Main Street, Florence

FRIENDLY FLORENCE THOUGH CRIMINALS OUTNUMBER CITIZENS ABOUT 2 ΤΟ 1, THIS MIDWESTERN-STYLE SMALL TOWN IN THE DESERT REMAINS VIRTUALLY FELONY-FREE

recognized Florence's Main Street immediately. Not just as a waypoint along the highway with vacancy signs lighting the way but as a mining boomtown. Boomtowns all look alike, whether in northern Michigan or a one-hour drive southeast of Phoenix where Florence's Main Street slices through a subdued downtown without parking meters, past mom and pop stores, and where jaywalkers have little to fear from the feeble traffic.

When silver from a nearby bonanza flowed like a river through town in the 1880s, rows of Territorial-style buildings and several saloons sprang up, as did Arizona's first federal land office. There was even talk Congress might locate a U.S. mint there.

Then the Silver King, near present-day Superior, 31 wagon miles to the northeast, petered out-mines always do-and soon after, the promoters left. Agricultural claims filed on former Indian lands sustained the boom for several more years. Eventually, however, more successful places eclipsed Florence, and the town quietly tiptoed into the 20th century, a peaceable place with a few taverns and a fancy 1891 Victorian-style courthouse. A railroad spur arrived in 1904, followed by the main highway between Phoenix and Tucson. The Territorial prison moved to the outskirts of town in 1909, providing employment with a steady paycheck. Hollywood cowboy Tom Mix sometimes bent an elbow at the town's bars in the 1930s.

World War II breathed vitality into Main Street. The U.S. Army built a camp for German and Italian POWs across the usually dry Gila River where Florence Gardens subdivision stands now. As a boy, Manuel Y. Remigio, a retired custodian for the Pinal County courthouse, shined the guards' shoes when they came to town on Saturdays to enjoy the taverns and other diversions.

"Main Street was just a strip of pavement," he remembers. "The other streets were dirt." When the Army left, Florence returned to AFTER A LIFE AS A PHOTOGRAPHER OF FAMOUS ARCHITECT FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AT WORK. 'I LIKE TO IMAGINE I'M WALKING THE SAME STREETS MY GREATGRANDFATHER AND GREATGRANDMOTHER DID.'

FAMILY ASSOCIATIONS BROUGHT GUERRERO BACK TO FLORENCE

Being a quiet town that people went to just to visit inmates and then moved on-there being only two small motels. While scarce in cities, a surplus of "quiet" still surrounds Florence, where you can hear sounds that would be lost in a larger community. And not even with the glow of the prison does the town of 4,500 produce enough light to blot out the Milky Way arching across clear desert nights.

Jimmy Westfall, a retired irrigation district water boss, takes these natural luxuries for granted. His family has always lived in Florence, back to his great-grandparents-he was German, she Spanish and Mexicanwho arrived during the silver boom and stayed after the fizzle.

Westfall's boyhood memories include shooting pool, hanging out at an ice cream parlor and exploring the countryside. These days, the main excitement in Florence is the high school sports competition with rivals Coolidge, a cotton-farming area, and the mining town of Superior.

I drove warily. Small-town police are tough on speed outlaws, and on Main Street the limit is 25 miles per hour. Sure enough, a cop in a parked squad car eyeballed me as I crawled the few short blocks of Main. It's a time-machine-type experience as you pass 139 Territorial-style businesses and homes listed on the National Historic Register. Except for a hamburger joint on the town's edge and a couple of convenience stores, the ubiquitous chain stores remain absent. The sign for Murphy's Eating Establishment reminded me that Hollywood found Florence's small-town quality endearing and turned Main Street into a set for Murphy's Romance, a 1985 flick starring James Garner and Sally Field, with townspeople playing themselves. Locals still talk about it. Owner Sandi Tyus replays the movie daily on an overhead TV for lunchtime customers in the 1916 building portrayed as Murphy's pharmacy in the movie. Paintings of Garner and Field adorn the front windows and "Not one day goes by that someone is not taking a photo of the faces," Tyus reported. "I've had a good business for five years," she said. The main problem-one shared by small towns everywhereis finding help.

She trains teenagers, but after high school graduation they always leave for faster places. "When the kids come back, I keep feeding them," she said. "They're like my own kids."

Along Main Street, as in most small towns, commercial bank credit can be an elusive commodity. Florence has a branch bank and a credit union. That's it, except for a couple more small banks 20 miles away in Coolidge.

