Emily Bishton and Conrad Uno are a couple from Seattle who own a historic dancehall in Arivaca, Ariz. Bishton first saw the property in 1993, when she was on a birding trip with her husband, Uno. Nearly 25 years later they moved to Arivaca to retire, not knowing that much about the small town.
“Arivaca has a deep-rooted sort of self-belief that it's still a little bit of the wild west down here,” Uno said.
Bishton hears similar remarks when she mentions the dancehall to people.
“Some people who just think it's a bunch of outlaws out here, renegades and ne’er-do-wells, you know, [and I say] ‘whatever,’” Bishton said.
Bishton previously worked as a remodeling contractor. When they moved in to Arivaca in 2017 they bought the property from an architect independently renovating the dancehall. Bishton said when the architect stopped the project and sold the dancehall, she wanted to jump on the opportunity.
“‘Okay, I think I got one more restoration in me,’” Bishton said. “Little did I know the blood, sweat, tears and cartilage it would take to do it. But we were able to finish the restoration.”
They spent two years renovating the dancehall and finished in 2022.
Uno and Bishton said it was in bad shape due to decades of residential use followed by a period of vacancy.
Arivaca’s town historian, Mary Noon Kasulaitis, knew of the family — the Townsends — who lived there.
“It was always a building at the end of the street there. I never knew it as a dancehall because in the early ‘40s the Townsends acquired that property and they lived in it like a house. So I always knew it as the Townsends’ house,” Kasulaitis said.
Kasulaitis said the dancehall’s history started with the Caviglia family.
From 1934 to 1940, the dancehall was a bustling spot built by Angelo Caviglia, the son of Italian immigrant Bernardo Caviglia. Bernardo had owned the land and Angelo built the dancehall when his father passed away.
“But as soon as he died in 1932, then Angelo decided he was going to have a bar for a lot of the Arivaca people [and also for] all these miners in Ruby. They would come down on the weekends and drink and party,” Kasulaitis said.
The Ruby Mine closed for the last time in 1940 and never reopened after World War Two. Angelo moved to Tucson and the Townsends lived in the dancehall until the 1990s.
Both Bishton and Uno wanted to keep this history in their new restoration of the dancehall.
“The original floor was end-to-end and wall-to-wall in old red oak and it was the dance hall, truly,” Uno said.
Uno said they had to take out each plank of wood during the restoration. Thankfully, some of it was repurposed.
“The red oak that you see, this band of red oak, that's the original,” Bishton said, pointing to the wood floor below. “So rather than just make a centerpiece out of the red oak, we were like let's try to get a band all the way around it so that when you step out on the dance floor, you're on that 90 some year old oak.”
They finished the renovations in the winter of 2022. Since then, they have hosted dance classes, concerts, readings, art shows and talks every week for free. With the community’s support they built working bathrooms and hired street artists to paint on the properties next to the dancehall.
Kasulaitis said that she is happy that the building is being used as originally intended. She added that Bishton and Uno are doing a great job taking care of it..
“This little hamlet or village — whatever you want to call it — of 600 people has seven nonprofits doing all kinds of stuff for the community. And that's an incredible thing and that is the heartbeat, in my opinion,” Bishton said.
