History is under our feet and all around us. Old buildings, streets, statues and signs. We drive by remnants of the past every day, without giving them a second thought.

In this episode, the story of one man’s close encounter with a forgotten piece of history.

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Written and produced by Adam Burke and Jamie Wanzek.

Host: Jamie Wanzek

Sound design and musical score: Adam Burke

Additional musical scoring:

First Light, Arend

Moss, by Philip Anderson

Color and Scent, by Mum Child

© 2025, Magic City Studios, llc

For more than 50 years, Ed Singer has used oil paints on canvas to depict life in the Navajo Nation. His style mixes realism and expressionism, and he employs techniques drawn from European oil painting masters.  Singer is part of a generation of Indigenous artists from the 1960s and 1970s who asserted a visual sovereignty in their paintings, to confront Native American stereotypes, and depict Native American life in a modern context.

In this episode, we meet 73-year-old Ed Singer in his studio in Cortez, CO, and learn a bit about his journey as an artist.

Written and produced by Adam Burke and Kirbie Bennett.

Host: Kirbie Bennett

Musical score: Adam Burke

Additional musical scoring: Lawn Games

© 2025, Magic City Studios, llc

In the 1970's, a group of counter-culture denizens in Durango, Colorado, started a festival aimed at curing the winter doldrums. The end of January was a slow, sleepy time of the year back then.

45 years later, Snowdown is an annual event that brings together city boosters, businesses along Main Street, locals, and tourists for a week of costumes, quirky fun and events. Each Snowdown has a theme, and over the years, festival organizers have encouraged participants to get decked out as pirates, disco dancers and ancient Romans.

1992 stands out as maybe the weirdest, edgiest year on record--at least for a small fraction of the people who happened to be in Durango between January 29th and Feburary 2nd of that year.

In this episode of the Magic City of the Southwest, we revisit Clown Around Snowdown.

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Produced by Magic City Studios llc

Written by Kirbie Bennett and Adam Burke

Original Musical Score by Adam Burke

Hosted by Kirbie Bennett

Graphic design by Jamie Wanzek

Durango loves to promote its western frontier town image. It's easy to envision the bustling boardwalks in the late 1800s and imagine an incorporated town sprouting from the strength and will of those early settlers. 

This episode of The Magic City of the Southwest is the real story behind the facade.

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Thanks to historians Robert McDaniel and Thomas Andrews for their help and guidance on this story.

Produced by Magic City Studios llc.

Writing and production by Adam Burke, Kirbie Bennett and Jamie Wanzek.

Hosted by Kirbie Bennett and Adam Burke.

In 2022, mobile home park residents in Durango, Colorado, fought to keep their community from being purchased by an out-of-state corporate owner. The Westside Mobile Home Park had been Alejandra Chavez's home since she arrived from Mexico at 12 years old. In the fight to help her community, Chavez was caught between an instinct to keep a low profile and the need for her leadership.

In this episode of The Magic City of the Southwest, we tell the story of one immigrant neighborhood's struggle to belong in a city with diminishing housing options for working-class people. Along the way, we go down the rabbit hole of mobile home park investment and explore the psychic landscape of manufactured housing.

Hosted by Kirbie Bennett & Jamie Wanzek

Produced by Magic City Studios (Adam Burke, Kirbie Bennett & Jamie Wanzek)

Original score by Adam Burke

Additional Music:

Chrome and Wax by Ray Catcher

Selena Leica by Sugartree

Wisteria by The Contessa

Tumblehome by Resolute

Like many towns in the US, Durango has made a business of nourishing the old West stereotypes, like the narrow gauge railroad, the Native American archeology, the old hard rock mines. Even those of us who live in Durango reinforce this history. But what if we told you that the parks and bike paths along the river were once thriving neighborhoods full of working-class Hispanic and Native American people?