A Trip to town

Click the pics before these buildings fall apart.

Sunday morning, getting ready to head downtown.

I drove into town this morning as I often do on a Sunday morning; Sunday morning is a good time to avoid the traffic and being able to park wherever I want without being in the way.

I also stopped at the Ajo grocery store while I was in town. Usually, when I go to Walmart, I have two or three things I want to buy, but I typically walk out with 10 or 15 items that I'm not sure I need. At the Ajo grocery store, it's the opposite; I walk in needing ten things and walk out with two because I can't afford the other eight.

I still haven't seen any sign of a mouse, so now I believe the mouse ran away from home somewhere in my travels. But they have a homing instinct, so I'm wondering how long a mouse would take to walk from Tucson to Ajo. Of course, I'm assuming I'll be leaving before that takes place. Still, since I'm parked in the dirt with a lot of suspicious-looking holes scattered around in the ground, I'm going to leave the traps set just in case a local mouse decides there's room for two of us in this camper or my previous mouse manages to hitch a ride on an Air Force jet and bailout over Ajo using a mouse-sized parachute.

I haven't seen or heard any Air Force jets flying today or yesterday, so I assume they don't work on weekends. But I'm hoping during the week, some of them will be flying over the bombing range to the north of me because that's usually the range where there flying relatively low enough for me to get a picture.

Theboondork

I wanted to show some property problems in Ajo that makes the whole town look bad, but there's not much that can be done about it for various legal and financial reasons.

All of these buildings you're going to see are right on Main Street, so pretty much any place you want to go in Ajo your going to drive past these buildings. And these are by no means all of the derelict buildings on main Street, maybe not even half.

I have too many pictures for one blog post, so tomorrow I will show some good things about Ajo.

Most of the buildings are old and have gone through various permutations trying to find a business that works.

A business doesn't have to be boarded up to be a drag on the town, remember this is the main street in the town, and who would want to put a new business next to this.

Here's an example how that looks. This cutesy little boutique is apparently appealing mostly to females. And look at this derelict building right next door, there is on-street parking for the little shop and what woman would want to park next to that ramshackle building, particularly in Ajo where illegal aliens live wherever they can, and old vacant buildings are irresistible.

Not all buildings are old, and even though this building looks in good shape its been vacant for years.

What do you do with a building this old and run down? There's nothing you can do, it would cost more to bring this building up to various City, County, and State codes, than it would to build a new building. So this property's value is the price for vacant land minus the cost of demolishing the building, which makes this property almost worthless, which is why it's been sitting here for many years.

There's probably very few people living in this town that have the money available to buy and renovate a property like this on Main Street. And any visiting business person coming to Ajo will quickly see that its hard to make a buck with a shop on Main Street. So you're probably not going get them to part with any money.

This could be made into a pretty little store in a town that was growing, but I doubt that's happening in Ajo.

Ajo's days were done when the Copper mine played out. When the Copper mine closed the miners and their families moved on. Then the Main Street business folks couldn't make enough money to pay the bills so they put their property up for sale, and move on also. Then the people that worked in those Main Street stores couldn't pay their rent so they too pack up and leave.

What's left? Not much. Retired folks, tradesmen that have the skills to keep things running for the retired folks. People living on welfare, people living on a small pension, and hard-working younger people that have three jobs and are barely keeping their heads above water. I know that because those people used to work for me in Cripple Creek, and it's a tough life.

Tomorrow's pictures won't be so depressing.... Hopefully.