Nipton, Calif., has one main road and about two dozen residents. Entrepreneurs with dreams of turning it around have come and gone. Will this time be different?
By Debra Kamin | New York Times
Since the days of the gold rush, dreamers hoping to strike it rich have been staking their claim to a dusty 80-acre town in the Mojave Desert called Nipton. For nearly all of them, those dreams have been fool’s gold.
A buyer who envisioned turning the California ghost town into a testing ground for solar power died before getting his green energy idea off the ground. An attempt by a cannabis company to create a weed-themed resort was impeded by legislation that banned marijuana sales there.
Ross Mollison is the most recent badlands baron. His company, Spiegelworld, bought the town on a whim last year for $2.5 million — a million or so shy of what he paid for his six-bed, five-bath apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
As the founder of Spiegelworld, a live entertainment company producing sybaritic adult circuses in Las Vegas, Mr. Mollison specializes in spectacle and calls himself an “Impresario Extraordinaire.” But even hedonists must occasionally fast. In the desert sun of Nipton, where visitors now can find little beyond a peeling one-room schoolhouse, an empty general store, a five-bed hotel and a small cluster of forgotten cabins, he is trying to build an oasis of escape — a circus sanctuary.
