Superior, AZ

The Stars Come Out to Superior, Ariz.

If you’re looking for property in Superior, Ariz., (pop. 3,516), don’t expect any help from Jake McKenna.

Despite a sign for McKenna’s real estate office on the town’s main thoroughfare, Jake is nothing more than a figment of the imagination.

As with a scattering of other features in this former copper-mining community 60 miles east of Phoenix, the McKenna sign was devised by moviemakers—in this case, director Oliver Stone and his crew for the 1997 thriller U-Turn, starring Nick Nolte as McKenna, alongside Sean Penn and Jennifer Lopez.

The town, with its main street of numerous old buildings flanked by ancient mining equipment and imposing mountain scenery, began its movie career in the early ’60s, when the mine’s railroad was used in scenes for How the West Was Won.

More recently, however, the film industry has offered hope of a brighter local economy to a community hit hard by the closure of the Magma copper mine in 1982. River of Rage, starring Victoria Principal, was partly filmed here, as was a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie, The Lost Child. In addition, The Gauntlet, starring Clint Eastwood, and The Prophecy were both shot in Superior. The main street witnessed make-believe mayhem recently when giant spiders attacked the citizens in a Warner Bros. production expected to be titled Arachattack.

A busy business district, even one bustling with arachnids, is a welcome sight to locals who have endured a two-decade downturn that threatened to turn Superior into a ghost town. Roy Chavez, town manager and former mayor, remembers the mood when the mine closed.

“We were caught off guard,” he says. “It was the only horse in town. The economy revolved around it.”

At first, many miners enjoyed the rest, convinced it would last only a few days. But as weeks and months passed, townspeople realized they would have to look elsewhere for jobs.

“At the closure of the mine, the population was 6,500 or even 7,000. We’ve lost half the population,” Chavez says. Today, many town residents travel elsewhere to work, including into the Phoenix area.

Years later, the mine did reopen on a much smaller scale, but then closed again in 1996. For a community that had always depended on one source of income, it took time to revive. Though not a company-owned town, mining was in everyone’s blood.

“When I grew up, the taste and smell of sulfur were in the air,” says Chavez, referring to the odor emanating from the smelter used to process copper ore.

But it was silver, not copper—along with the founding of the Silver King mine—which gave the town its start in the 1880s. At first, the community was called Hastings and then was renamed in honor of one of the mining companies, the Lake Superior and Arizona.

Although silver is still mined on a limited basis at the Silver King, the emphasis shifted to copper at the turn of the century, when William Boyce Thompson formed the Magma Copper Co. Thompson is more widely known now for founding a nearby arboretum.

In 1923, the town’s progress leaped forward when a railway track was completed, connecting Superior to the Southern Pacific Railroad between Phoenix and Tucson. (In earlier days, ore had to be hauled in mule-drawn wagons 300 miles to Yuma, on the Colorado River.)

“Superior is what it is because of the railroad,” says Dave Lira, president of the town’s historical society and environmental and community relations coordinator for the company that currently owns the copper mine, BHP. “If it hadn’t been for that, the mine would have died.”

Historical information on the mines is available downtown at the Bob Jones Museum.

Today, Chavez estimates a single movie production can bring a quarter of a million dollars into Superior’s economy, and the town has ambitious plans to build on this momentum. In addition to a new industrial park, there are plans for mine tours and a recreational area along Queen Creek.

“One day, the mine may reopen,” Chavez says, “but it won’t be our whole cake again. It may be some icing.”

Andrew Means is a freelance writer from Phoenix.

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