Hosed Down at Hotel Wells?

A selection for the Vintage Photos Theme Park of a favourite photo (this can be a family photo or a found photo, and if you would like to say why it's a favourite, that would be wonderful).

I have lots of family photos that I treasure, and I have many found photos that I enjoy. I'm not sure that I could select just one single photo, but I can offer a particular type of photo as my favorite.

I guess you could say that the kind of photos I like best are the ones that pose questions. These are typically found photos rather than family ones, and some of the questions they pose are:

-Who is that person? (See, for example, Elias M. Baugher, Teacher and Who Was That Masked Santa?)

-What is that thing? (See One-Man Music Machine and Giant Portable Underwood Typewriter.)

-What's going on here? (See Breakfast in the Women's Dorm and Braving the Whirlpool Rapids at Niagara Falls.)

-What the heck? (See Group Portrait with Man Smoking and Sykes Ranch, Aberdeen, Mississippi, 1956.)

The fun part, of course, is trying to answer the question that a photo is asking. Sometimes there's an easy answer, but often there's no solution to the puzzle a photo presents.

Which brings me to this photo, which I've captioned as a question--Hosed Down at Hotel Wells? This is a what's-going-on-here photo in which it seems that folks from near and far have come to see--well, I'm not sure what's taking place.

Mouse over the photo to see an enlargement of the action in the middle of the street and my notes about some of the details I've noticed. Any idea what's going on?