The sun had just started its descent when the Mane Street band took the stage for its somanedado Sunday Sunday Sunday in the Red Dog Hall of Pionertoown. Young adults in the hiking team drank beers under the spider lamps shaped like cart wheels like old timers with gray tails and cowboy hats talked with a tattooed waiter. Outside, a group of parents sat around long picnic tables, ignoring their children who were playing on earth.
It was not easy to know who was local and who was visiting the city of High Desert founded almost 80 years ago as a permanent film established for Western films. The warm neighboring scene felt as one more test than the locals had been telling me all weekend: the false Western city that Hollywood finally built has become a real western city with its own identity.
The Dog Saloon network in Pionertoown serves breakfast, lunch and dinner and is a meeting place for locals and visitors equally.
(Simone Lueck / by schedules)
“This is not the berries of Knott,” said Joanne Gosen, a local merchant and goat farmer who moved to the area 21 years ago. “This is a real city and it is our city.”
After years of agitation that included the prices of fired homes, an Airbnb boom fed by the pandemic, a failed proposal for a space of multipurpose events and a false claim of a television reality star that the city possessed, the residents of this small unproceded community say that Pionertoown is being installed in a new balance. The tumultuous era in the historic house and the place of concerts of the city, Pappy and Harriet, seems to have ended as a new management repairs relations with the surrounding community. The companies established as Red Dog Saloon and Pionertoown Motel are offering stable employment to premises and transplants equally and more buildings in the “Mane St.” of the Western themes of Pionertoown. They are becoming small local stores.
The locals dance in the Dog Saloon network in Pionertoown.
(Simone Lueck / for times)
Pioneer Bowl in Pionertoown, California. (Simone Lueck / for times)
Visitors will also find much more to wait two hours for a table in Pappy and Harriet. Weekend tourists can take a taco on the Dog Saloon network, explore natural bathroom products locally manufactured in Xeba Botanica, bowl in a historic bowling alley or explore the Berber-Meets-Cowboy Soukie Modern store. If you are there on a Sunday morning, you can even pick up a dozen New York style bars boiled by hand if you make an order in advance.
“It can be difficult for us veterans to see all the changes,” said Gosen, who turns the goat fiber in thread out of his soap store on Mane street most weekends. “I do not love all the Airbnbs and residents who cannot pay the house. But at the same time, we are here on the farm alone most of the week and the weekend we are lucky to go to the city and meet the most incredible people around the world.”
Hey Bales are scattered on the main street of Pionertoown, blatantly known as “Mane Street.”
(Simone Lueck / for times)
Developers, be careful with the 'Curse Cure'
Pionertoown has always been a strange and hybrid place: half false, real half.
The community was founded in the mid -1940s by a consortium of artists that included Roy Rogers, Dale Evans and the children of the pioneers, a popular singing group at that time that lent his name to the city. He was conceived and directed in his early years by Dick Curtis, an actor of 6 feet 3 who appeared in more than 230 films and television programs in the 40s and 50s. Curtis dreamed of creating a permanent western film set in the resistant backdrop of the Sawtooth mountains that would also work as a city that works with companies that attended to the filming and resident equipment. Pionertoown Corp. was launched in 1946. Among its first buildings were a land office, a beauty salon, a motel, two restaurants and a food store, all with facades from the old west.
Filming in the city stopped mainly in the 1950s, but the area continues to offer visitors and residents a unique mixture of fantasy and function decades later. Some buildings such as the General Store, the Saddlery and the Post Office of the Post Office. Others, such as prison, free and a barbershop are only facades, excellent for selfies but little else.
Over the years, people with great dreams and the limited understanding of the challenges of construction in this particular section of desert have tried and have not been able to bring great developments to the city, which today has around 600 residents. In the 60s, an Ohio cars seller bought the Pionertoown Corp. and proposed plans to create a resort in a massive desert with attached houses, apartments, lakes and golf courses. He predicted that he would eventually attract a population of 35,000. (The business declared bankruptcy. The project was finally degraded to a Caro Airbnb And for when it was completed, it was no longer part of that.
The Pionertown Cinema Museum offers a cured look at movies and movies used in the Hollywood set turned into the western city.
(Simone Lueck / for times)
Curt Sautter, who helps cure the small Museum of Pionerto Cinema, believes that the city has been protected from important development for what he calls Curtis Curs. “You can succeed in Pionertoown, but if you become greedy or try to do something that puts you with the environment or the community itself, you will fail,” he said.
The locals know that the growth in Pionertoown is inevitable, but they also point out their limitations: the low local water supply, the lack of a fire department and that there is only one way inside and outside the city.
“The community wants a slow growth that preserves the western character of the city and is compatible with the desert environment,” said Ben Loescher, architect and president of Friends of Pionertoown, a non -profit organization that supports the community.
Richard Lee of 29 Loaves sells Bars freshly baked out of the Pionerto Domingos motel on the morning.
(Simone Lueck / for times)
What to do in Pionertoown: Bowling, Bars, Bingo and more
Today you will find growth signs measured everywhere in Pionertoown, which makes now a good time to visit. Pioneering bowlA perfectly preserved vintage alley of 1946 with the original murals of a Hollywood set designer on its walls, has just resurfaced its lanes and extended its hours. It is now open from 3 pm to 10 pm from Wednesday to Saturday. A game will cost you $ 25 and you arrive for the first time, for the first time. It used to be impossible to find breakfast in the city, but now you will find breakfast burritos, tacos and quesadillas in the Red Dog Roomthat opens every day at 10 am on Sundays from 8:30 am to 9:30 am, Richard Lee 29 breads Deliver their baked bakes freshly baked to those who asked them in advance outside Pionertoown Motel. (The bars of the cinnamon date are especially recommended).
Local at the Dog Saloon network in Pionertoown, California. (Simone Lueck / for times)
Children and selfie applicants will enjoy Pionertoown Petting Zoo Where $ 10 will buy 20 minutes with chickens, turkeys and a small horse. There is also a small history museum to explore and two old Western recreation groups, Mane Stampede and Gunters for rent – They seem to entertain themselves as much as they are the audience. (See your websites to obtain updated exhibition schedules). If you plan in advance, you can also reserve a walk with goats with Yogi goat farm for $ 95 per person.
Visitors can also consider subscribing to Gazette of Pionertoown, A free weekly newsletter that the co -owner of Pionertoown Motel, Matt French, began publishing online in 2023. It compiles listings for dozens of concerts, performances, yoga classes and other events that occur in the high desert. A personal favorite is Desert bingo In the Red Dog Saloon at 6:30 pm on Monday night, where the locals, visitors and transplants meet for a Bingo and Malhumorado bingo game with a live DJ. A Bingo Board will cost you $ 10 and income benefits a local charity.
Pioneer Bowl in Pionertoown was built in 1946 to entertain filming equipment. He has recently expanded his hours.
(Simone Lueck / for times)
Whether you are planning to visit an afternoon or considering moving to the area, you will find that this Hollywood films set, turned into the ghost city, became tourist curiosity, became the real western city to entertain the premises and visitors that in decades, without sacrificing the western environment that attracted its founders to the area almost 80 years ago.
“It's the landscape and that strange Western mythology,” Loescher said. “He has always been full of people who are a bit iconoclast and do not do things in the normal way.”
And it doesn't matter how many people come who dream of changing Pionertoown, the challenging desert environment, and Curtis's curse will probably keep it like this.
A sign in Mane St. in Pionertoown.
(Simone Lueck / for times)
