Flagstaff Days, Monte Vista Nights- Finale
Flagstaff has done an excellent job of preserving and transforming its historic old downtown. Shops, restaurants, micro-breweries, and a central plaza invite strolling and poking into Flag’s history.
An excellent walking tour is available that takes you around the historic section to the buildings that are the face of the town’s history. There is a Virtual Tour available on line and if you take a look at it you’ll get an idea of some of the places we visited.
Blue sky and cool temperatures kept us on our feet wandering through ‘old Flag’ and the surrounding residential areas until late in the afternoon, when we went back to the Monte Vista.
By then, in addition to our walkabout, we had visited a chili cook-off (2 bucks for all your stomach lining could take); a gay pride festival in one of the parks with enough food booths to ruin the restaurant business for the rest of the day; and a short ride out toto the edge of town to the community center and art museum for an acoustic music festival.
There's stuff to do all summer long up there as the city reaches for the tourist dollar!
Flagstaff is much smaller than Tucson and the area to restore or revitalize is more compact than Tucson’s, but the truth is that Flagstaff has done a much better job at "downtown re-vitalization" than Tucson.
Flag had the great advantage of being in an area where there was plenty of lumber for building, and where the winter climate invited building with bricks. Much of Tucson’s central area was built of adobe, and was simply bulldozed flat in the ‘60s, for federal dollars, in the name of "urban renewal."
A Monte Vista Night
The Monte Vista has a bar. I like bars. The Monte Vista bar (a big sign outside says, simply and directly, COCKTAILS) has a dark, red plush, atmosphere as comforting as the womb. They sell Bloody Marys by the pint. The woman who tends bar is the fastest gun in the west
This is where Katherine and I hung out on Friday night. By the time we got there the place was beginning to fill up, waiting for the MC, "Barbara Seville," to open the drag show. We took a couple of chairs at a table for six and shortly after we sat down were joined by four guys who were a) escaping from Phoenix heat and b) flying the flag for gay pride. We had a great time. Everyone in the place had a great time.
Of course the show did not start on time so by the time it did start the bar was packed shoulder to shoulder with a crowd of amiable drunks nearly all of whom were smoking. To our dismay we found we were sitting no more than ten feet from one of the monster speakers. Once the music started conversation was impossible. Hell, thought was impossible, so we just let the show roll over us while our neurons were scrambled.
One of our table-mates knew all the songs which he lip-synched along with the Queens, pausing to make faces of critical disapproval.
Five acts into the show we finally gave up and took our smoke filled-lungs to bed. My ears rang for twenty minutes. The next morning every stitch we had on still smelled of smoke and I had a double-bass voice and a hacking cough.
We probably won’t do that again, but we’ll surely go back to Flagstaff for another long weekend.
PS-- I struggled to the bar at one point to get another beer. A nice guy bought it for me. I was really quite flattered.
