Albuquerque 1904-1925; Communities in New Mexico
Dynamics of Suburban Growth 1904-1925
By David Kammer
Throughout its early history, Albuquerque’s promoters published pamphlets boosting the new community. Often containing predictions about the town’s future based more on their hopes than facts, these brochures offer a gauge of the optimism that inspired many of its early leaders. During 1908, promoters were presented with an unusual opportunity to boost their hometown when it was selected to host the Sixteenth National Irrigation Congress, an event that drew over 4,000 delegates from around the world. Seeking to disseminate information about the latest irrigation technologies, the meeting also presented the territory with an opportunity to make its case for statehood. For the host city, it offered an opportunity to celebrate the growth it had made over its twenty-eight year history. By the time delegates began to arrive at the depot, boosters had produced a multi-page pamphlet entitled “Albuquerque, New Mexico: Chief City of a New Empire in the Great Southwest” (Hening 1908). With a cover featuring a Moorish-inspired triumphal arch framing a view of the Railroad Avenue commercial district, the generously illustrated pamphlet offered readers a glowing report of the advantages Albuquerque offered potential residents.
To allay concerns that the town lacked the services associated with any up-to-date community, it noted its modern gas, electric, water and sewer systems. It also cited its fire department, six miles of electric trolley lines, and a new hotel, the $200,000 Alvarado, built in 1904 for Fred Harvey and the AT&SF. To enhance Albuquerque’s image as a growing urban center, the pamphlet emphasized Bernalillo County’s population of 25,000, rather than the city’s population of some 8,000, a practice that became common with each decennial census over the next half century. Noting that Albuquerque had “never had a boom,” that “growth has been steady, persistent,” the pamphlet quoted one of the town’s “master builders” who noted that it was “built one-fourth on prospects, one-fourth on actual business, and the rest on public spirit and an active community” (Hening 1908:np).
Many of the illustrated pages in the pamphlet bear testimony to the builder’s assessment. An entire page is devoted to Albuquerque’s growing reputation as a health center for those seeking a cure for tuberculosis. With the construction of St. Joseph Sanatorium in 1902 and the selection of the town as the site for the Presbyterian National Tubercular Sanitarium, the town had begun to advertise its ideal climate for the then popular climatological therapy. Proclaiming research that had concluded, “Nowhere in New Mexico is it possible to spend so much time out of doors,” boosters sought to attract those chasing the cure. Over the next quarter century, health seekers attracted by similar efforts to advertise Albuquerque’s favorable climate would drive much of the town’s expansion and growth, especially on the high, dry East Mesa.
Most prominent in the pamphlet, however, were the four pages treating the “suburban additions” that were “rapidly building up around the city.” Referring to Albuquerque as offering a “neat, attractive home likeness,” boosters noted the “good taste shown in the architecture of the finer homes, the substantial and dignified, graceful style of modern construction being everywhere in evidence.” Homes were further classified with larger residences described as being chiefly of “brick and stone” often in the “Mission style” with pebble-plaster finishes. Arguing that Albuquerque offered homes “cheaper than in California” but with the same pleasant, dry climate, the pamphlet noted that many of the smaller homes were being built in the bungalow style, “which is at the same time inexpensive, picturesque and well adapted to the climate.” While many of the residences illustrated in the pamphlet were located in the central core of the original town site, special emphasis was given to new homes “erected in the eastern heights commanding a magnificent view of the valley of the Rio Grande and the mountains.” If, as the boosters projected, new additions continued to include parks in their plats and the school children who had pledged to plant a tree and bush and then care for it did so, the city’s “civic pride” would “make Albuquerque in reality a City Beautiful.”
From a contemporary perspective, the pamphlet offers a good example of the ardent promotion that marked many of New Mexico’s efforts to attract additional residents during the late territorial period. It implies an optimism that the territory’s half-century long struggle for statehood was about to be realized, making an effort to cast Albuquerque, its emerging urban center, within the national context of the City Beautiful movement. Despite the overstatement characteristic of such documents, the pamphlet presents several important factors that gave the town’s leaders cause for optimism. Among them were the development of the town’s electric trolley system, the platting and emergence of residential suburbs beyond the boundaries of the original town site, and the appearance of the first of the modern sanitariums. Although the pamphleteers made no effort to interpret these factors in concert, the synergy they generated accounts for much of Albuquerque’s early suburban growth through the mid-1920s.
