Travel publishers produce a great many lists of overlooked Arizona towns, and buried in the current crop is the single best lesson about place-making that commerce has ever produced.
In 1958 Robert McCulloch, a chainsaw and oil man, bought 3,353 acres on the east side of Lake Havasu and set about developing it. The problem was immediate and total: the land sat far from any centre of population, in a very hot, arid climate, and the estate agents could not persuade anybody to come and look at it. There was nothing wrong with the land. There was simply no reason to go.
His agent, Robert Plumer, heard that London Bridge was for sale. The City of London had put the 1831 structure up for auction because by 1962 it could no longer carry the traffic. McCulloch’s reported first reaction was that it was the craziest idea he had ever heard. He then placed the winning bid of $2,460,000 on 18 April 1968, had the exterior granite cut into 10,276 numbered blocks, shipped them through the Panama Canal to Long Beach and trucked them across the desert. The bridge, a reinforced concrete structure clad in the original 1830s masonry, was completed in 1971 along with a canal dug to give it something to span.
He did it to attract tourists and retirement home buyers to his properties. It worked. Lake Havasu City exists.
Now hold that next to what every list of overlooked towns is actually telling you.
Overlooked is a supply word pretending to be a verdict. Tubac has more than thirty galleries and the first European settlement in the state. Jerome is a copper town on a hillside that turned itself into an arts colony. Bisbee is the southernmost mile-high city in the country. Patagonia has recorded more than 260 bird species. None of those places lack qualities. What they lack, relative to Sedona, is a reason legible enough to make a stranger commit a Saturday.
That is the thing McCulloch understood and almost nobody else does. The reason people come somewhere is manufactured far more often than it is discovered. Sedona has the red rock and nearly three million visitors a year, and the rock did not decide to become a destination; an accumulation of trailheads, galleries, hotels and photographs did. Tombstone has traded on a thirty-second gunfight from 1881 for a hundred and forty years and built a whole town’s economy on it.
Which is the operating lesson for anyone opening anything anywhere quiet.
The mistake is to wait for the area to improve. The area will not improve on its own, because improvement is exactly the set of things you are considering being the first to do. What moves a location is one thing striking enough to be worth a journey, and then everything else arranging itself around the traffic that thing generates. The cafe does not follow the footfall. In a place with no footfall, the cafe is the bridge.
You do not need $2.5 million of granite. You need the small-town version, which is the single unreasonable thing: the roaster who imports one lot nobody else in the state has, the bakery that does one bread properly and sells out by ten, the room that books a band on a Tuesday because nowhere else does.
Unreasonable is the point. Reasonable is invisible.
Ten thousand two hundred and seventy-six numbered stones, shipped across an ocean, to sell a hot piece of nothing.
Source: WorldAtlas, “11 Overlooked Towns In Arizona Worth Visiting”
