This southern Arizona town, once a tourist haven, is struggling during the coronavirus pandemic.
Mike Anderson waded through knee-high weeds as his index finger traced a path along a crinkled map of Evergreen Cemetery.He walked briskly down a row of headstones, his masked face sweating under the cloudless afternoon sky, until he spotted three slabs of granite whose death dates now echo back to a frightening moment here in southeastern Arizona.
“Businesses that have been mainstays for years could be gone by the end of the year,” said Kathy Sowden, who owns an antique shop near the center of town and expects to see profits decreasethe pandemic, people from across the country flocked to Bisbee to drink at the local brewery and stroll Main Street gawking to the rusting tin roofs of old miners’ homes clinging to the cliff sides.
The library — which has 32,000 books, including a volume of the town’s history — has now been closed 99 days and counting. Copper production boomed and mines expanded during World War I; the smaller towns of Warren and Lowell flourished on Bisbee’s outskirts. In the summer of 1917, as miners staged a strike over working conditions at Phelps Dodge, the area’s major mining company, an armed posse of local law enforcement and businessmen rounded up about 1,300 miners and shipped them off on trains to New Mexico. The area was devastated and torn apart by the incident later known as the Bisbee Deportation.
Gov. Doug Ducey allowed businesses to reopen in May — a move that fell in line with President Trump’s rush to revive the nation but led to the current surge — Smith was frustrated and upset.“It was too soon,” he said, “way too soon to open.”The “Too Soon Arizona” movement is dividing business owners in the tourist town of Bisbee.
The bodega has been Sowid’s life for the last five years. He moved to southeastern Arizona from Lebanon in 1980 to study at Cochise College. He met his wife, the daughter of a miner, and he settled into Bisbee. Over the years, family has come to visit and recently, his nephew, Hassan Sowid, moved here on a student visa to study nursing at his alma matter. Now, Hassan works part time in his uncle’s store.
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