When it first opened, the u-shaped layout of this property hosted company offices, a hotel, and social room, lobby area, store, and dormitory designed to accommodate 23 Pacific Coast Borax miners. As an aside, Borax isn’t just a brand name - it’s the name of an element that’s found in abundance in this corner of the west: borax sodium, and it’s used for everything from household cleaners to moisturizers to toothpaste.
In the heart of Amargosa Valley, this Spanish Colonial Revival architectural style building was first established in 1923, and built to support a company town staffing the Pacific Coast Borax Company in nearby Death Valley. There’s no better place to embrace an honorary dose of Weird Nevada than the barely-over-the-border Amargosa Opera House, whose late proprietress Marta Becket performed ballet and opera to a painted audience, and anyone who showed up to visit nearby Death Valley National Park for more than 40 years. Can you think of a more Weird Nevada appropriate story, especially one that’s 100 percent true? A Broadway dancer breaks down in the desert, converts a pioneer old stage stop into her performing venue, and proceeds to paint her audience around her.
If you were writing a Hollywood script about a dusty, Western outpost and the quirky characters who inhabited it, you couldn’t do better than the story of the Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley Junction, situated along the Nevada-California border at the gateway to Death Valley National Park.
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