Jerome, Arizona

Jerome is a "ghost town" in Arizona set high on a mountain side. The city was started at this location to be near a mining strike and was booming, with a population as high as 15,000 (which is kind of unimaginable if you see how small the city is today) but it became almost totally abandoned in the 1950's, with the population dwindling as low as 50.


Today the city has been revived for tourism and is dotted with shops and bed & breakfasts. There are also a lot of artists and frankly weird stuff there. This is a view by the one main street that snakes up the hillside, with the Hotel Connor in the center.



This is a view of Cleopatra Hill, with older mining buildings still intact. You can see the "red" tint from all of the rocks which is characteristic of this area.



As I said above, there are a lot of funky people in this town. Note the myriad of stickers on the van. Usually we take out license plates but frankly I assume that this person loves the attention anyways. I particularly like the red sticker nearest the roof that says "No one is ugly at 2am".



There are a lot of half ruined buildings throughout the town. Per the wikipedia link above in the first paragraph apparently Jerome burned down a couple of times so they implemented a brick building code which accounts for the cool ruins (there wouldn't be much left of the wooden ruins at this point).



This is the police chief's office in downtown Jerome. If you blow up the photo you can see the "do not tap on glass" sign which is pretty funny since the sidewalk is right up against the police station.

I'd recommend checking out Jerome if you are in the area. The road is well maintained that leads up the mountainside and there is a lot of history in this city.