The Last Cave-Dweller of the Modern World

Hello! This is Elizabeth Goodspeed, this week’s guest editor of The Mortar, back with another story.

My second selection comes from The Smudge, one of my most beloved defunct publications. Created by Liana Jegers and Clay Hickson in LA, it published monthly for four years, from January 2017 until December 2021. Contributions ranged from Liana’s odes to overlooked objects (“In Praise of…”) to essays, comics, classifieds, and personal writing – all filled with joyful wit and beautifully riso-printed in riotously bright colors.

Today I’m sharing Sasha Plotnikova’s The Last Cave-Dweller of the Modern World, from Volume 3, Issue 10 (October 2019) of The Smudge. The piece is about Bedrock City, a Flintstones-themed roadside attraction in Arizona that operated for many decades before closing in 2019. The location itself is the stuff of Casual Archivist dreams: a kitschy, off-brand replica of a cartoon town from a show that stopped airing almost three decades before I was born. Plotnikova, however, reads Bedrock City as a more significant kind of civic space; a communal meeting point that, despite its longevity and appeal, falls outside the criteria typically used to determine what’s worth preserving.

The existence, and inevitable downfall, of Bedrock City reminds me of the same questions I’m always asking myself when digging through garage sales and flea markets. What to save and what to let fall away? Ultimately, the question applies just as easily to old train tickets and American Southwestern tourist traps as it does to publications like The Smudge and Works That Work (my defunct selection from earlier this week). Magazines persist as objects long after their moment of circulation has passed.

There were two ways to get to the Grand Canyon. You could take highway 67 from Jacob Lake, Arizona, and visit the rugged north rim of the canyon. Or you could make your way up from the town of Williams, driving north along Route 64. Twenty-nine miles shy of the crowds touring the south rim, you could find a small world of structures built of love and stucco, generously tended to by the family that first brought it to life. You could pay five dollars for admission and five cents for coffee – you could even park your RV and camp for the night, laying down amidst the schoolhouse and the brontosaurus slide to gaze up at the stars.

This was Bedrock City, a homemade version of the fictional hometown in The Flintstones. The Speckels family opened their first Bedrock City in Custer, South Dakota in 1966 along with a handful of their friends. It was an RV lot and a small roadside attraction, and the owners saw the RV park as the true business, not expecting that the sideshow of rounded, rubble-like forms and off-brand character replicas of the Flintstone and Rubble families would itself draw crowds. Woody Speckels quickly observed that this Bedrock City complemented the nearby Mt. Rushmore and South Dakota Badlands, taking visitors into the fantastical world of the Flintstones before they made their way to the surreal Black Hills of South Dakota – from the stone age into a world of stone. With an eye towards opening a second Bedrock, he visited several sites close to other sublime landscapes of the American West, settling in 1972 on a site in Valle, AZ. Over the next forty-seven years, the site became a touchstone of countless trips up Route 64. For some, the Grand Canyon became the sideshow to Bedrock City.

Valle’s Bedrock City was itself a family – a collection of related buildings, backdropped by the expanse of the Arizona desert reaching out toward the horizon. The ground was unpaved, leaving the muted red clay of the soil and the contrasting patches of teal desert grasses to play against the vibrant colours of the stucco structures. The site was often windy, turning the freeform stucco buildings into useful shelters. The Flintstones’ show designers envisioned the stone age dwelling as a massive, hollowed-out boulder – typically a round, squat one topped off with a flat one. The magnetism of these buildings is the fantasy of a pre-historic building type that would have required contemporary technology in its construction – show me a cave dweller who successfully hollowed out a boulder fifteen feet in diameter!

Bedrock had about a dozen of these buildings, representing both homes and civic institutions: a school, a courthouse, and of course “Fred’s house” (which, let’s be real, should rightfully be called Wilma’s house). The interiors were minimally decorated with animal-print fabrics, blocky wooden furniture, and stone-age analogues of objects found in a 1960s home: a record player made from blocky shapes; and wooden bones and cactuses as tchotchkes. An array of medium-scale objects were arranged around the site to really give it life: a wooden boxcar; a stucco palm tree; wooden benches and the stucco figures of the Flintstones and Rubble families.

We could talk about Bedrock as just a roadside attraction, as another artifact of America’s post-WWII highway boom; we could wax poetic about its campiness, its kitschy refusal to modernize; we could even shrug our shoulders, accepting that places like Bedrock aren’t long for this world. But when we look at a place as special as Bedrock and simply liken it to other folk architecture, we ignore the role it played on a local scale – the specific way it spoke to the desert landscape, and the way that its guardians dedicated themselves to keeping the prices low and the doors open so that visitors and community members alike could find reason to return time after time. Some fool once said that architecture is where art intersects with property – and here are the Speckels proving them wrong.

