The Most Impossible Rise of a City Ever: El Paso, Texas

Описание: In 1880, El Paso, Texas was a desert village of 736 people — no railroad, no paved road, closer to four foreign capitals than to Austin. By 1930, it had concrete skyscrapers, a Tiffany stained-glass dome, a 2,410-seat movie palace, and the world's largest custom smelter. This is the story of how the most geographically isolated big city in the continental United States built itself into a real American metropolis in a single lifetime — and what it cost.
The script follows the money and the decisions: Anson Mills flunking out of West Point and drawing the street grid that downtown El Paso still uses today. The Southern Pacific Railroad arriving in May 1881 and turning a village into a boomtown overnight. Robert Towne buying 1,156 acres for $3,757 and building the ASARCO smelter that would process twenty-two million dollars in metal per year. Henry Trost, the Ohio-born architect who came from Chicago in 1903 and designed over six hundred buildings across the Southwest, giving El Paso the skyline of a city ten times its age — the Mills Building, the Hotel Paso del Norte, the Bassett Tower, Conrad Hilton's first high-rise hotel. The first-ever meeting of a U.S. and Mexican president, in El Paso, in 1909. The Battle of Juárez in 1911, watched by thousands of El Pasoans from their rooftops. The Prohibition boom that sent border crossings from 14,000 to over 418,000 in a single year. The Plaza Theatre opening during the Great Depression with a sixty-thousand-dollar Wurlitzer organ. And the morning in April 2013 when three hundred pounds of dynamite brought down the ASARCO smokestacks — once the tallest in the world — while the city watched from the same hillsides and rooftops their grandparents had stood on a century before.

Sources

W. H. Timmons, "El Paso, TX" and related entries, Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association (tshaonline.org)
Borderlands research journal, El Paso Community College — student articles on railroad history, ASARCO, the Mexican Revolution, Prohibition, and Henry Trost (epcc.libguides.com)
Henry C. Trost Historical Organization — building records, construction dates, newspaper citations, and architectural documentation (henrytrost.org)
Elaine Hampton and Cynthia Ontiveros, Copper Stain: ASARCO's Legacy in El Paso — interviews with former smelter workers and environmental history
Plaza Theatre historical marker documentation and Plaza Classic Film Festival archives, El Paso Community Foundation
Bernie Sargent, quoted in "El Paso's Rich Railroad History," El Paso Inc., 2022 — on the arrival of six railroad companies after 1881 and the city's transformation