NO ONE IN Leavenworth stays in character quite like the milkmaids at the Fudge Hut. Those same embroidered blouses, dirndl dresses, and floral tiaras may deck cashiers throughout town, but these sweets-vending fräuleins have resolve, even when accosted by a tourist suffering from yodel fatigue. “That’s annoying,” the tourist barks, tilting his sunburned pate toward the stereo belting out the brilliant throat work of a burgeoning yodel star. “What is it, like the Tiny Tim of the Alps?” The young milkmaid behind the counter says without expression, “It is not annoying,” then seamlessly transitions into a smile that melts the customer like a block of chocolate amaretto swirl on a summer day and says, “How can I help you?”
This is what happens when a town spends 40 years pretending it’s somewhere else. Generations have been raised to both defend and celebrate the eccentricities of Leavenworth, population 2,300. And for generations, however much it may baffle one’s own sense of taste, the city has won over its guests.
Suck down that fudge, step out onto Front Street, and see for yourself. You know a town’s got something good going when even Starbucks bends to its will. Elbow your way onto the main drag of this faux-Bavarian village jammed with dazed window shoppers, silver-haired posses on Honda Gold Wings, and adventurers in search of rental gear, and behold mighty Starbucks looking like Geppetto’s cottage along with everything else citywide. Call it chalet-chic.
City planners decided not to let the town complete its trajectory into economic ruin. Their solution: “Go Alpine.”
That’s because in 1965 city planners decided they weren’t going to let their busted logging and railroad town complete its trajectory into economic ruin. Their solution: “Go alpine,” as more than one Leavenworthian can be heard saying today. And if you squint your eyes and bend down low, the Cascades circling town can sort of pass for Alps. The city adopted strict building codes—low-slung roofs, flower boxes, stucco, and gingerbread trim—and the residents became quasi scholars of all things Bavarian. Parents sent their kids to folk dance classes, musicians learned how to squeeze the accordion, singers took up yodeling. Leavenworth went from near ghost town to a polka-cranking tourist destination so believable that bona fide German ex-pats have moved in.
The makeover runs deep. Wells Fargo looks dog-eared—as if 500 years of European history were weighing on its timbers. The copy center is called Das Copy Shoppe—near Alpensee Strasse. It goes on and on. Kris Kringl is a year-round Christmas retailer. Simple Treasures traffics in prints by self-proclaimed painter of light Thomas Kinkade, whose folksy paeans to bucolic small towns seem modeled on Leavenworth, with its quaint and at times grating pageantry, and where sunlight splintering through the toothy Cascades casts spotlights throughout town, as if The Sound of Music had been reproduced as a rock opera.
Speaking of pageantry, Leavenworth hosts 20 festivals a year, most notably Oktoberfest, a three-weekend bacchanal that drew some 10,000 visitors last year. And like the original annual beer bash in Munich, Germany, hops play a big part in this fest, the ground zero of which is the Festhalle at the south end of town.
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