"The Buzz About Marfa Is Just Crazy"
New York capitalists sipping cappucinos with Houston superlawyers, Hollywood fashionistas enjoying works by Icelandic artists. Boutique motor courts, day spas, and grandiose openings. Yes, the West Texas town has become a playground for the urban jetset, and its future has never looked brighter. Or stranger.
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"HOW MANY TOWNS GET TO REINVENT themselves?" asked Robert Halpern, the editor of the Big Bend Sentinel, Marfa's newspaper. He was sitting in Carmen's Cafe, under words painted on the wall that read "Marfa Brags." Below them were others, including "Population 4,500 Urban, two country clubs, 103 business establishments." The words were painted around 1950 and recall an era of long-gone glory. Marfa was founded in 1883 as a stop on the railroad that headed west to El Paso from San Antonio. Soon the vast Presidio County grasslands were divvied up by cattle ranchers, and Marfa became their headquarters. Ranching money built the beautiful downtown buildings, like the Brite Building and the El Paisano Hotel, designed by the El Paso architect Henry Trost and built in 1930. "It was very stylish here," says local historian Cecilia Thompson about those days. "The social life was really extravagant."
It wasn't just ranchers. Marfa was also a military town. Camp Albert was established around 1911 to keep an eye on the border during the Mexican Revolution; in 1930 it became Fort D. A. Russell, which helped buoy the area when the Depression hit. During World War II, bomber crews trained at the nearby Marfa Army Air Field. By the end of the war, five thousand people lived in Marfa, including two hundred German POWs imprisoned at Fort Russell.
But in 1946 the bases closed, and the fifties saw a seven-year drought that crippled the ranching industry. Ranchers began selling off land, and the Border Patrol, which had opened a sector headquarters in Marfa, became the area's biggest employer. By the seventies, those residents who had stuck it out would sit around the Thunderbird restaurant, the town's gathering place, sipping coffee and complaining about hard times.
Then the godfather of the new Marfans showed up. Donald Judd was a famous Minimalist artist from New York, one of the most influential sculptors of his time, and he was tired of the big city. For Judd, context was everything, and he loved the idea of his spare, modernist shapes at permanent rest in the harsh light and rugged terrain of West Texas. In 1973 he began buying up houses and then commercial buildings in the depressed downtown. Finally he bought 340 acres at the old Fort Russell, on Marfa's southern outskirts. He turned two artillery sheds into homes for one hundred large mill-aluminum boxes. He placed fifteen giant concrete shapes, like megaliths from some prehistoric Trans-Pecos Druidic civilization, in a pasture. He converted the old barracks into permanent installations for other artists. He called his place the Chinati Foundation. "Judd was his own person," says realtor Livingston. "He was in his own world." Judd was cranky and remote, putting a high wall around his home and office, which sat on San Antonio. His foundation, though, grew in stature, at least among outsiders and especially among Europeans, who journeyed to his Minimalist oasis by the thousands.
But the visitors, who often stayed at the Chinati, didn't spend much money in the sleepy little town. When Judd died, in 1994 of lymphoma, Marfa was almost dead too. Downtown businesses were boarded up, including the Paisano, and the population had sunk to 2,400. That year, Joey Benton and Maiya Keck, two former Rhode Island School of Design students, moved to town. Keck was a childhood friend of Judd's daughter, Rainer, and came to help administer his estate, though someday she planned on opening a restaurant. There wasn't much to do in Marfa, the couple remembers, so they learned to play bridge, which they played with the wives of some of the ranchers. Keck recalls, "They'd say, 'Why are you young people moving here? This town is dying.'"
Slowly, Marfa began to revive. In 1997 Tim and Lynn Goode Crowley moved to town. He was a Houston plaintiffs lawyer, and she was an art gallery owner who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and needed clear, dry air and the quiet life. Once in Marfa, the couple began buying property, rehabbing it, and then either reselling or renting it out. And they told their friends, some of whom were artists and arty types, some of whom were lawyers, about this strange little mecca. And then they started coming and buying and building homes, usually for getaways from the big city.
In 1999 the Crowleys did something outrageous for what was then an anti-intellectual West Texas backwater. They opened the Marfa Book Company, an airy, well-lit space heavy on art books, modern fiction, and Texana. When the manager, a Houston native named Louis Dobay, had the brilliant idea of adding a gourmet coffee shop and wine bar, Marfa got what it hadn't had in a while: a clubhouse, a place to meet. Soon, old ranchers were sitting out front next to Germans headed to the Chinati Foundation. Writers such as David Foster Wallace were walking the aisles and sometimes giving readings at the bookstore. They were guests of the Lannan Foundation, a Santa Febased program for writers and artists that bought a few homes in Marfa and in 2000 moved its residency program there. In 2001 the Paisano was bought and restored, and the courthouse was reopened a year later. Keck decided the time was right for a fancy restaurant, and Maiya's opened in April 2002.