"Our business expectations might be different than you'd find in the city," explained accountant Nedra N. Quick, a spokesperson for the Greater Florence Chamber of Commerce. "We have to have bankers who are willing to look at us in the setting we arein, and this is a difficult subject" because, she said, "sometimes the decisionmakers aren't there."

Main Street stops short of the Gila River bottom and turns toward the new town hall where I found Building Inspector Larry L. Quick, Nedra's husband. The couple live about 9 miles outside of town, on an emu ranch.

Quick reminded me that historic towns can have a downside.

"Being an older town," he said, "we deal in a lot of hazardous wiring." He pointed to an octopuslike tangle of knob-and-tube wiring from the early 1900s in a corner of his office. Fires have left gaps along Main Street. The theater in Murphy's Romance is gone. So is the ranch house. The second story of the only grocery store in town, an 1890 building with pressed-tin ceilings, was lost in 1948. Gone also is the Tunnel Saloon, scene of a long-ago gunfight. The Silver King Hotel, named for the lode mine, stood gutted for years, but state Heritage Fund money is rebuilding it.Whenever 81-year-old Pedro E. Guerrero passes the Silver King he thinks of his grandmother, who died of peritonitis in one of its rooms. Family associations brought Guerrero back to Florence after a life as a photographer of famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright at work.

"I like to imagine that I'm walking down the same streets my great-grandfather and great-grandmother did," he said. Guerrero's great-grandfather, Peter Collier Warner, was a pioneer Florence landowner who died in1908. “We had to move him to a new ceme-tery in Casa Grande because a high school auditorium was to be built on the [old] grounds.” Fifty years later, the family moved Warner again, this time to the Florence cemetery where Guerrero's grandmother was buried.

After deciding he liked Florence enough to move there himself, Guerrero bought the 1888 Jacob Suter House when he was 78. “It was an age when I should have been look-ing for a job as a school crossing guard,” he said, laughing. “Instead, I was headed into new territory with plans to bring my Frank Lloyd Wright archives to Florence.” In Florence, there's plenty of demand for housing but often nothing for sale. As a consequence, most prison employees live elsewhere, taking with them their $3 million annual payroll.

A few refugees from cities have come to Florence in search of a small-town lifestyle. Naturalist Vera M. Walters, 53, formerly of Prescott, arrived in town in 1997 and considered herself fortunate to find a house for sale. Later she moved into a historic building on Main Street and opened a craft shop. In summer, when the desert heat descends on the town, she works part time as a high-country ranger for the National Park Service. In winter, Walters enjoys hikes into the paloverde-dotted desert that begins where Florence leaves off.

You can take the full measure of Florence from the intersection of Main and Butte, where the edge of town is visible in all the cardinal directions. The state prison, draped in stainless razor wire, dominates the south end, across State Route 79.

The joke around Florence says that most of its residents are in jail. Between 8,000 and 10,000 inmates are locked up in three government and two private prisons. Florence gladly includes the convicts for a larger share of state tax revenue.

Fifteen minutes walking will take you almost anywhere in Florence. There is no home mail delivery in town, so many folks consider a stroll to the post office downtown a part of their day. Benches on the porch accommodate kibitzers.

The Pinal County Visitor Center, housed in an 1892 cottage, entices people to Florence with assurances of small-town living. The director, Brenda Wallace, arrived two years ago from Tucson. Her husband works at the prison and is a volunteer fireman.

Compared to large cities, she remarked, “It's cheaper living in a small town. School classes are smaller.” And, she added with a smile, “You have quick and easy access to the politicians. They all live close by.” Very little stays a secret in small towns for long. Wallace quoted a sign in a Florence café window: “This ain't gossip; I'm just telling facts.” Small towns usually have a funny bone. Take the time when a Florence man paddled his canoe down Main Street following a particularly heavy downpour. He was tick-eted, but the stunt lives on in town legend.

As for crime, Wallace said, “Local people have no feel for a real crime wave, having never experienced one.” However, three years ago, when workmen uncovered a shallow grave containing a skeleton on an apartment site, the town buzzed with the exciting news. It looked like a big-city crime mystery for sure.

Douglas S. Epley of Mesa, general contractor on the apartment building, said the police were called on suspicion the skeleton might be a homicide, but the bones turned out instead to be from a very old unmarked Indian burial site. Artifacts found along Florence's riverbank indicate that American Indians lived there first, for several hundred years.

