How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America

7: Money in the Air

115| Fair Santa Barbara, to thee Is given a sacred ministry. To thee the sick and suffering Their hopes and fears and sorrows bring. Would these sad hearts so sorely tried Might see their longing satisfied. —All about Santa Barbara, California: The Sanitarium of the Pacific Coast (1878) Reno, November 23d. The Marquise de Chelles, of Paris, France, formerly Mrs. Undine Spragg Marvell of Apex City and New York, got a decree of divorce at a special session of the Court last night, and was remarried fifteen minutes later to Mr. Elmer Moffatt, the billionaire Railroad King. —edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (1913) in June 1915, Miss Bessie Post of Westbury, Long island, a properly broughtup woman in her twenties, enjoyed a grand western tour that started in southern California and ended in the Canadian Rockies. Halfway through the trip, she checked into Portland’s new Multnomah Hotel (“absolutely fireproof ” according to hotel stationery), purchased an umbrella, and lunched on fried fresh salmon. “Well!!” she wrote the folks back home in new York: “i wish you could have seen the size of the order—pieces together 10 inches long and 4 inches wide.” the afternoon began with a trolley ride to Council CHAPter seven Money in the Air | CHAPter seven 116 Crest, where an amusement park topped the 1,000-foot ridge of the West Hills and sightseers could marvel at Mount Hood’s massive peak rising to the east. it continued with automobile sightseeing to see Portland’s rose gardens in full bloom, which she thought even nicer than Pasadena’s, and the Forestry Building left over from the 1905 world’s fair. the “timber temple” was built from huge unpeeled logs measuring as much as six feet across. “they say wood is cheap out here,” she commented in explanation. Although she didn’t have time for a steamer excursion along the Columbia River and wasn’t much for strenuous hikes, she left Portland a satisfied tourist. Like others who came west in increasing thousands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bessie Post was looking for a relaxing tour, not a strenuous adventure. if Portland houses didn’t quite measure up to the mansions of Glen Cove and oyster Bay on Long island’s north Shore, the city had more than adequate amenities.1 through her whole trip, Miss Post had been enjoying the air—the climate of the Southwest and the Pacific slope. Air, to be sure, is a pretty intangible commodity, but western cities have been selling it for nearly a century and a half through their claims on climate, scenery, and recreational resources. they developed local recreation hinterlands in the later nineteenth century , with some similarities to resort districts around eastern U.S. cities. Southwestern cities prospered as health resorts and winter escapes. Urban boosters cooperated with railroad publicity departments to promote state and national parks and sometimes acquired title to nearby mountaintops for local recreation and tourist attractions. in the 1910s and 1920s they made sure that paved highways pushed outward from the major cities to serve automobile tourists who would come to know Route 40 and Route 66. All of these activities involved an exploitation of “air.” the literal pure, dry air of the Rocky Mountain Piedmont and southern California attracted asthmatics and tuberculosis victims to cities like Colorado Springs and Pasadena. the soft, warm air of southwestern winters was a key resource for leisure and retirement cities such as Santa Barbara, Santa Fe, and the competing cities in Arizona’s Valley of the Sun (meaning Phoenix, tempe, Chandler, and Scottsdale). noble mountains and exotic deserts to be seen through clear western air brought tourists to and through Denver, Albuquerque, Calgary, and Los Angeles. tourism—comfortable visits as distinct from arduous travel—came west in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. in the 1830s and 1840s, to travel westward from the Mississippi River or to voyage into the Pacific was to adventure and explore like Francis Parkman, Richard Henry Dana, or John C. Fremont. By the 1860s it was to report and comment for people who were unlikely ever to observe the new mines and farms and cities for themselves but who could still read books by the likes of Horace Greeley, Samuel Clemens, and Richard Burton. in the 1870s, with pleasure travel affordable Money in tHe Air | 117 figure 29. tourist cities to 1940. Cities throughout...