Jerome

The floor tilts. Not metaphorically — the restaurant floor, the gallery floor, the hotel corridor. Jerome clings to Cleopatra Hill at an angle steep enough that some buildings have entrances on two different street levels simultaneously, and the entire town slides imperceptibly downhill on the unstable ground of its own abandoned mine shafts. Two thousand feet below, the Verde Valley shimmers in desert heat.

Jerome in Arizona was a copper boomtown that peaked at 15,000 residents in the 1920s, with twenty-three brothels, nine churches, and a Main Street that dropped 1,500 feet from one end to the other. When Phelps Dodge abandoned the mine in 1953, the entire town was left intact. The sliding jail — a concrete block that moved 225 feet downhill between 1920 and 1938 as mine shaft subsidence destabilised the hillside — is not folklore but documented fact. The artist colony that moved in during the 1960s preserved the Victorian commercial district rather than converting it into a themed attraction, and today Jerome's galleries, tasting rooms, and restaurants occupy buildings whose structural idiosyncrasies are features, not flaws. The town's slope is steep enough that several addresses are accessible only by staircase.