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One-industry towns face a formidable and familiar hurdle when that industry, for reasons of economics or obsolescence, goes kaput. For one soon-to-be fading settlement in the Kootenays region of southeast British Columbia, the answer was schnitzel, schnapps and sauerkraut.
In the 1970s, confronting the inevitable conclusion that its mineral resources would soon be spent, the alpine community of Kimberley embarked on an ambitious scheme of downtown renewal. With mock-chalet facades, an outdoor pedestrian mall — known as the Platzl — and no shortage of hanging flower baskets and lederhosen, it reinvented itself as “the Bavarian city of the Rockies.”
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