The Price of Boredom

The bumper sticker is really an inside joke. I saw it on a car yesterday and had to reflect on the slogan: “Keep Warren Boring.” Locals will recognize Warren as the large Bisbee neighborhood which splays out south of the Lavender Pit, a place where the “nice” people lived in the early years of the twentieth century. It is still home to our community hospital, our lone elementary school,

and a few second hand shops, but almost all of the businesses that used to line Arizona Avenue were shuttered years ago. There remains a quiet residential area with some pretty nice looking homes in various stages of deterioration and a strip-designed city park that hosts our weekly farmer’s market. Overall a sleepy, quiet place and one overlooked by the tourists who frequent Old Bisbee every weekend to carouse in the many saloons. So, yes, Warren is boring and it looks likely to stay that way.

Keeping a place boring requires that residents look elsewhere for commerce and entertainment. For Bisbee citizens, that means a drive to Sierra Vista for almost everything other than groceries. With a population that exceeds Bozeman, Montana, “Sorry Vista” is a vast area of strip malls and franchises such as Outback and McDonald’s. It is a city without a core, lacking a downtown area

in favor of sprawling development that guarantees the necessity of driving some sort of vehicle to shop, worship, or eat. It resembles the worst of Tucson’s development where older ugly temporary buildings are periodically bulldozed to throw up newer ugly ones, and where directions are generally given by using chain restaurants as geographic waypoints.

We can indeed glory that Warren is “boring” (or even the rest of Bisbee) because Sierra Vista offers us the luxury of keeping it that way. We drove over to the big city yesterday for a doctor’s appoinment and had a wonderful lunch, but it is always somewhat stressful to deal with busy intersections and traffic lights. We have neither in Old Bisbee, and I hope it remains that way (even if it is boring.