In Defense of Deserts

An early autumn sunset sets the sky aflame in Joshua Tree National Park in southeastern California.  When you take a closer look, you see beyond the reds and catch the blue sky beyond the clouds, and below, the subtle shades of the plants and hills.  The desert, it seems, always rewards a second look.  Rainfall is rare here, and this faint rainbow seemed like a visitor from another world...

Sunsets present themselves in endless variety and subtlety, giving a depth to an ordinary intersection on Twentynine Palms Highway.

About 72.5 miles from the southern entrance to Joshua Tree National Park, you will find the Galleta Meadows Estate in Borrego Springs, featuring about 130 impressively-scaled metal sculptures.  The unfenced, privately-owned site is open to the public every day of the year, for hiking, horseback riding, and of course photography...

The sculptures were all created by Ricardo Breceda and commissioned by landowner Dennis Avery, with the goal of land conservation and sponsoring a public art display.  There are diverse themes, including native animals like bighorn sheep and these life-size, wild horses above, and this giant scorpion facing desert insects.  Other themes focus on prehistoric animals including dinosaurs...

The sculptor also created mythical beasts...

Seen at enough distance, you can take in the full length of the 350 feet of Breceda's  sand dragon sculpture. 

The sculptures, including the tortoises below, were all created from 2008 to 2012, when Dennis Avery died.  Because of his land conservation effort, the Galleta Meadows Estate protects actual wild creatures and plants, as well as the metal kind, and because of this the land will be protected from development.   

Our two photographers exercised extra caution because serpents (the real, not sculptural kind) are common in the desert.  Despite precautions, one was surprised to be at face-level after turning around, with a rattlesnake coiled up in rocky crevice, just inches behind him.  Because he is dedicated to his craft, he got the shot, and avoided any bites...

This art car was a late 90s Buick (we think) under that eye-catching psychedelic paintwork, photographed at Rainbowland in Joshua Tree, a 3-acre art park with gallery and work studio. The park, facilities, and works were created by artist Patrick Hasson.  Somehow, California car culture has collided here with what was once called the counterculture...

A somehow-related roadside attraction invites passers-by to share their joys.  By an eerie coincidence, "my dogs" is listed over "Picasso", which stunned our other photographer because she had a legendary, much-loved hound named after Pablo Picasso.  The cosmic, psychedelic alignments keep coming, in true California style.

Just 45.5 miles west on I-10 from Joshua Tree National Park, you'll find the desert town of Palm Springs.  Though it gained fame as a center of mid-century modern architecture in the 50s and 60s, architect Lloyd Wright (son of Frank) got the ball rolling with his 1924 design of the Oasis Hotel, with innovative concrete block construction. Other postwar architects adopted perforated concrete blocks and shady metal vaulted trellises, as here, in the Old Las Palmas neighborhood...

In the same neighborhood, this mid-century bungalow forms a style suited to the then-new car culture, and the postwar innovation of air conditioning.  When I once asked a Palm Springs friend if she planned to take her dog for a nice, post-sunset walk, she replied, "Are you crazy?  It's still a hundred outside."

Even a spaceship gas station qualifies for landmark status, because of its reinforced concrete structural expressionism and futurist adventurism. Ironies abound; the futurism dates from 1964, when architect William Cody created this design.  Back to the future...

But we will want return you to the desert before closing, back out in the primordial wilds.

At Joshua Tree, this coyote pup levels his gaze at the photographer before moving on...

Because the desert rewards a second look, you realize that it is teeming with life in amazing diversity.  Folks who avoid the desert (after all, it can be hot and dry, and can make demands of us), often assume it's a vast, empty place.  After you spend some sustained time out in wild nature, perhaps you may experience a shift of perspective.  Perhaps the truly empty spaces are ill-considered artifacts of our civilization: the vast asphalt parking lots with oppressive sodium-vapor lighting, the AI data centers, and the first postwar suburban tract developments that leveled hills and cut down trees to maximize profits. We hope you take that second look, and treat the landscape and its creatures with respect.  You may come home with new gifts...