With the development of electric traction in the late 1880s, the thoroughfares of cities and towns throughout the country had become lined with electric streetcar rails and overhead cables. The innovation had begun to transform cities, expanding urban boundaries to include residential rings served by electric trolleys around the old urban cores. Termed “streetcar suburbs” by historian Sam Bass Warner, these additions and the streetcars that spawned them tended to separate the previously integrated urban experience in which work, commerce, and home were contained within a walkable community. Soon, the electric streetcars, radiating out from the urban core as so many spokes on a wheel, began to change the urban experience, segregating the various aspects of daily life. Seeing the connection between numerous diverse activities and their volume of riders, traction system owners often undertook or worked actively with land developers to plat these new suburban additions. On other occasions, they played roles in developing industrial sites, parks and natatoriums, baseball fields and amusement centers at the ends of their lines, hoping to attract a greater volume of riders.
Albuquerque’s electric streetcar system exerted a similar influence during the first period of expansion beyond the original town’s core. Much like other new technologies, architectural styles and popular trends, the coming of the electric streetcar to New Mexico Territory lagged behind other sections of the country. The first system appeared in Las Vegas in 1903. A year later, the Albuquerque city council granted a franchise to William H. Greer of Bakersfield, California. Greer immediately replaced the lightweight rails of the mule-drawn trolleys and introduced an electrified line with a rolling stock consisting of ten double-ended cars. Heralding the departure of the old trolleys as Albuquerque’s removal of “the last vestige of villagery,” the local press celebrated the new transportation system (Simmons 1981:333). Within a few years, the company was reorganized to form the City Electric Company, and tracks were added to the north and east. Although the traction company would succumb to the rising popularity of the private automobile by the mid-1920s, replaced by a city bus system in 1928, its nearly twenty-five years of operation contributed to the form and development of Albuquerque’s first generation of suburbs.
Unlike the singular route of the previous trolley, the route of the electric trolley did resemble a modest set of spokes befitting a town of about 8,000 people. An east-west axis extended along Railroad Avenue from Yale Boulevard at the University of New Mexico to Old Town Plaza, making a brief detour a block north to Tijeras Street to cross the AT&SF tracks. The north-south axis was more complex. Its southern terminus was Barelas at Third and Bridge streets, but the northern terminus was extended far to the north with tracks running north on Second Street to New York Avenue (now Lomas Boulevard). There, they turned west to 12th Street, and then turned north to what became known as the Sawmill area, site of the American Lumber Company sawmill and yards. East of the AT&SF lines, running twelve blocks south on Edith Street through Huning’s Highland Addition was a second north-south spur. With more than six miles of tracks, the new electric trolley system made new territory accessible for development on the town’s northern and eastern sides.
The decision to extend a line to the American Lumber Company’s mill was an astute one, reflective of many traction companies’ efforts to seek out heavily traveled routes. Incorporated in 1901, the American Lumber Company controlled over 300,000 acres of timberlands in the Zuni Mountains less than 100 miles west of Albuquerque. Seeking a good shipping point with an abundant water supply to run a large-scale milling operation as well as a large labor pool and the potential for adequate housing and amenities, the company selected a 110-acre site in northwest Albuquerque. With the AT&SF an integral part of the operation, hauling logs to the mill and then shipping lumber and finished products from it, the operation opened in 1903 and prospered. By 1906, the mill had surpassed the AT&SF as Albuquerque’s largest employer with over 850 workers (Glover 1986:18).
This boom in jobs contributed, in part, to the rapid growth of what became known as the North End, an area comprising the portion of the Fourth Ward north of Tijeras Avenue as well as two additions just north of Mountain Road, the northern boundary of the original town site. With 98 houses in 1902, by 1910 the North End contained 766 houses with 58 of them located north of Mountain Road (Biebel 1981:22). By 1920, the number of houses in this fastest growing section of the town had almost doubled over the 1910 figures, rising to 1,242. While a quarter of these were located north of Mountain Road or west of Twelfth Street, the vast majority were closer to the urban core, marking an infill of the original town site (portions of the area are located within the Eighth Street/Forrester National Historic District). With only a few exceptions of small additions within the original town site that employed circles and curved blocks, settlement of the North End, similar to Huning’s Highland Addition, was based on a rectilinear grid.
