D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
July 2009
Melvin Huff
Page: 2As we continue our tour, Huff's running commentary underscores how layers of history are reflected in Silver City's architecture. Less than a block from my own home — either a Santa Rita or Vanadium transplant that spent several years alongside Hwy. 180 as a State Farm office before setting down near Boston Hill — he identifies a former barracks that once accommodated post-war soldiers on the WNMU campus. During the next two hours, I learn that old GI and CCC barracks are planted along side-streets all over town, many converted into rental duplexes.
"Can you see under the trees? These cottages are relocated from the old tuberculosis sanitarium that was out on Cottage San Road," announces Huff, as we come to a stop on the 1300-block of Georgia Street. Now remodeled, the pebble-dashed frame buildings were constructed in the early 1900s to house "consumption" patients sent to Silver City for the presumed health-affirming benefits of its clean air, bright sunshine and mild climate. Like other newcomers, it has taken me awhile to realize that "Cottage San" is an abbreviation of "Cottage Sanitarium" — and even longer to discover that some of the old "porch" cottages still exist at the original location a few miles north of town.
By now Huff is on a roll. With his unerring assistance, I pick out a few old adobes, most with corrugated metal roofs, dotting the sides of Brewer Hill. I notice the cut-limestone foundation of the 1906 Elks Club Opera House on Market Street, the railyard warehouse that once stored the town's always-ample beer and wine reserves, the purple building on Bullard that once housed Zeke's Grocery, and the Santa Rita church resurrected as a Newman Center near the university.
Huff regales me with stories of parked cars being swept down Yankie Street during monsoon rains — only to be caught by anchor-size chains stretched across Yankie's drop-off into the Big Ditch, installed for the express purpose of keeping autos from floating into San Vicente Creek. Another highlight of our tour is a redwood fence along Swan Street made of tall, scorched staves that once were strapped together to form a wooden pipe, part of a long-gone water system that served part of Hurley's mine works. I had driven past this fence hundreds of times without noticing it.
Much later, seated around Huff's dining-room table, the discussion turns to the role mines might play in Grant County's future. "I think they'll stay," he muses, "because you can still work low-quality ore with the electro-winning process. But it's a poor man's way to make copper and they won't need as many men."
Huff recalls that during World War II, area mines worked ore that was averaging 2% copper content per ton. "When I retired, it was four-tenths of one percent. Nowadays you have so much overburden to move even to get at low-grade ore." Smelters and mills, he agrees, aren't coming back to Grant County.
Retail trade, health care, agriculture, tourism and retiree income will continue contributing to the local economic mix, he predicts. But for the near-term Silver City will rely on a service-oriented economy with a low wage scale.
"It is a tough place to make a living right now," Huff concedes. "The only people getting big money here, as a group, are the nurses and doctors." He points out, however, that it is hard to get health professionals to stick around due to Grant County's isolation and its lack of certain amenities, such as upscale shopping and performing arts. "But I think the year-round climate is ideal and if you are here awhile many people come to recognize this." The small-town atmosphere and large regional hospital, he suggests, will continue to attract a certain type of retiree.
Asked whether the nascent Silver City art district and adjacent Bullard Street retail sector may portend a reviving economy, Huff sounds pessimistic. He ticks off a list of reasons to discount such a trend, singling out "those who start businesses who don't know what they're doing," speculators who spend too much on old buildings without a realistic expectation a profitable return on investment, and the intrusion of "hysterical people" — Huff's euphemism for at least some promoters of historic-district preservation — into civic affairs.
But the biggest obstacle to downtown revival, he maintains, is something mundane. "Where are you gonna put your car?" he asks rhetorically. "I can't see how you're going to get much business [along Bullard] without better parking. If you don't have that, people aren't going to come." The cruel irony, according to Huff, is that plenty of customers will walk the equivalent of a block or more across Wal-Mart's oceanic parking lot, but never consider walking a fraction of the same distance within Silver City's historic downtown.
"But you know," he concludes, "I had a father-in-law who would spend 20 minutes driving around looking for the exact parking spot he wanted. He wouldn't think to park a little farther away and walk." This was more than half a century ago.
Live long enough and things do come around twice, for better or worse. Me? I'm thankful for my little miner's house, after its intermediate incarnations as an insurance office, church, therapist's clinic and college crash pad. Decades later, it is back to being someone's cozy home.
Southwest Storylines columnist Richard Mahler is a 21-year resident of New Mexico who leads tours of Silver City's historic district when not writing for Desert Exposure, New Mexico Journey and New Mexico Magazine. Learn more at www.RichardMahler.com.