Silver King Hotel

Perched at the top of a steep flight of stairs on Brewery Avenue in the canyon district known as Brewery Gulch, the Silver King Hotel is one of the oldest remaining structures associated with Bisbee's copper mining boom. Built around 1900, it was constructed to house the men who worked the Copper Queen Mine — not the investors and dignitaries who stayed at the nearby Copper Queen Hotel, but the laborers themselves. The building is European boarding house style, seven rooms sharing common baths, and it still operates that way today. The front rooms look directly out over the Gulch, the narrow canyon corridor that during Bisbee's peak held more than fifty saloons, brothels, gambling dens, and dance halls packed into a stretch of red-brick buildings carved into the hillside. The Silver King sat at the center of all of it.

Bisbee itself came out of nothing fast. Copper was discovered in the Mule Mountains of southeastern Arizona in 1877 by a U.S. Army patrol. Within a generation the town had grown to a population approaching 25,000, making it for a time the largest city in Arizona and one of the most productive mineral sites on earth — eventually yielding nearly 3 million ounces of gold, over 100 million ounces of silver, and more than 8 billion pounds of copper. German-Swiss immigrants founded the first breweries in Brewery Gulch as early as 1881. The Silver King Hotel was built when the Gulch was at its rowdiest and most populated, its lower floors allegedly housing a brothel and gambling operation serving the same rough demographic that filled the boarding rooms above. An Asian laundress is said to have operated a laundry on one of the middle floors — common in mining towns of the era, where immigrant labor filled service roles across the district.

The broader context of the building's era is inseparable from violence and upheaval. In July 1917, the Phelps Dodge Corporation, with the cooperation of Cochise County Sheriff Harry Wheeler, rounded up over 1,000 striking miners at gunpoint — many of them the same class of men who had lived in places like the Silver King — loaded them into cattle cars, and sent them sixteen hours through the desert without food or water to Hermanas, New Mexico. The Bisbee Deportation, as it became known, was later declared wholly illegal. Two years later, in July 1919, Brewery Gulch was the site of the Battle of Brewery Gulch — a violent street riot between Black Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry and local police, part of the broader Red Summer of that year. The Silver King Hotel stood through all of it.

The building has reportedly been the site of at least two murders. Paranormal accounts center on two recurring apparitions. The first is an Asian woman believed to be the laundress who operated on the middle floor — described as present throughout that section of the building. The second is a distressed miner, seen and heard on the upper floors in what is described as an agitated or injured state. Both accounts have circulated among staff and guests for years and are consistent enough that the location was featured on an episode of the Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures. Mining operations under the hotel actually resumed in 2013, and the low vibration of the drills beneath the structure is reportedly noticeable when they pause between shifts.

Owner Danielle Martinez, a Philadelphia-raised artist who took over the property and converted the hotel's smallest and least-rentable room into Room 4 Bar — now widely billed as the smallest bar in Arizona at just 100 square feet and four stools — has noted that the property may or may not be haunted, with the two reported murders acknowledged. The hotel remains open, welcoming guests who don't mind steep stairs, shared baths, and the possibility of company they didn't book.