Bedrock’s folk architecture laid a claim that the value of a place is its history, its ability to elicit a sense of wonder, and its enduring commitment to be a mainstay of the local culture. Over the years, Bedrock had become a community hub for Valle residents. They employed a lot of the community, operated as a Head-Start center and even funded the fire department. I spoke with Brandon Glasscock, head of the Bedrock City Alliance, long-time employee of Bedrock City, and grandson of the Speckels – according to him, “Bedrock City was the community.” Like many of America’s small towns and suburbs, Valle lacks a true public space – there is no community center, no town square; just a couple gas stations, some small businesses and a hardware store. It grew from a dusty highway interchange into a community beginning in the 1960s, and with it Bedrock grew into the town’s civic space. Imagine you live in a small community of just 830 and you want to host a community gathering – maybe a firework show, a concert, or a town hall. Imagine being able to come to a place that was neither wild, nor tame, and more public than someone’s home – a place that was closer than the Carl’s Jr 30 miles south, less prescriptive than the local church, and warmer than the generic architecture of any municipal government building. That place you’re imagining existed in Valle, and I struggle to think of a space better suited to hosting community gatherings than Bedrock. In some ways, Bedrock may even have innovated a new model for civic life in small town America.

Following fast on the heels of its sister in South Dakota, Bedrock closed its doors in January of 2019. Sales were good at this time – better than they had been in years: the National Parks Service celebrated its centennial in 2016, running a massive marketing campaign that has since flooded attractions like the Grand Canyon National Park with about two million more visitors per year each year since; not so nice for the local park rangers but lucky for Bedrock. That said, running a whole City for decades on end is exhausting, and Linda Speckels had long wanted to retire since losing her partner in the 90s. She put the property up for sale in 2015. The Valle community was surprised she held onto it as long as she did, and Glasscock spent much of his time trying to save it. His hope, of course, was that any new owners would see the structures, not the land, as the true value of the site. As I’m sure you can guess, the new owners barely blinked an eye when they decided to demolish Bedrock City.

What’s tragic about the loss of places like Bedrock is not just the role they played as roadside attractions. The real loss is that in this political economy, and under these land use policies, it’s unlikely that anything like Bedrock could overcome the hurdles of the building process today. For the last decade, Bedrock had been flooded with cease-and-desist orders from Warner Brothers. Glasscock said that the park had fallen into disrepair, and that they were lucky that the Coconino County building inspectors didn’t come by the property too often: “I was the one removing the rusty nails sticking out in the theme park and the literal death traps ranging from eighty-pound slabs of concrete atop forty-year-old wooden props, to live electrical wires sticking out of the Fred sign in the parking lot.” Given the operating and construction costs, the standing copyright now being held by Warner Brothers Animation, and the tendency of planning departments to favor profit over people, we may never see anything quite like Bedrock again.

Though The Flintstones ceased production in 1966, it stayed on high rotation and remained an American favourite until The Simpsons stepped in in the late 80s. The Speckels’ Bedrock City parks opened soon after The Flintstones went off the air, riding on the persistent success of the show. The real estate market was not yet swelling around metropolitan areas, making space for a less professionalized, more inclusive and expansive field of architecture. The explosion of car ownership in the 50s popularized road trips as a way to vacation in America and incentivized the construction of roadside attractions. Since the 70s, a lot has changed. Real estate is now king, and anyone with an eye for development would be quick to advise that every square foot of land should be squeezed for its maximum potential income. Our failure of a healthcare system has made for a culture so obsessed with building safety that it’s almost impossible to build anything fun, nevermind something as whimsical as Bedrock City. As more and more folk architecture ages out, its place in our built environment is taken by Instagram museums – or “experiences" as they apparently prefer to be called. Using the neoliberal logic of contemporary development, it’s increasingly hard to justify the upkeep of what amounts to a 62-acre playground, accessed by five-dollar admission.

The loss of Bedrock Cities across North America calls into question what exactly the preservation efforts of American historical commissions work to preserve. Sure, a tribute to The Flintstones should be reason enough to keep a place around – what kind of future is a future in which children only know The Flintstones as a vitamin? But more importantly, we should hang on to these places as monuments to the possibilities we once had – possibilities that capitalism has destroyed, and that the architecture community has left by the wayside. Glasscock had spent most of the past few decades advocating for Bedrock's historical recognition to no avail, and was developing a continuation plan when his grandmother sold the property.

