"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.
WHEN THE EARLY COWBOYS and ranchers got their first good look at the Marfa Plateau—the rich grasslands 4,830 feet above the desert, surrounded by far-off mountains and domed by a vast sky that made them feel both grand and puny at the same time—you'd like to think they were struck gloriously dumb. To be precise, you'd like to think they reacted as F. Scott Fitzgerald imagined the seventeenth-century Dutch sailors did when they came upon the American shore. "[F]or a transitory enchanted moment," Fitzgerald famously wrote in The Great Gatsby, "man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent . . . face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."Realtor Michael McGraw, who discovered Marfa for himself in 2004, says he knows all about that feeling: "The moment I got to Marfa, I said, 'This is going to be the next hot spot. And I want to be part of it.'" McGraw, a former Las Vegas restaurateur (he was the general manager of Spago and the Coyote Cafe), came to Marfa with his partner, Kimberly Newman, for an art opening in April; two days later they bought an old 3,200-square-foot Army quartermaster's building and are now converting it into a boutique salon and day spa. It will be called the Lucky Star. "I've never been so excited about anything in my life," he says.
McGraw is not alone. A century after the cowboys and ranchers moved in on the local Tejanos, Apaches, and Comanches, a new breed of excitable invaders has arrived, this one made up of, among others, Hollywood fashion arbiters, the granddaughters of Texas ranchers, New York art-world youngsters, and Houston superlawyers. Many of them are friends who have bought second homes and who come here to get away, even if it's just for the weekend. They congregate at the Marfa Book Company, on the main north-south road, Highland Avenue, sip protein drinks, and enthusiastically talk of the old adobe houses they've recently bought and how exhilarating it is to strip away the layers of paneling and muck on the walls, almost as if it were a process of self-discovery. Then they walk up Highland, toward the majestic Presidio County courthouse, past the locals filing into the post office (there's no home delivery in Marfa, population: 2,500), past the new art galleries and shops in the gorgeous old downtown buildings, many built eighty years ago. They drink Venetian spritzes and eat rib-eye steaks and roasted-asparagus pasta at Maiya's, on white tablecloths. Those who haven't bought a place just yet stay at the gloriously redone Hotel Paisano, where Rock Hudson, James Dean, and Elizabeth Taylor hung out during the filming of Giant almost fifty years ago.
"There's something magical about the town," says Nina Garduno, a vice president of Ron Herman/Fred Segal in Hollywood who is building a fourplex of businesses in town. "I feel like all things are possible there." Indeed, right now you can get a $2.50 latte, a $28 steak, a $120 room, and the Sunday New York Times—on Sunday morning. If you had visited at various times this past year, you could have gone to a gallery and danced to a two-piece rock band from Berlin or waded into a room stuffed head-high with red balloons. Soon, on San Antonio Street, the town's main east-west road, you'll be able to buy a thong, rent a skateboard, get your hair highlighted by a noted Hollywood colorist, and sip a cool mojito around a lush garden that was once an old forties motor court—while your kid goes to the new Montessori school.
A motto on a sign on the outskirts of town, raised by the chamber of commerce in 1996, reads "Marfa is what the West was." That is so twentieth century. The fact is, the ranching industry was moribund back then, and Marfa was on the verge of joining some of its neighbors as a ghost town. Now that the new Marfans have arrived, a more apt motto is one you hear a lot these days on the streets and in the galleries, uttered with both excitement and dread: "Marfa is the new Santa Fe." And Palm Springs, home of the jet set. And Greenwich Village, home of the bohemian. And, for that matter, Gatsby's East Egg, where the wealthy fled the mundane world. In truth, no one really knows what Marfa is yet. Because every day, more people come, bringing their money, their energy, and their ideas of what the town should be. Residents of the old Marfa—retired ranchers, Border Patrol officers, and poor and working-class Mexican Americans—sit back and watch, usually with amusement. They've seen artist types before, the gloomy Germans and the serious New Yorkers who have been making pilgrimages to Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation since the mid-eighties. But this is different. The Chinati has always been elitist and distant—like PBS. This new scene is loud, funny, weird—like HBO. If Marfa were a series, it would be called How the West Was Won. The answer: good coffee, boisterous art, and lots and lots of money.