Photo Credits:  

All photos were generously provided by Veronika Sprinkel, a frequent contributor in past days of this blog, except the rattlesnake and the coyote pup shots from Duncan Mackenzie. Our wildlife photographer friends concluded their desert adventures happily, without any injuries, despite that one close call with that rattler...

Roadside Attraction: Durango's Smiley Building Finds New Life Through Community Involvement

 

We first heard about the Smiley Building from an artist friend* in Durango, a southwest Colorado town with over 6,500 feet of elevation, under 20,000 people, and a vibrant downtown. The Smiley is a landmark junior high school designed by Colorado Springs architect Charles Thomas and built in 1936 with funding from the Federal Government's Works Progress Administration. 

The school was named for Emory Smiley, a school superintendent very popular with students. Smiley resisted having a school named after him, but he lost that argument. The school served as a junior high for 25 years, converted to a high school 25 years later, and the school district moved its programs to another school sixty years after the school was designed. That meant the historic structure was suddenly quiet and vacant…

But not for long.  Local brothers Charles and John Shaw, along with Charles' wife Lisa Bodwalk, proposed conversion to a community center with a cafe, gallery space and artists' studios, and the school district sold them the building in 1997. The Smiley Studios nonprofit soon got to work with hundreds of  community volunteers on repairing damage on the 45,000 square foot structure, setting up a window restoration shop in the basement after receiving a grant in 1999. The Shaws provided supervision and much of the labor on the windows.   In 2001 another grant funded a historic restoration study by Atkinson-Noland & Associates of Boulder, addressing brick masonry restoration.    

The new owners also focused on making the complex energy efficient and self-sustaining, installing a large array of PV cells on the building and over the parking walkway, and drilling 20 new wells to power ground-source heat pumps that provide winter heating as well as summer cooling.  In 2008, the Smiley Building was awarded the Colorado Governor's Excellence in Renewable Energy Award as a pioneering carbon-free energy project.

Along with the building restoration and energy projects, the exterior received some artistic attention. These murals, in the spirit of WPA-era public art, were produced by artist Brad Goodell and dedicated in 2025...

On a recent afternoon, the Smiley is busy inside.  You can order a coffee and a pastry at the Smiley Café, check email or just people watch.  Along with artists' studios and apartments, the building houses dance studios, nonprofit offices, a greenhouse and 2 schools...

Along with the ArtRoom Collective, a big artists' work space with individual studios for producing and displaying art ranging in size from jewelry to wall-size paintings.  Note how windows left over from the restoration program are used to define each artist's space...

At a time when green energy projects, and anything involving community infrastructure, are seeing reversals by the Federal Government, it's encouraging to see that a project motivated by those interests has saved a historic building, given it new life, and provided a vital meeting place for the community.

And in an era when corporations (and at least one politician) put their names on buildings they didn't build, it's reassuring that the owners and the team of volunteers who worked so hard rescuing this building have decided to leave Emory Smiley's name on it, as a way of remembering a public servant who never wanted his name on anything...  

*Many thanks to Durango artist and jewelry maker Jennifer Floyd of Cartwheel Studio, who introduced us to the Smiley Building.

Photo Credits:

All photos are by the author.

Roadside Attraction: Boulder Eats Exhibit at the Museum of Boulder

Just because you've been living in a town for a good while doesn't mean you know its history all that well.  There are always stories to discover, so when a friend told me there was an exhibit at the Museum of Boulder about local restaurants I might remember, I decided to go.  The museum, at 2205 Broadway, is right next door to the Carnegie Library for Local History where we'd researched the Boulder Theater story*, at the intersection of Pine and Broadway.

The Boulder Eats exhibit begins with a riot of signs and menus from Boulder restaurants that will call up fond memories for some visitors (well, this one for sure), including Tom's Tavern, Juanita's, the New York Deli, Daddy Bruce's BBQ, and the Zolo Grill.  Along with more than 300 objects from their collection, the museum provides some history you might not have known...