Having worked on architectural restoration projects for the past few years, I can testify to the way that class inflects the way US preservation committees select what’s worth keeping, writing history in just the way you’d predict. As mid-century modernism has come back into style, real estate agents in Los Angeles trip over themselves to promote the homes in their portfolios as “historic.” At the same time, historic building commissions largely favour those done in a European style: the most popular being Victorian, Spanish, or Modern. There is little consideration given to places of value to the working class, or of an aesthetic that doesn't fit comfortably into the canon of architecture. 

In one well-publicized recent case, an Asian-American homeowner has come under intense scrutiny for her mansion’s decor, which was inspired by – of all things – The Flintstones. Her mainly white neighbours in a gated community in Silicon Valley have teamed up with the local planning department, condemning her home’s wild, orange domes and decorative mammoths for failing to conform to the community’s Spanish style architecture. Unable to stomach the possibility of co-existence with an unusual, fantastical house down the street, the town has came together to sue Florence Fang, calling her home a “public nuisance.” Can you imagine being so callous? It’s a real head-scratcher.

On occasion, the so-called “architectural gems” of Modernism are made into house museums at great effort and expense to private donors and nonprofits that keep these relics operating. More often, a millionaire artist outbids a foundation and moves in after a meticulous restoration has been performed, closing their doors to the public and putting up an entry gate so even the building’s exterior becomes private. Sometimes, the millionaire might open their doors, charging exorbitant fees for admission. Visiting the John Lautner-designed Sheats-Golstein house in LA means paying $40 to someone with a net worth of $300 million. I’ll remind you again that Bedrock City, an invaluable asset to America’s built environment, cost only $5 to get in. Postmodernist architect James Wines wisely defended folk architecture against the snobbery of modernism, asserting that “Form follows fantasy, not function.” His thinking never caught on among those with the power to save the relics of folk architecture, buildings built on imagination and resourcefulness; not on stuffy historical reference or graduate degrees.

When The Flintstones first aired in 1960, it broke ground as the first animated sitcom, and brought families together by catering across generations – Fred and Wilma’s bickering kept parents entertained, while the fantasy of the proto-technological stone age gave kids a new universe to dream about. The Flintstones, the Rubbles, and their whole world were neither prehistoric nor contemporary, but from a parallel universe where both eras seemed to coexist. The show was a pure salad of anachronisms: dinosaurs magically lived alongside humans, and a prehistoric community had all the trappings of modern life. Fred wore a tie and drove his family around in a leg-powered cart; a pelican doubled as a washing machine; and a buck-toothed lizard served as a can opener.

In its final years, Bedrock City itself had become an anachronism. Toddlers visited a life-size ode to a cartoon from the 1960s, likely never having met the characters before, and not realizing that they had stepped foot in something that was built at a time in history when weird dreams could come true. Behind the scenes, Glasscock’s enthusiasm for bringing Bedrock up to safety standards and keeping it running was at odds with his grandmother’s exhaustion. “The true story of Bedrock never fits the narrative that outsiders are attempting to portray,” said Brandon. Indeed – Bedrock City was neither the peachy family business we want it to be, nor merely another quirky roadside attraction, as the press has described it. In fact, it was one of the last cave dwellers of the modern world.

I was lucky to go to Bedrock City with my friends Joe and Ted in 2016, and see Joe re-create a photo his family had taken of him twenty years ago. This past January, Bedrock closed its doors for good after the vultures descended and Linda Speckels sold the property to Raptor Ranch, a park where predator birds will be held captive for visitors to gawk at. They’ve left intact what Glasscock called “the carcasses of Bedrock,” – a few select photogenic structures – using Bedrock City’s legacy to attract visitors in bad faith. The proceeds from these months are going towards the demolition fees for the remaining structures. “Saving Bedrock City was my dream,” Glasscock said, “Now the bird people will demolish it.” Bedrock City Alliance has asked visitors to reconsider if they plan to visit the bird park.

The Smudge was a monthly newspaper offering articles, interviews, comics, and advice from a range of unique thinkers and creators.

David Huang is an illustrator and designer based in London. He spends most of his time in the three places close to his heart: New York, London, and Taiwan. When he isn't illustrating, he enjoys a nice roast at the pub, and searching for random historical facts on wikipedia. You can see more of his work on Instagram.

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