The houses located in these first northside suburbs tended to be more modest than those built south of Mountain Road in the Fourth Ward during the same period. In general, the infill occurring in the Fourth Ward, especially south of New York Avenue was marked by a concentration of larger homes, many with two stories, employing late Queen Anne and Prairie School styles. Interspersed among them were houses reflecting other popular styles including moderately ornate examples of the Hipped Box and Bungalow, as well as the emerging Southwest Vernacular style (Historic Resources of the Downtown Neighborhoods Area of Albuquerque 1979). In contrast, the houses north of Mountain Road were generally one story and displayed a more modest range of stylistic details. Most prevalent were the Bungalow, Hipped Box, and Southwest Vernacular Styles. Reflecting the presence of many sawmill employees as owners, some houses display distinctive milled lumber and wood shingle details. Lying outside of the city’s limits until residents voted for annexation in 1927, these early suburbs lacked access to many city services, including water. Typically, the developers of outlying additions, unable to obtain these services, provided their own water and sewage systems. Later, during the annexations of additions that marked the city’s growth during the late 1920s, they then sold the systems to the city, which modified or expanded them to conform to the city’s system.
Just as the northern leg of the electric trolley contributed to the opening of new residential enclaves north of Mountain Road and around the sawmill, the trolley’s eastern leg with its south-running spur along Edith Street offered greater access to additions lining the eastern sand hills and to the East Mesa itself. By 1902, the First and Second wards, consisting largely of Huning’s Highland Addition, included 299 houses. In 1910, the figure rose to 1,000; and by 1920, with some of the first houses on the East Mesa included in the total, to 1,528 (Biebel 1981:22). Also contributing to this growth east of the railroad tracks was a timber and trestle bridge, known as the viaduct, completed on Coal Avenue in 1901. Crossing over the maze of switching tracks just north of the AT&SF yards, it eased access to the south side of the Second Ward. Although at first officials banned the town’s few automobiles from the viaduct, restricting it to horses and wagons, along with the trolley spur on Edith Street, it encouraged development of the southern Highlands district. Near the railroad shops and the Albuquerque Foundry Company located along the eastside of the tracks, the area proved especially attractive to those blue-collar workers. As a result, some homeowners converted some of the larger single-family homes into boardinghouses, which along with modest hotels and rooming houses accommodated many of the city’s single workers (Kammer 1999).
The pace of development farther east, however, only began to pick up as newcomers became convinced that the future of Albuquerque lay on the East Mesa. Convincing them of this bright future was no easy task as evidenced by the inability of Brownwell and Lail and M.P. Stamm to develop their additions over a nearly twenty-year period. The steep sandy hills and arroyos characteristic of the alluvial fans offered a particularly challenging terrain for imposing a grid of streets. Consisting of eroded sediment washed down from the Sandia Mountains, the sand hills lay dry most of the year. Summer cloudbursts, however, were capable of turning the arroyos, favored as the east-west roadways, into temporary raging torrents. Attracted by the orderly flat grids and tree-lined streetscapes of the valley, many newcomers chose to build just below in the Highlands or down in the North End. Even the attraction of the University of New Mexico atop the East Mesa failed to draw surrounding settlement until the 1910s. For most townspeople dwelling in the valley, Railroad Avenue east of High Street was little more than a “wavering sandy lane as far as the University” and then a wagon road that “wound uncertainly till it entered Tijeras Canyon” (Balcomb 1980:60).
Gradually, however, attitudes toward the East Mesa began to change. In 1905 and then again in 1910, M.P. Stamm replatted his Terrace Addition, setting aside land for a park and digging a well that assured potential residents a steady water supply. Significant impetus for eastward suburbanization came in 1906, when Col. D.K.B. Sellers platted the University Heights Addition to the east of the Terrace Addition. Previously involved in land development projects in the valley along the northern leg of the electric trolley line, Sellers had resolved to strike out on his own to promote the city and to make his fortune in real estate as it grew. To accomplish this he resorted to an aggressive marketing of his new subdivision.