In all, six graves were found on the construction site, with five holding cremated remains. As each grave was unearthed, Salt River-Pima officials collected the remains for ritual reburial on nearby tribal land.

Urban spillover from Phoenix suburbs to the north steadily advances across the desert, threatening Florence's small-town identity. Town officials considered annexation rules that would enable the town to swallow encroachments and avoid encirclement by bigger, more powerful local governments.

Father Charles Cloud, pastor of the 1870 Roman Catholic Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, arrived from Tucson in 1997 to tend a parish of about 300 mostly “good, solid, middle-class” two-income families. The congregation has grown to about 600.

“Everyone sees the value of a small town,” he said. “You see the streets are clean. They want good things to happen to the place. But the writing is on the wall. They've already approved 50,000 [new] houses north of us. They have three golf courses up there already.

“If we don't grow, we will be surrounded,” he predicted. “Either we get control or we become a victim of it.” AH Tom Kuhn of Phoenix has traveled in and reported on Arizona for 27 years.

Phoenix-based Dan Coogan plans to go back to Florence when he can spend more time there.

Ten Eyes on Lake Powell

'The Cinco Amigos' focus on the terrain's stark beauty and off-season calm

PORTFOLIO RANDY PRENTICE

Preceding panel, pages 24-25: Traveling with four other photographers creates competition for the best spots. I make it a point to be the first one off the houseboat this time. Scrambling up a rocky hill, I look eastward beyond a sandy peninsula toward Gunsight Butte and say to myself, "I'll take it!"

NICK BEREZENKO

Left: The sun starts to break through the clouds, so I hurriedly find a tiny rock island and beach the boat. I am delighted with the ridged lines of the chalky rock and the turquoise water lapping against them. Spindle-topped Boundary Butte makes a prominent background element.

DAVID ELMS JR.

Right: I work my way along the crest of a little island in predawn light and suddenly the scene stops me before I walk into it. Dune grasses frame a glowing Gunsight Butte across the bay. I quickly set up the camera just as the sun lights the foreground.

One afternoon we walk onto the rear deck of the houseboat. The world appears upside down. At our feet, weird buttes float inverted in an azure sky, while above, whitecotton puffs of cloud daub a lake of blue. The scene stays so perfectly still - not a sigh of wind it allows perfect mirror images. The sky reflects in the lake, razor-sharp images frozen with not a ruffle on the water. I feel as if Creation is holding its breath. What a strange and surprising land we've come to. Five of us, photographers all, The Cinco Amigos. "Let's do Lake Powell in the off-season," we had said. And so we are. In the week we spend here, five pairs of eyes, five viewpoints see and record a panoply of sights and colors. A week of gold-flecked sunsets born in boisterous storms, of intermittent rains and photogenic fury. And during this week, quite often, we're blessed to watch Creation holding its breath. - Nick Berezenko

PORTFOLIO

PETER ENSENBERGER Preceding panel, pages 28-29: I am nearly out of film. Determined to make my last three exposures count, I wait patiently as rosy rays of sunlight alternately highlight first the foreground, then the background. Then, in one last surge of light, the horizon opens, illuminating all of Padre Bay. It is my last photograph of the trip.

RICHARD EMBERY Above: Lake Powell is a spiritual place for me, where stone spires touch the sky. The sculpture of Dominguez Butte, created by the scouring of wind and rain, is as spectacular as any cathedral. The canyons of the lake envelop me with a sense of quiet. When I am here, time stands still.

DAVID ELMS JR. Right: Standing in the creek bed below Rainbow Bridge, I reposition the camera and sink ankle-deep into mud. I don't need this, I think to myself. What I need are dark clouds behind the bridge with the light peeking through. Luck being 99 percent preparation, I am ready when the clouds pass and the sun shines.

RANDY PRENTICE

Left: Wandering over dunes and cross-bedded sandstone, I realize I can't see the lake from here. I reverse direction and head toward the water, Just beyond a field of giant boulders, I witness a beautiful scene: the placid channel of Face Canyon stippled with reflections.

PORTFOLIO NICK BEREZENKO

Above: Off the boat and hiking through pristine backcountry above Face Canyon, I am glad to have the feel of solid ground beneath my boots. I notice terraces on the side of a butte echoing the layering clouds in a tempestuous sky, and I recall musing with Randy Prentice about the repetition of form.