Pump and Circumstance: Bisbee, Arizona's Indian Motorcycle building

Bisbee, Arizona sits 90 miles southeast of Tucson in the Mule Mountains on the Mexican border and is a very cool place. It was a huge mining town in the early 1900s and had the largest population between San Francisco and St. Louis at that time. Bisbee continued to be a mining community until the 1970s but today it is mostly known as a funky and free-spirited artist community. You could spends days walking around taking pictures of all the cool old Victorian buildings and their colorful inhabitants and their pursuits, the most spectacular of which is the Shady Dell vintage travel trailer park, which I'll get to in a future post.

We got onto a quiet avenue somewhat ironically called Main Street that led us to some beautifully melancholy street scenery. Several posts are needed to do it all justice, so here's the first one. We spotted an abandoned-looking (save for a satellite dish) red brick building with a gorgeous Indian Motorcycle sign painted on its exterior. Out front were two old Texaco pumps and a 1940s yellow Chrysler taxi cab, all just sitting there for the benefit of no one in particular. I love places like this, seeming caught in a time vacuum while the rest of the world hurries by.