"THIS IS THE FIRST HOME we sold to Donald Judd," said Valda Livingston, a cheerful sixty-something-year-old realtor, driving her white Lexus SUV down a quiet street on the northern side of Marfa and pointing. "A couple from Santa Fe are going to turn it into a tearoom and possibly a B&B." A few doors down, she said, "I just sold this to some people from Massachusetts." A moment later she added, "I just sold this to a lady from Baltimore who is a writer and a poet." As she drove, Livingston mentioned other recent clients: Houston defense attorney Dick DeGuerin; former Tyco CEO John Fort; Lewis Saul, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who's opening a Greek restaurant; and Harry and Shelley Hudson, a Dallas couple who are converting the abandoned bus terminal into a large adobe home. After decades of rural decay, during which Livingston would get maybe half a dozen calls in an entire year, she spends much of her time now in her SUV, driving visitors around town and looking at properties. She figures she sells a home about every week and a half.
Livingston pulled out onto San Antonio, where most of the hipster capitalists have been setting up shop lately. She pointed out Ballroom Marfa, formerly Mando's Garage, which she sold in 2002 to Virginia Lebermann. Lebermann and her collaborator, Fairfax Dorn, who are both heirs to nineteenth-century Texas ranching dynasties, had ideas for a different kind of art gallery after spending time in the New York City art world. "We wanted it to be a living place," says Lebermann, "where people were hanging out and talking about art, music, and film." At one of their spring shows, a performance piece called "In My Room: Listening to Records in Marfa, Texas," an Austin music aficionado named Dominic Welhouse set up a simulacrum of a large, comfortable living room and played records from his prodigious collection for two weeks. His audience included ranchers, poets, and an area couple who handed out homemade prickly pear wine and sotol. The next month the Ballroom had its grand opening, and more than a thousand people came, most from somewhere else, to wade into the roomful of red balloons and gaze at a 24-foot light sculpture.
"I think this is so exciting," Livingston said as she continued west on San Antonio, pulling up between the Thunderbird Motel and the Holiday Capri Inn, two old motor courts getting a rehab from Liz Lambert and some investment partners, including Lebermann. Lambert, who is from Odessa and whose roots extend to the local McKnight ranching clan, lives in Austin, where she is well known as the eccentric entrepreneur who turned a run-down hooker motel and parking lot on South Congress Avenue into the cool, ascetic, almost minimalist Hotel San José and Jo's Hot Coffee. Lambert has been making the drive to Marfa more and more as the Thunderbird nears completion; it should be open next month. Renovations at the Capri are going to take longer (it will eventually be part of the Thunderbird). When finished, it will include a courtyard, interior gardens, a diner, and a bar. Five years ago, says Lambert, she would not have considered opening such a place in Marfa. "Now," she says, "there's enough traffic."
Farther down San Antonio, almost to the edge of town, Livingston pointed out two stakes that marked off a block that had fallen into ruin and had recently been bought by two friends of Lambert's, Nina Garduno and her girlfriend, Leisha Hailey, a star on the Showtime TV series The L Word whose photo was recently on the front of the New York Times Sunday Styles section under the headline "The Secret Power of Lesbian Style." The two have a concept Garduno calls Free City: a hip indoor-outdoor retail "experience," with a restaurant, a music venue, a "stuff you can use" store, and a shop called Let's Go, where you will be able to get restored vintage skateboards, scooters, and Schwinn bicycles. In 1999 the two drove through Marfa but couldn't find a place to eat, so they kept going. But this spring they came back, and the town was alive. "This is it," Garduno said. "This is the place."
And then there's Michael McGraw and Kim Newman's spa, behind the Thunderbird. McGraw had heard about Marfa from his friend Lebermann. On his first visit, at the April Ballroom opening, he and Newman saw how the thousand or so tourists had no place to get dolled up. So they bought in. The Lucky Star, McGraw says, will do "manicures, pedicures, massages, and world-class hair. Kim is one of the number one colorists in the country." The pair are planning on rehabbing the old quartermaster's building back to its 1920's roots and allowing local artists to put their art on the walls. They may also put in a pool and some Airstream trailers.
Not all the new Marfans are thinking so grand. Chris Cessac, who has been here since 2000, is one. Cessac, from Portland, Texas, gave up practicing law for writing poetry before arriving in Marfa and doing some of each. "I was attracted to Marfa," he says. "I was not attracted to a vision of Marfa." Now he and his wife, Jeanne, are opening the Brown Recluse, a coffee roastery and used-book-and-record store. But Cessac is taking a low-key approach and says he will have a section of books in Spanish—and cheap coffee. "Our coffee will be one dollar a cup," he says. "We think that's important." More than anything, he worries that Marfa is growing too fast in some ways and not fast enough in others. "There are a lot of fine galleries here," he says, "but there's still not a full-time doctor or a pharmacy or a vet. Sometimes I feel pretty jaded and skeptical."
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