Historic Setting and Landscape
By David Kammer
As the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (AT&SF) pushed into New Mexico Territory in 1879, reaching Las Vegas on July 4, 1879 and Santa Fe on February 9, 1880, advance survey crews sought a site in the Middle Rio Grande Valley for locating shops and yards. Failing to do so in the town of Bernalillo, where the dominant Perea family demanded exorbitant fees for the necessary acreage, railroad officials looked 18 miles south to Albuquerque. There a group of three boosters, Franz Huning, William C. Hazeldine, and Elias S. Stover formed the New Mexico Town Company, a subsidiary of the railroad. Rather than seeking to develop land located near the Villa de Albuquerque, which reflected the plaza-settlement pattern characteristic of many Hispano communities along the former Camino Real, these developers turned their attention almost two miles to the east. Buying land, some of it from the descendants of the original Villa de Albuquerque Grant granted in 1706 by Francisco Cuervo y Valdés, the Spanish governor of New Mexico, the three investors pieced together a 3.1 square-mile parcel that became known as the “original town site.”
The investors’ decision to locate the site well away from the plaza of Albuquerque rested upon several factors. From an engineering perspective, the eastern location permitted an efficient, straight alignment that avoided the large nine-mile westward U the Rio Grande River made beginning at Alameda midway from Bernalillo to Albuquerque. Moreover, land was less expensive than that in the intensively farmed agricultural land around the plaza. By the 1870s, much of the floodplain lying within this large U comprised some of the most productive agricultural land in the territory. Throughout the valley a series of gravity-based irrigation ditches, or acequias, coursed the river’s floodplain, contributing to the growing importance of the plaza at Albuquerque as a trading and shipping center.
Associated with these irrigated field systems were several dispersed agricultural communities, some with small plazas. Often they were named for the families who had originally settled them such as Los Duranes, Los Candelarias, Los Griegos, or Barelas. Together these outlying communities included some 4,300 residents in the 1880 census. Easternmost of these communities was Martineztown, aligned along the foot of the sand hills less than a mile northeast of the new depot. The community’s field systems, lying on the floodplain below the village, were irrigated by an acequia that extended several miles from its headgate near where the river began its westward turn at Alameda to where it emptied back into the river near Barelas.
Comprising Albuquerque’s first suburbs, many of these agriculturally based villages would eventually be joined to the city as it grew. Later, by the 1930s, some developers would begin to plat small subdivisions such as the Los Alamos Addition of 1938 within these villages’ former field systems. Most, however, would continue to retain at least a few elements recalling their earlier cultural landscape, especially streets and lanes lacking the rigid grid pattern characteristic of the railroad town and houses built in the New Mexico Vernacular Style.
Many of the farmers in these communities continued to graze their sheep on the East Mesa, or Grand Mesa as it was also called. Lying above the sand hills marking the eastern edge of the floodplain, the mesa rose gently up over its eight-mile breadth extending to the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. Although portions of this mesa had been homesteaded and were subsequently purchased by developers as the city grew eastward, these lands had once been part of the common lands, or ejidos, an integral element in Spanish and Mexican land grants, and herders continued to use them into the 20th century.
Farther east, lying beyond the Sandia and Manzano Mountains and accessible from a wagon trail that climbed through Tijeras Canyon, laid the Estancia Valley with its lush grasses making it ideal for sheep grazing. Together with the fruit and vegetables being grown in the Rio Grande Valley’s truck farms, the wool these thousands of sheep produced constituted the valuable exports the area’s boosters hoped to ship from the depot at the newly designated Albuquerque town site. Cheaply priced, convenient to the wool wagons descending the sand hills from the East Mesa, well-boosted by some of Old Albuquerque’s leading entrepreneurs, and ideal for the efficiency-minded railroad survey crews, the town site awaited only the coming of the railroad to begin its growth.
On April 22, 1880, hundreds of citizens traveled eastward from the plaza to the new rail line to celebrate the arrival of territorial and railroad dignitaries. While some wealthy businessmen had decried the coming of the railroad, viewing it as a threat to their shipping businesses, most Albuquerque residents welcomed its arrival. Rather than competing with wagon freighting, they saw the railroad as offering the key to exploiting the area’s resources and creating opportunities for increased short-haul shipping. To distinguish between the older plaza community and the new railroad town, people began to refer to them as Old Town and New Town, respectively. In contrast to the population of Old Town, which was largely Hispano, the population of New Town consisted largely of newcomers to the territory, many who came from the eastern United States or from northern Europe. While the United States Census classified both groups as white, popular usage has evolved to distinguish between Hispanos, those of Spanish and Mexican descent, and Anglos, those of Americans and northern European who immigrated to New Mexico.
