Bisbee, part 3

When State Highway 80 goes east from the oldest part of Bisbee, it runs along the edge of a deep, open pit, a relic from the town's mining days. It is called the Lavender Pit. It is nearly half a mile deep and one mile wide. When the pit was active, it expanded so much that highway 80 had to be re-routed because the pit was threatening to destroy the highway. Now there is an overlook on the edge of the highway so people can look down into the dark recesses of the pit.
One mile east of "Old" Bisbee is the first of the former towns that amalgated into the larger town of Bisbee. It is called Lowell and the vast majority of this former town has been swallowed up by the pit.
The main feature of the Lowell section of Bisbee is a traffic circle, or roundabout, where State Highway 80, State Highway 92, Bisbee Road, Erie Street and Old Douglas Road all come together. Old Douglas Road is an earlier routing of highway 80, predating the traffic circle.
Erie Street was once the principal downtown business street of Lowell. Now it goes west a short distance, about the equivalent of one city block, and then dead-ends at a high fence on the edge of the pit. The Lowell downtown area has a few businesses still open, but most of them are abandoned. The most notable of the abandoned businesses is a former Sprouse-Reitz store. Sprouse-Reitz was a "five and dime" store much like the more famous Woolworth's. The chain was headquartered in Portland, Oregon. The chain was in business from 1909 until 1993, when the entire chain liquidated. In 1991, the dying company changed its name to Sprouse! in the hopes they would stay in business for awhile longer, but it didn't work. When the name change was made, there were only 84 Sprouse-Reitz stores still in business, down from a peak of nearly 400 stores.
Along Erie Street, the "Sprouse-Reitz" letters on the front facade of the building are still very visible, looking almost as though the store is still open for business. I wonder how long Erie Street used to be before most of it disappeared into the pit? I wonder how many buildings also went into the pit? Presently, there is a small parking area next to the fence that lines the edge of the pit. Just one foot from the fence, there is a curb that is seemingly out of place. It is an ordinary street curb except that it runs next to the fence for quite a distance on each side of Erie Street. This curb is all that remains of a street. It runs along the east edge of the former street. About 1 foot beyond the curb is the fence and about 1 foot beyond that is the rim of the pit. This is where a street intersection used to be. On the east side of this curb, I saw 5 concrete slabs, all that remain of businesses that used to line the east side of this street. I saw 4 concrete slabs north of Erie Street and 1 slab south of Erie Street. The sidewalks that run in front of the commercial buildings nearby now run off into the pit, the western part of both sidewalks suffered the same fate as the western part of Erie Street.
Today the population of the Lowell section of Bisbee is about 25. The town once had 2,700 people. Lowell was founded in 1905.