Bisbee, Arizona, Then And Now: 01/13/17

Bisbee, Arizona, Then And Now by Boyd Nicholl is a short picture history of the old mining town, Bisbee. Like the usual Then and Now format, the book has a spread with a historic photograph compared to a more recent one.

I've not personally been to Bisbee but I have family ties to the city. My step-grandfather was born and raised there. Some of the historic photographs are from when he was living there, though he would have been a toddler.

This book must have had a small run. By the time I heard of it (in about 2006 or so) it was already out print. Bisbee is 90 miles southest of Tucson (and for other familial reasons, Tucson was the farthest east we ever seemed to go on our family car trips). As of 2010 it had a population of 5,575. At it's largest in its boom town days (1880-1920) it had a population of about twice what it has today.

Although the new photographs in the Bisbee book are now themselves years old, some being twenty or so years old, they're still interesting. Bisbee with its stable population and its arid climate seems comfortable in a slow rate of change. Granted, tourism to see the historic mining town and the mine, is probably part of the incentive to keep things the same, I think it's just one of those towns that doesn't feel the need to reinvent itself every decade or so.

Five stars

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