It was news to this writer that Daddy Bruce Randoph, who died at 94 in 1994, was not the first African-American to open a restaurant in Boulder. That honor belongs to O.T. Jackson, who managed the Chautauqua Dining Hall in 1898, and later owned a seafood restaurant and an ice cream parlor. The exhibit notes his involvement in the 1910 founding of Dearfield, a farming community for African-Americans south of Greeley.  Daddy Bruce made a more recent imprint on local history, also because of his community spirit. In the 60s he began serving free Thanksgiving dinners in Denver's City Park, at first offering a couple hundred meals from a portable grill.  By the middle of the 80s Bruce was serving thousands of free dinners at his restaurant in Denver's Five Points neighborhood. 

Exhibit displays a history of kitchen appliances including a Victorian-style cast iron stove, a later 1920s model, a circular metal ice box with 100-pound capacity, a Fifties-style stove and fridge, and a microwave.  Exhibit historian and food writer John Lehndorff helped provide a timeline of Boulder's natural food businesses, including the 1969 founding of Celestial Seasonings followed in 1970 by the Green Mountain Grainary, the first health food store downtown, and first to offer Celestial Seasonings tea, the 1976 founding of Rudi's Organic Bakery, and the 1987 founding of Wild Oats Market, which became the 2nd largest natural foods chain nationally.

Owing to recent raids on food businesses in other states by ICE, the exhibit curators decided not to display photos of immigrants working in local food businesses.  Instead, they posted the silhouette of a worker, and noted the large part immigrants have played in harvesting and preparing food.  

The curators decided, however, to post a photo of a guy who worked as a janitor at The Sink on University Hill during his student days at CU. That was Robert Redford, who left us back in September.  The Sink is still in business, though, at 1165 Thirteenth Street...

There's also an ongoing, award-winning exhibit in the Boulder Experience Gallery that provides a panorama of local history including racing bicycles recalling the Red Zinger classic (1975-'79), runners and wheelchair racers from the Bolder Boulder 10k that began in 1979 and has continued on every Memorial Day since, and a satellite recalling Ball Aerospace, also in Boulder. 

The Boulder Experience also displays artifacts from deeper history as well, beginning with the stories of Chief Niwot and the Arapaho tribe, the true "legacy Americans" who first lived here, along with photos, musical instruments and clothing from the era of cattle ranches that began to take over after the 1861 Treaty of Fort Wise restricted tribal land access.

Downstairs from the main level where you enter, there's an interactive children's area with geometric toys on the wall, and a mural of a VW Microbus with colors and symbols from the Summer of Love era.  That seems appropriate (this is, after all, Boulder), and though I'd thought the artist had made a bit of an error in choosing the "bay window" bus with its curved windshield, I was off base.  The "bay window" bus first appeared in August 1967, when it was still the Summer of Love, for the 1968 model year.  In May of that year, students joined union workers on a national strike in France.  But that story is for someone else's history museum...

*Footnote: The Boulder Eats exhibit on the history of food in Boulder will be open through July 26, 2026.  The Museum of Boulder is open Mondays and Wednesday through Sunday from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM and is closed on Tuesdays.  June through August, Monday hours change to noon to 8:00 PM.  You can visit museumofboulder.org to confirm ticket prices, but we saw that children under 5 are free, kids 5-17 and college students are $8 (along with seniors), and that standard tickets are $10.

 

And "Roadside Attraction: The Boulder Theater", our history of the recently-restored Boulder Theater, appeared as our blog post for December 15, 2025. 

Photo Credits:

All photos are by the author.

Roadside Attraction: The Boulder Theater

Walking north along Boulder's 14th Street from the Pearl Street pedestrian mall, it's hard to miss the Boulder Theater, a surviving landmark from the depths of the Great Depression, and one of the best examples of Art Deco architecture in Colorado...

When Kansas City architect Robert Boller of Boller Brothers (founded by older brother Carl) was selected to turn the 1906 Curran Opera House into a palace for showing motion pictures, his design went beyond mere renovation to replace the old Curran with a new structure, auditorium and facade to reflect contemporary design themes.  During the Curran's nearly 3 decades of service, it had also hosted orchestral concerts and also some silent films, which presaged the flexibility it would need to survive later in the century.