Within a few months, Huning, Hazeldine, and Stover had hired Walter G. Marmon, a civil engineer, to survey, mark and name the streets of the new town site (Simmons 1982:224). Dutifully replicating the Midwestern town landscapes with which he was familiar, Marmon devised a grid, numbering north to south-running streets westward from the tracks, naming east to west-running streets after the minerals, such as lead, coal, gold, and silver, local boosters hoped to exploit. Other streets commemorated the town site’s founders and their children. For the street paralleling the tracks on the eastside, Marmon chose the Broadway; and for the street perpendicular to the tracks and anticipated as the main commercial street, Railroad Avenue. Climbing the sand hills to the East Mesa, Railroad Avenue followed the alignment of a wagon road leading to Tijeras Canyon; to the west it followed the new grid for eight blocks and then veered northwesterly toward the plaza at what soon became known as Old Albuquerque.
Benefiting from the access the railroad offered to distant markets, the new town site thrived as a shipping and trade center during the 1880s. A commercial district grew up along Railroad and Gold avenues with warehouses, stockyards and shipping facilities lining the tracks north of Railroad Avenue. To the south appeared the railroad’s facilities, a depot and the buildings marking the yards and service shops. Amenities characteristic of growing towns throughout the United States, including gas street lights, a rudimentary telephone service, and a water works, appeared during the 1880s. By 1891, the population of New Town stood at 3,785. That year voters took advantage of a law passed by the territorial legislature in 1890 and chose to reincorporate as a city.
This new designation brought with it a mayor/alderman form of government in which the town was divided into four wards determined by the new city’s geographical quadrants (see accompanying Willits’ map of 1898). These political boundaries, which would endure until 1917 when voters decided to shift to a city commission/manager form of government, provide a focus for viewing and discussing the city’s various distinctive areas. Based on the two axes created by the intersection of Railroad Avenue with the AT&SF tracks, the four quadrants beginning in the northeast corner and progressing clockwise were designated the first through the fourth wards respectively. By the early 1900s, each ward had its own, nearly identical, two-story brick school. Each also had one or more additions appended to it. Socially and economically, however, at the turn of the century the four wards were far from similar as demonstrated in the early patterns of development that each exhibited.
The First and Second Wards east of the railroad tracks became largely residential areas with long rectangular blocks paralleling the tracks. North of Railroad Avenue and bordered on the north by Martineztown and to the east by unusually steep sand hills, the First Ward appeared largely as the northern extension of the more rapidly developing Second Ward. The most successful of the earliest additions, Franz Huning’s Highland Addition situated at the eastern boundary of the original town site, extended two blocks north of Railroad Avenue and seven blocks south. By 1888, 63 percent of the addition’s 536 lots had been sold. Using brick and milled lumber, builders employed styles such as the Italianate, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, and, by the turn of the century, the Hipped Box, popular elsewhere in the country. As a result, by 1900 an enclave similar in appearance to residential blocks in small towns elsewhere in the country had begun to thrive along the lower foothills just above the railroad tracks and floodplain. Other additions extending eastward to the steeper upper reaches of the sand hills, such as Brownwell and Lail’s Highland and Stamm’s Terrace Addition, proved less attractive, however, and languished until the new century. Only after the establishment of the first large tuberculosis sanatorium, St. Joseph in 1902, at the eastern edge of the town, did residential development begin pushing up the sand hills to the East Mesa.
The Third Ward, lying in the southwestern quadrant, was the one closest to the new town’s principal employer, a location that spurred its early growth. Hemmed in on its southwestern side by the Rio Grande at the southern end of its nine-mile U and by the villages of Barelas and San Jose, the area included the AT&SF shops and yards at its eastern edge. This proximity attracted many railroad workers, estimated to comprise one-third of the new town’s workforce by the turn of the century. With both newcomers to the territory and some local Hispanos who had secured railroad jobs, housing construction grew, prompting development of two early additions, the Atlantic and Pacific and Baca Additions during the 1880s. These and other smaller additions, sometimes little more than single block strips carved out of former irrigated fields, resulted in the emergence of the most ethnically mixed portion of the largely Anglo new town. This ethnic diversity was also reflected in the more diverse mixture of residential architectural styles of the area with modest examples of the imported styles found in the other wards mixed with examples of the New Mexico Vernacular Style.
