Jerome clings to the side of Cleopatra Hill between Prescott and Flagstaff, and at its peak in the early 1900s, the town held nearly 15,000 people and over thirty nationalities. The United Verde Copper Company was the engine driving it all, producing copper, gold, silver, lead, and zinc from an ore body that yielded metals worth more than a billion dollars over seventy-seven years. By the 1920s, Jerome needed a hospital worthy of its ambitions. The United Verde Hospital opened in January 1927 -- the fourth and final hospital built in Jerome. By 1930, it was listed as the most modern and well-equipped hospital in Arizona, and possibly in all of the western states. It was also the highest commercial building in the Verde Valley, sitting at 5,240 feet above sea level.

The hospital's architects faced a problem unique to Jerome: the building had to survive not just earthquakes but the daily detonation of 260,000 pounds of dynamite in the mines below. Their solution was a 30,000-square-foot structure of poured-in-place concrete anchored to solid bedrock on a fifty-degree slope against the flanks of Mingus Mountain. Not a single piece of wood went into the framework -- the entire building was designed to be fireproof. The Mission Revival structure became the last major building constructed in Jerome, a monument to engineering confidence in a town that was already beginning to slide. In 1938, a powerful mining blast jostled Jerome's jail building off its foundations, sending it 225 feet downhill across the road. The hospital held firm.

Copper production peaked in 1929, and the Depression accelerated Jerome's decline. The Little Daisy mine shut down in 1938. When Phelps Dodge closed its operations for good in 1953, Jerome's population collapsed from thousands to fewer than one hundred. The hospital had already closed in 1950, its medical staff transferring to the neighboring community of Cottonwood. For the next forty-four years, the concrete fortress sat empty on its mountainside, its cast-iron Kewanee boiler cold, its Otis elevator still. Jerome was designated a National Historic District in 1967, and artists and craftspeople began trickling into the ghost town in the 1960s and 70s, converting crumbling miners' buildings into galleries and studios. But the hospital waited.

In 1994, Larry Altherr purchased the abandoned hospital from Phelps Dodge and began the transformation. The Jerome Grand Hotel opened for business in 1996, and Altherr remains the owner. The original Otis elevator still operates, regularly maintained and inspected, ferrying guests at its deliberate fifty-feet-per-minute pace. The 1926 Kewanee boiler -- a cast-iron unit originally designed to run on wood, coal, or oil -- has been converted to natural gas and still provides low-pressure steam heat throughout the building, producing between 800,000 and 2,500,000 BTUs. Its dual pump system means it never needs to be shut down for maintenance. The hotel's motto is fitting: "Arizona's mile high historic landmark." At 5,240 feet, perched on Cleopatra Hill with panoramic views across the Verde Valley, the Jerome Grand Hotel is a place where copper-era engineering and modern hospitality coexist inside walls that were built to outlast explosions.