Architectural historians think that Boller's design for the Boulder Theater building owes a bit to the Boulder County Courthouse, completed in 1933 to the design of local architect Glen H. Huntington.  It's right across 14th Street, and when you walk around to look at the courthouse facade facing Pearl Street, below, you see what those historians mean. The theater facade echoes the stepped, symmetrical facade of the courthouse, with its highest parapet over the central entry.  The courthouse is faced in sandstone from a dismantled railroad building, an early example of recycling building materials. Boller's theater facade contrasts with the restraint of the WPA Moderne courthouse, though, with exuberant Art Deco patterns of brightly colored terra cotta surrounded by stucco. That facade, protected by a legal easement sponsored by Historic Boulder, was restored with the help of a grant from the National Trust for Historic Places, and completion was celebrated on November 5 of this year.

The theater was one of the first in the country, and likely the first in Colorado, to feature a sound system with woofers and tweeters. In 1935, the year it was under construction, MGM's Shearer Horn amplifiers were released, a 2-way system with woofers for lower frequencies and tweeters for higher ones. There were also special precautions against fire.  Unlike many theaters with heating systems located below the stage floor (usually wood), the Boulder Theater located its heating unit in an adjacent building. The projection room walls were fireproofed, important in an era when the film used was highly-flammable nitrate.  And after consulting with Boulder Building Department, architect Boller increased the number of exits to 10, with 3 from the balcony area. 

The north and south walls of the auditorium display murals set within giant circles. The murals were designed and painted twice by local artist Earl Tryon.  When viewing his initial mural designs (of which we* could find no photos), he decided they didn't relate well to the themes of the new theater design...

So Tryon painted over those images with these colorful trees and flowers, which may have held symbolic meanings for the original inhabitants of this region. In Boulder Valley, the indigenous people were the Utes, who moved west into the mountains when the Southern Arapaho tribe moved into the valley. By 1858, Arapaho Chief Niwot ("left hand") was suggesting that gold-seekers leave the area.  Some seeking gold moved on to try their luck in California, and Chief Niwot now has a village with a nice downtown 9 miles north of Boulder named for him... 

By 1980 Boulder Theater was losing its movie audience to the Crossroads Mall multiplex, and Historic Boulder moved to purchase the building, securing landmark status and the facade easement that saved it from demolition and replacement with a parking lot. They also played an important role in the recent restoration of the facade with current owners, who have been offering concerts in the building for 30 years.  Both Boulder Theater and Boulder County Courthouse* have been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980 as part of the Downtown Boulder Historic District.  As a result of Historic Boulder's heroic effort to save Boulder Theater from demolition, it also gained status as a National, Colorado and Boulder Historic Landmark in 1980.

*Footnote:  A big thanks to the staff at Boulder's Carnegie Library for Local History, who helped find newspaper articles from 1936 covering the design and construction of Boulder Theater during my visits there. 

The County Courthouse was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2024, not for its architectural style, but for its historic significance as the site where the first same-sex marriage licenses were issued in 1975. 

Photo Credits:

Top, 2nd & 4th from top:  the author

3rd from top:  Historic Boulder

5th from top:  On the Boulder Reporting Lab website, sourced from Boulder's Carnegie Library for Local History.

6th + 7th & 8th (adjacent mural shots):  Barry Trester

Bottom:  the author

Roadside Attraction: LeMay Museum Part 2-----Independents and Oddballs

Among the roughly 3,000 cars the LeMay family collected, there were plenty from what we'd today label as independent manufacturers.  In this context "independent" means not part of Detroit titans Ford, Chrysler or General Motors.  These car makers included Pierce-Arrow in Buffalo, Willys Overland in Toledo, and Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg in Auburn, Indiana.  And of course they included Detroit's Packard, who produced the cars above during their time as the leader in the upper crust car market.  On the left, a 1923 model, next to a blue '30 and a gray '31, all with Packard's inline 8-cylinder side-valve engine.

The 1919 Stanley Model 735B, made in Watertown, MA, showed the independence of the company's founding brothers F.E. and F.O. Stanley by avoiding an internal combustion engine altogether.  Like all other Stanleys made starting in 1897, it was powered by a steam engine, in this case a rear-mounted 2-cylinder, 20 horsepower unit, while the boiler with famous safety valves was at the front, behind those sleepy-looking headlights...

The Duesenberg J was the flagship of the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg and was featured in Part 1 of this report, but we couldn't resist a closeup of the radiator and hood ornament that fronted the 265 hp,  32-valve twin-cam inline eight.

