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!
