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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
It's high noon in far West Texas, where a shootout looms for the soul of one of America's last unspoiled towns. But these aren't typical gunslingers. Some of them wear Prada.
Aug 1, 2005 | The light of the West Texas sky streams through big plate-glass windows and illuminates Jason Willaford and his wife, Rea, sipping freshly ground coffee in the Marfa Book Co. The slim and attractive couple, who met in Los Angeles, moved to Marfa last summer to open Galleri Urbane, a boutique specializing, like so much of the town, in contemporary art. So far, their experience has been wonderful. "Marfa's a lot more sophisticated than most places," Willaford says. "When someone here sets out to do something, they do it nice. That's why people like it here -- no Wal-Marts."
When Tony Trento imagines Marfa, his voice, thickly upholstered with his native Long Island, N.Y., accent, grows excited. "Marfa needs more retail stores and affordable houses," says the developer, who owns the American Plume and Fancy Feather Co., based in Marfa, which crafts boas and masks from turkey feathers and sells them to exotic dancers and Las Vegas showgirls. "There could be a truck stop, a McDonald's, or maybe," he says, contemplating something truly special, "a Wal-Mart."
A classic Western showdown has come to the hottest little town in the country. Set amid the cedar-shaded, yucca-dotted lands of West Texas, surrounded by grasslands as wide as the Serengeti, Marfa may be the last un-Starbucked place in America. In the past few years, a covey of A-list artists, corporate players and real estate speculators have descended on the tiny town (pop. 2,121). Enchanted by its spare beauty -- think "The Last Picture Show" with a Christian Liagre makeover -- they're also drawn by elite cultural institutions like the Chinati Foundation, dedicated to hip installation art, and the Lannan Foundation, a prestigious literary organization.
Trailing in the trendsetters' wake has been the national media. Marfa's press clips glow like newly lit luminaria. Publications such as Vanity Fair, Elle and ArtForum venerate Marfa's Victorian ranch houses and Texas Territorial adobes, the burgeoning art scene and its rich patrons. The movie "Giant" was filmed in Marfa 50 years ago, when its stars James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson could be seen kicking around town. These days, the scene makers include Dan Rather, Frances McDormand, Dwight Yoakam and Tommy Lee Jones. A National Public Radio station is coming. The real estate madness already has. Four years ago, Marfa adobes were selling for $40,000. They're now $200,000 and no doubt a good deal higher after the recent New York Times story, "The Great Marfa Land Boom."
It's a familiar pattern. Western havens like Aspen, Colo., Taos, N.M., and Missoula, Mont., were Marfas once, playgrounds for coast-hugging hipsters who could slip into jeans and the rustic camaraderie of the outback. But those towns are full up now, victims of their popularity. Now the sagebrush Medici come to Texas, piloting the corporate Gulfstream into tiny Marfa Municipal airport and bellying up to the jes-folks atmosphere of Joe's Bar, where the Bud Light costs $1.75. The town remains an aesthete's dream, devoid of Olive Gardens, Best Buys and any sign of the suburban middle class. Rather, Marfa is the honest texture of adobe and fine art set against a big sky. It's the simplicity of line and the haunting emptiness of the land.
But this isn't what Marfa means to everybody in Presidio County. Most residents don't own much in this southwest corner of George Bush's Ownership Society. The county is 84 percent Mexican-American; 36 percent of its residents live below the poverty line (the U.S. average is 12 percent). Marfa itself is 70 percent Hispanic.
Today, on Marfa's main street, tony art galleries and wine shops are driving away traditional cafes and shops, whose local owners can't afford the new sky-high rents. Everywhere you go the townsfolk, independent Texans to the core, lament the changes to their community. The term "ChiNazi" is used locally to describe anyone from out of town who arrives with artistic ambitions and a superior attitude. Observes one local cattle rancher, who asked to remain anonymous: "We're filling up with triple A's -- artists, assholes and attorneys."
Some of the new businesses hire people who were born and bred in Marfa, and that helps the local economy. At the same time, the cost of living is rising above their means, and they welcome Trento's plan for big-box retail and ranchettes. To them, a steady job and an affordable home near extended families are more enticing than living in little Bauhaus on the prairie.
The ever-widening chasm between social classes in America has reached West Texas, with acrimony erupting all around. Trento's plan threatens Marfa's art community, spearheaded by the Chinati Foundation, which is determined to prevent the ambitious developer from besmirching its views. The tussle between subdivisions and sightlines stirs up questions to make the culturati squirm in their Eameses. Are the aesthetic desires of an elite more important than the economic needs of the majority? Will Marfa be a town where working-class residents can thrive or will it become Marfa's Vineyard, a weekend sandbox for people whose tastes veer more toward pinot noir than Dairy Queen? Are big-box retail jobs less desirable than "All Things Considered"? Should you sell a Frenchman your adobe? What price arugula? Marfa is about to find out.