The 1933 Hupmobile Series I-326 below featured a 302 cubic inch, inline 8 cylinder L-head engine sending 109 hp to the rear wheels through a 3-speed gearbox.  Detroit's Hupp Motor Car Company would fold in 1940, after making the rear-drive Skylark model based on body dies from the discontinued Cord 810 front-drive car from Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg.  For cars from the A-C-D combine, keep reading...

This Auburn Model 850Y cabriolet appeared the year after that Hupmobile, with sweeping new clamshell fenders and a lower, more streamlined profile than earlier Auburns.  The inline eight made by A-C-D's Lycoming Division produced 115 hp from 280 cubic inches, and sent power to the rear wheels through a 3-speed manual gearbox.  

The rumble seat at the rear of the 850Y offered space for 2 passengers, while others could huddle out of the weather under the convertible top.  The colorful, highly detailed '34 styling was part of A-C-D head E.L. Cord's  effort to attract sales during the Great Depression...

So was his second effort to offer an advanced car with front-wheel drive.  The Cord 810 stunned crowds when in appeared at New York's Auto Show in November 1935.  It followed the front-drive Cord L-29 offered from 1930 to '32, but didn't resemble that car, or any other car, in most ways.  For one thing, there was no traditional radiator grille in Gordon Buehrig's streamlined body design; chromed horizontal louvers wrapped around what was quickly named the "coffin nose".  Then there were those hidden headlights, which you cranked up out of the teardrop fenders at night...  

Along with hiding the headlights, Buehrig got rid of the running boards that were then standard features below the door sills (as on that blue Auburn).  The Cord 810 was low enough that you didn't need that step to get in.  A 288 cubic inch V8 drove the front wheels through a 4-speed, electric pre-selector gearbox, and made 115 hp. In 1937, the 812 version added a supercharger that raised power to 190.  Cord also offered Sportsman and Phaeton convertible models, and sticker prices ranged from $1,995 to $3,575. 

With the Great Depression grinding on, though, fewer than 3,000 drivers got a chance to sit behind this control panel, set below a windshield that could be opened for ventilation...

Two years after the last cars offered by Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg, Packard built the stately Super 8 convertible for 1939.   The 320 cubic inch inline eight made 135 hp, and the chassis, introduced in '37, featured independent front suspension.

All the fascination wasn't concentrated at the top end of the size or price scale during this period. This 1939 Crosley convertible featured a 2-cylinder, air-cooled engine driving the rear wheels and making about 120 hp less than the Packard, but boasted 50 mpg fuel economy.  The convertible from the Cincinnati company sold for $325 in '39, its first year.  On the same 80 inch wheelbase as the BMC Mini that would show up 2 decades later, it's a charmer...  

Like the Crosley, the 1937 Fiat Topolino (Italian for little mouse) was a front-engined, rear-drive car, and its 569cc inline four made about the same power.  Drivers could make the most of that power with a 4-speed gearbox.  Top speed was similar to the Crosley, around 50 to 53 mph.

The American Bantam was a version of the English Austin built in Butler, PA.  The black and yellow 1939 model at the LeMay is a Hollywood roadster on a 75 inch wheelbase.  The 46 cubic inch inline 4 made 20 hp.  The American Bantam Car Company made the very first Jeep prototype in 1940 in answer to US Army specifications for a light, all-terrain vehicle.  Though Willys and Ford got the big production contracts, Bantam produced Jeeps at the Butler factory throughout the war, and never went back to car production.

Crosley went back to car production after WWII, with a new engine, a 44 cubic inch (750cc) overhead cam inline four that became a favorite of amateur road racers.  From 1949, Crosley offered a 2-door, 4 seat sedan, a wagon, a Hotshot 2 seat roadster good for 85 mph, and this little fire truck, one of which hung out at our neighborhood amusement park near Chicago. 

Before the end of car production in 1952, there was also a fiberglass roadster body called the Skorpion made for the Crosley chassis by a California firm.  The LeMay Museum acquired theirs, one of maybe a hundred, in 2020...

