photo: David Olsen
Conversations are cornerstones for great ideas, and Charlie Levy of Stateside Presents remembers how one he had with Calexico’s Joey Burns sparked the impetus for a music festival in downtown’s Barrio Viejo.
“One day, Joey was telling me about a show he did in a small town in Spain, in a neighborhood street,” Levy recalls. “It stayed with me and I thought of Barrio Viejo.
“That neighborhood is so unique and so Tucson – so much music, historically, has been made and inspired there. So many bands live and practice and write music there, going back to Teatro Carmen and Lalo Guerrero,” Levy explains. “It has a cultural and musical mystique.”
As one of Tucson’s oldest neighborhoods, it is a site to celebrate. Donald Rollings, whose family’s company has owned real estate in the neighborhood since 1971, agrees.
“Let’s honor the area and people and traditions,” Rollings says. The event is “an invitation for people to become part of it, and appreciate the buildings and place and everything that goes with it.”
According to Betsy Rollings, Donald’s sister and proprietress of Cushing Street Bar and Restaurant, Barrio Viejo features the “largest stand of 19th Century adobe structures in the country.”
Over the last 40 years, the Rollings have worked tirelessly to maintain their adobe buildings but have had continuous issues with the city’s cast iron water mains leaking.
“The water mains date back to the early 1900s and the life expectancy (of cast iron mains) is between 50 and 70 years,” Donald elucidates. “With the slow leaks, moisture gets distributed laterally, gets in the sidewalks and wicked up into the adobe – creating structural problems.”
The goal is to work in conjunction with the city, he stresses. “It’s not a blame game; we’d like to have meaningful dialogue in order to save these buildings.”
The Rollings family has been refurbishing the adobes since their Tucson-born patriarch Kelley Rollings purchased property in the barrio four decades ago.
“The TCC forced my father to look at the buildings that were remaining,” Donald explains, referring to the city’s urban renewal efforts in the late 1960s that demolished homes and businesses from Broadway Boulevard to Cushing Street and from Main Avenue to Church Avenue to build the Tucson Convention Center complex.
See what still stands in this glorious, colorful neighborhood that hosts Calexico’s annual KXCI 91.3 FM fundraiser on Saturday, March 26. It’s not just a music festival; it’s also an experience of time and space. Take a look around and soak in the ambiance of this special locale.
Click HERE to learn more about the historic landmarks in the event area.
Click HERE to view the band schedule.
