Jerome Historic District

Author's Comments

Jerome does not sit on its hill so much as cling to it. The whole town leans, building stacked on building at angles that should not work and somehow have for a hundred years, and the first thing I do whenever I arrive is walk uphill until I run out of street and then turn around and look back down. From above, the rooflines telescope into each other in a way that flattens beautifully in a long lens. From below, the same buildings rear up against the sky like something half-remembered. The light here is the argument. Morning is when I work, because the sun comes up over the Mogollon Rim and the Verde Valley fills with that particular Arizona gold, and Sedona's red rocks ignite on the eastern horizon thirty miles away. Stand on any east-facing porch in town at seven in the morning in November and you will understand why people stayed here long after the copper ran out. Afternoons belong to the details. The peeling paint on the old hotel. The wrought iron. The way certain windows hold the last light after the street has gone into shadow. Jerome is a town built on a thirty degree slope, and shadow moves through it differently than it moves through flat places - faster, more theatrical, climbing the buildings rather than crossing them. Park at the bottom and walk up. The streets are too narrow for anything else and the climb is part of how the town reveals itself. Spring and fall are kindest. Winter, if you catch a clear morning after a dusting of snow on the high desert, is the photograph most people never think to come for.

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