Sales of microcars took off in Europe during the Suez Canal crisis in 1956, and one of those was the Messerschmitt KR200 built from 1955 to '64.  A  rear-mounted 191cc two-stroke single cylinder powered the single rear wheel and offered 4 speeds forward or in reverse because crankshaft rotation could be reversed.  The sideways-opening canopy offered access but not much ventilation.

The Isetta 300 made by BMW under license from Italy's Iso was also popular in this period. With a rear-mounted 298cc single-cylinder air cooled 4-stroke sending 13 hp to single rear wheel (4 wheels were an option) through a 4-speed gearbox, it was briefly imported into the US in BMW's 4-wheeled version.  That the design originated from a firm making refrigerators (Iso was from isotherm) sheds new light on that sideways-opening front door, doesn't it?

The LeMay has a collection of pickup trucks from the period before pickups were lifestyle accessories, and were likely to be driven by farmers like my uncle, for example.  The 1947 Studebaker M15 pickup could carry hay bales or construction materials on a 120-inch wheelbase with 80 hp from its flathead six.  It's a friendly-looking thing...

But then, Studebaker seemed to specialize in friendly-looking vehicles during this period. The South Bend, Indiana firm made history with the first truly modern postwar car body with Loewy Studios' design for their '47 model, especially the Starlight Coupe with its wrap-around rear window under a cantilevered roof.  For the 1950 model year, they updated this car with the famous bullet nose...

And by 1951, the year Studebaker brought out their V8 engine, they curved the grille below the nose into a kind of smile.  If the Studey Bullet Nose doesn't make you smile, you may have no sense of humor...

Studebaker's 1963 Avanti went from design sketches to running prototypes in a year, after a top-secret effort by Loewy Studios designers huddled in Palm Springs with an assignment to revive Studebaker's reputation for cutting-edge design. The 4-place GT coupe featured front disc brakes, a built-in padded roll bar, and an aerodynamic fiberglass body with air intake below the bumper, with covered headlights above it.  Supercharged versions of the standard V8 were available to customers, and the car set speed records at Bonneville.

These photos show the inward-curving flanks of the "Coke bottle" fuselage and the rearward slant to the wheel openings that imbue the form with a sense of movement.  Over 4,600 Avantis were sold before Studebaker abandoned US car production during the 1964 model year.  Ford's Mustang arrived to attract the youth market in the middle of that year, and Chevy's 1967 Camaro styling always seemed like a smooth jazz version of the edgy, cool jazz, hipster Avanti.  

Kaiser-Frazer founded its car building operation in 1945 after Henry Kaiser's shipyards had supplied Liberty ships for the war effort.  Though the company tried front-drive prototypes, the production cars offered were mechanically prosaic, with Continental flathead sixes like those in Checker cabs driving the rear wheels.  Body designer Howard "Dutch" Darrin was allowed to supersede his original, slab-sided body design with this glassy, curvy new shell for 1951, and Kaiser offered possibly the first hatchbacks, with up and down opening tailgates in 2 and 4-door versions, in lieu of station wagons.  They kept the outdated flathead six power, though, offering supercharging in 1954.  This 1953 Dragon model with fabric roof cover and special interior trim made 118 hp, but its sticker price of $3,924 would've bought a Chrysler V8.  Because of that price tag, Kaiser sold only 1,277 Dragons.

Ironically, though Kaiser and Willys passenger car production ended in the US after the 1955 model year, Kaiser's Jeep division outlived all the other independents. Kaiser bought Willys- Overland in 1953 for its Jeep division and related government contracts, and it kept American Motors going after that company bought Jeep from Kaiser in 1970.  Renault took a share in AMC Jeep in 1978 and sold the whole company to Chrysler in 1987, with Fiat taking a share in 2009, and Fiat Chrysler merging with PSA (Citroen and Peugeot) to become Stellantis in 2021.  The constant in the three most recent takeovers is the SUV boom in the US, which made the Jeep division a prize in all of them. 

Photo Credits:

3rd, 6th & 11th from top (Stanley, Auburn & Cord) + 3rd & 8th from bottom ((Kaiser + pickup trucks):  Duncan Mackenzie

10 from top (Cord Control Panel):  Wikimedia

All other photos are by the author.