In the northwest quadrant lay the Fourth Ward, bounded by the railroad and Railroad Avenue on its eastern and southern edges and extending sixteen blocks westward toward the irrigated fields east of Old Town plaza. Because of its proximity to Old Town and the decision of Franz Huning in 1881 to build his dream home, Castle Huning, along Railroad Avenue, some developers anticipated that the Fourth Ward would develop quickly as the two towns grew together to become one. This optimism proved premature, however, as Old Town struggled to retain its historic Hispano identity, becoming a part of Albuquerque only in 1949. As a result of this political and social antipathy as well as its distance from the railroad and commercial center, efforts to develop the Perea Addition, an 800-lot addition platted in 1881 at the northwestern edge of the Fourth Ward, materialized only in later decades as other additions and annexations drew New Town westward.
Early development in the Fourth Ward occurred instead on the grid of streets nearer to New Town’s core and along Railroad Avenue, which became lined with houses employing imported styles similar to those found in Huning’s Highland Addition. Referred to as “Honeymoon Row” by 1900, the street cut northwesterly from Eighth Street periodically creating triangles as it intersected Marron’s grid at oblique angles. One such space became Robinson Park, the city’s first public park, while another was later donated to commemorate the soldiers and sailors who had served in World War I. Although consisting of small irregularly shaped parcels unsuitable for residential development, the parks set a precedent that developers followed in later decades as they sought to provide amenities that would attract potential residents to their suburban additions. North of hard, earthen-packed Railroad Avenue, development moved more slowly, and until after 1900, a large cow pasture occupied most of the western portion of the Fourth Ward.
By 1881, mule-drawn cars of the Street Railway Company were traversing Railroad Avenue several times a day. With eight cars, the company’s line consisted of three miles of narrow gauge, lightweight track extending from Barelas to Old Town plaza and servicing the area’s three most frequented destinations. Passing through New Town’s commercial and railroad core, the streetcar had one terminus near the AT&SF yards. The other was located at Old Town’s plaza. Near the plaza was the railway company-owned Traction Park, the site of the Territorial Fair, horse racing and frequent baseball games. And, in 1886, after Albuquerque had wrested the county seat from Bernalillo (Sandoval County, of which the town of Bernalillo is now the county seat, was formed only in 1901), the Bernalillo County Commission decided to award the site of the new county courthouse to Old Town. Not surprisingly, the street railway company, which anticipated adding riders on county-related business to railroad workers and New Town residents making outings to the Traction Park living in Old Town, favored this decision.
This brief survey of the early development and landscape of New Town’s four wards reveals a good deal about Albuquerque’s early and subsequent growth patterns. Despite the creation of a horse-drawn trolley system in 1880, New Albuquerque remained largely a community in which distances between home, work sites, and the commercial district were covered on foot. The trolley with its three-mile track connecting the railroad yards and neighborhoods of the Second Ward to New Town’s commercial core and to Old Town’s plaza did little to alter New Albuquerque’s character as a walkable town with its focal point the railroad depot and the nearby commercial blocks. In fact, with its leisurely pace, the trolley prompted the local saying, “If you’re in a hurry walk, but if you have time take the streetcar.”
Geographic limitations also contributed to concentrating early development within the core of the original town site and its few contiguous additions. To the east the steeper upper reaches of the sand hills discouraged widespread construction even in platted additions. To the northeast and south longstanding Hispano agricultural villages stalled expansion. To the west the often-flooded riparian areas bounding the Rio Grande hardly invited development, and to the northwest Old Town’s sphere of influence remained compelling. For suburban growth to occur, New Albuquerque required expanded transportation systems and more dynamic local economic conditions.
Sources Used:
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Essay taken from "20th Century Suburban Growth of Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1904-1959", National Register of Historic Places, August 2000.
As the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (AT&SF) pushed into New Mexico Territory in 1879, reaching Las Vegas on July 4, 1879 and Santa Fe on February 9, 1880, advance survey crews sought a site in the Middle Rio Grande Valley for locating shops and yards. Failing to do so in the town of Bernalillo, where the dominant Perea family demanded exorbitant fees for the necessary acreage, railroad officials looked 18 miles south to Albuquerque.
Essay taken from "20th Century Suburban Growth of Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1904-1959", National Register of Historic Places, August 2000.
Albuquerque 1904-1925
Albuquerque 1925-1944
Albuquerque 1945-1959