dancer who was the sensation of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. It was the first time belly dancing had been seen in the US. In fact, the term belly dancing didn't exist yet, so promoters made up the names Hoochie Koo and Shimmy Shake to describe it. The performances caused riots and inflamed the league of moral decency, but there was no stopping it. Little Egypt toured the gold mining towns in California and the cowboy towns in Arizona and Colorado in the mid-1890s./early 1900s. It introduced the Dance of the Seven Veils and laid the foundation for everything from burlesque shows to stripping. A book on the subject was written called The Search for Little Egypt.
My dad would proudly point to that bar and tell his friends that Little Egypt danced the Dance of the Seven Veils upon it. I drank more than one toast to Little Egypt sitting at the Palace on Smmer afternoons.
Here is some Edison footage of Little Egypt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FUktaHZWiI
She might een be in Muybridge!
Steve: Fascinating! Thanks for the info! I'm amazed at how influential she was. I wonder how much of belly dancing is authentic, and how much was invented by Little Egypt.
BTW, I read something that said there were three Little Egypts. The second stole the first one's name and idea, and the third stole from the second. I'm amazed at how common plaigarism was in those days.
Although you didn't get any shade,the wide streets had a purpose. A team of horses and a wagon need a lot of room to turn, and also horses sometimes get a mind to do their own thing or spook. That wide open space gave one room to get away from the crazed horse or horses, and and others to deal with them. Mesa Arizona was built by Mormon settlers and they had a rule that a street had to be wide enough to turn a wagon, that was however big, pulled by a team of horses, that was however many, in a u-turn easily. (I can't remember the number of horses or the wagon size, sorry). I live in Prescott and Wiskey Row has mostly turned into touristy boutiques and "specialty" shops.Sad really.
Loran: So THAT'S it! Now I understand. Thanks!
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