YOU WOULDN'T KNOW IT FROM the generally all-white faces at gallery openings, but seven out of ten Marfans are Mexican Americans, and most of them live on the town's south, east, and west sides, where you'll pass block after block of mobile homes, small adobes, and beaten-up wood-frame houses. The races have always been split in Marfa, bitterly in some eras. The paternalism of the old segregated days is still alive; some whites still casually use terms like "wets" and "wetbacks." And, of course, the people doing the rehabs are all white, while the people doing the labor are all brown.
The recent boom has already made Marfa unaffordable for the town's working poor. Ten years ago you could buy an old adobe home for $20,000. Now, even if the walls and the roof have caved in, adobes go for twice and three times that. And if they're in good shape or in a good neighborhood, they go for a lot more. Nice homes are selling for $100,000 and up. Angela Borunda, a 26-year-old whose great-great-grandmother ran the Old Borunda, the first Tex-Mex restaurant in Texas (established in 1883), and who wears a silver stud in her eyebrow and a diamond in her nose, says she likes the changes in Marfa: "It's helping the community a lot. The older Mexicans like it that people are coming to do things to the town." But she also can't afford to buy a home anymore. The north side is out of the question. "And on the west or south side, you have to knock the whole house down and rebuild, and that's very expensive," she says. Mayor Oscar Martinez says a nonprofit corporation has been founded to help low-income homeowners (many Marfans live in houses passed down in their families) renovate their homes to keep up with the well-heeled settlers.
Despite the soaring home prices and property taxes, locals generally like the greenhorns. "They've face-lifted the town," says Armando Vasquez, who was born here, raised on a ranch, and later ran the garage that became the Ballroom. "They've bought a lot of houses, fixed them up—they love the old adobe. Then they try to make them as original as they can. And they're friendly people." Whereas the Chinati has long been viewed by old Marfans as aloof, the new Marfans have made overt attempts to engage the natives. The four-year-old Marfa Studio of Art, next to the Ballroom, offers free classes for children. The Ballroom has the feel of a local rec center. "[The Ballroom] invited me and my wife to opening night," says Vasquez. "They invited the whole town." To the old-timers, the revitalized downtown—the Paisano as alive as it was in the glory days, the coffee shop where they can gossip like they used to at the Thunderbird, the Ballroom, where young people are excited about something besides leaving town—reminds them of when Marfa itself was young and they were too. When the old-timers do get upset, it's not about the newcomers' sense but their art-world sensibility. Hlynur Hallsson, an Icelander, caused a scandal in August 2002 when he put up a show at a Chinati annex that sits next to the library. Hallsson wrote, graffiti-like, in blue paint on a gallery wall, "George W. Bush is an idiot" and "The real axis of evil are Israel, USA and the UK." Locals could see the large words through the windows of the gallery. They were not amused. The mayor got dozens of calls, the Sentinel printed many angry letters, and the gallery itself was graffitied in large white letters that read "You have no voice here! Ici go home. God bless George W. Bush."
Joey Benton says that in the end, it was a positive thing: "It let people know that art has power." And it let the artists and recent arrivals know—if they had forgotten—just where they were living: a land of old-school Mexican Americans, retired Border Patrolmen, and conservative ranchers. One old-timer asks, "Where do you think the redneck was invented?"
The learning curve, one guesses, is still ascending. Soon, for example, Benton and Keck are opening a Montessori school, and the Ballroom is hosting superfreak filmmaker John Waters. More hipsters are clearly on the way. "In the art communities of Las Vegas and Southern California," says the Lucky Star's McGraw, "the buzz about Marfa is just crazy." Garduno has ambitious plans beyond Free City. "I'm hoping to do festivals eventually," she gushes. "Music, film, architecture, sustainable housing." Whether all the newcomers will stick it out when they realize how quiet and, well, uncomplicated a small town can be—that will have to be considered part of their great trailblazing adventure.
IN JULY MARFANS GATHERED AT THE Ballroom under one of those alarming West Texas sunsets, the kind that looks like somewhere the world is coming to a fiery end. The underside of the clouds was bright red, and the sky above them was a strange new hue—violet, maybe. The air was clear and dry and, though it was summer, cool. If you looked west, you would have seen the mundane world far below you. You would have felt both grand and puny at the same time.
The sun sets every night in Marfa. Boy, does it set.
Inside the gallery, artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz, who is from San Antonio, had laid out hundreds of objets d'art and kitsch—silver shoes, plastic hot dogs, photos of the little Mexican American boy from Giant—in gridlike lines on a giant 25-by-25-foot board. Dozens of people wandered around the art, talking loudly and drinking beer. Marianne Stockebrand, the Chinati Foundation's director, leaned against the wall and gazed at the grid, which looked like the ordered streets of a small town. Robert Halpern spoke with Tim Crowley. Valda Livingston peered down, inspecting something. Dick DeGuerin, wearing blue denim and a cowboy hat, strolled slowly by with his wife, Janie. An older man in a gimme cap pointed out something—the pile of coffee grounds? The upside-down pudding packs?—to a younger woman. "I just love your house," one newcomer who had bought a place the day before enthused to another. A pretty young woman from France talked to a man in a cowboy hat. Maybe he was a cowboy. Maybe he was a lawyer who'd recently bought a really nice house and a nice hat. In Marfa these days, you just don't know.
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