With a few partners he had acquired a quarter section of patented land on the East Mesa south of the university. Orienting the streets to the principal points of the compass instead of to the alignment of the railroad tracks, as had been done in the original town site and earlier adjacent additions, Sellers carved out a four-by-seven block subdivision. In these twenty-eight rectangular blocks, he placed 672 lots, each fifty by 142 feet. Each property faced on one of the north-south streets, and a sixteen-foot-wide alley ran between the properties. East-west streets retained the names they carried in New Town—Silver, Lead, Coal—although the longer north-south blocks eliminated Gold Street and left the others out of alignment, a feature that continues to punctuate the west side of the subdivision. Inspired by the nearby university and hoping to attract faculty members as residents, Sellers assigned the names of colleges, such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Cornell to the north-south streets, all of which ended at Railroad Avenue. Later, in 1916, Sellers acquired additional land to the east and platted an eastern portion of the subdivision.
The promotional material Sellers generated reveals the vision he held for the mesa land. A pamphlet published in 1906 entitled “The Coming Aristocratic Residential Section” described the lots as an “opportunity for the small investor” (University Heights Improvement Company 1906: np). Characterizing the valley as having little land remaining for building, it urged prospective homeowners to look “towards the higher ground, above the smoke and lowlands and to “come up from the low zone to the ozone.” It further played on would be homeowners’ fears that as the city expanded and homes near the town’s center became boarding houses building “close in may be undesirable.” In short, the sales brochure touched upon a range of sentiments associated with many Americans’ desire to move to the suburbs. By articulating aspirations for upward mobility through sound real estate investment, idealizing the locale and its climatic advantages, and then instilling an ominous threat and connecting it with choosing a residence in the valley, Sellers struck a chord that would encourage a progression of increasingly distant subdivisions on the East Mesa for the next eighty years.
Even this aggressive marketing of the East Mesa and its bright future as Albuquerque’s suburban sector required time to take hold. It was not until after World War I, after he had constructed a water tank on Nob Hill at the eastern end of the subdivision in 1916, solving the addition’s chronic lack of a reliable water supply that substantial settlement began to occur. A photograph taken in 1912 of the Werner-Gilchrist House at the corner of Silver and Cornell shows the dormered, hipped-roof house, its outbuildings and a wind-pumped well standing in absolute isolation. Only a single tree and a few disparate bushes interrupt a landscape of short grasses and low brush. A 1916 map of the addition indicates that in only four of the twenty-eight blocks had more than half of the lots been sold. The city directory, which began to list the addition’s streets in 1914 (annexation to the city would not occur until 1925), includes only twenty-four houses in the 1919 edition.
Sellers nevertheless persisted in his project, using his Winton touring car to ferry prospective buyers from his downtown office through the subdivision. The embodiment of the public-spirited booster motivated by “prospects” as much as by “actual business,” Sellers threw himself into any activity that held the potential for promoting Albuquerque. In 1912, for instance, he led a campaign to rename Railroad Avenue as Central Avenue, seeking to add prestige to what he hoped would be the city’s main thoroughfare leading to the East Mesa. After serving as president of the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway Association, which sought to draw early automobile tourism to New Mexico, he was elected mayor of Albuquerque in 1914. Realizing that the success of his suburban addition depended upon his ability to lure buyers away from the valley, he priced his lots competitively, selling them for about a quarter of what a similar lot cost in the valley. Along the residential streets lots ranged from $50 to $105; corner lots and those facing now Central Avenue, the intended commercial strip, ranged from $100 to $275. Asking ten dollars down on a single lot and only five on two or more lots, Sellers aimed at the small investor anxious to own his own property.
This sales strategy served to define the pattern of development that would occur in Albuquerque’s suburban development in the inter-war years. By selling lots cheaply, Sellers encouraged numerous small residential builders to purchase lots, construct a single house at a time on speculation, and then sell it, using the small margin of profit to embark on another such project. In some cases, those purchasing lots, particularly health seekers uncertain of their future, simply chose to construct a small one or two-room structure at the rear of the property as their domicile. Later, if their health and means improved, they would build a larger house, placing it in alignment, usually about twenty feet from the front of the property, with the other houses on the block. The original house might be converted to a garage or retained as a rental unit (McKay 1987). One result of this lot-by-lot development in the University Heights as well as the replatted Terrace and Brownwell and Lail’s Additions was that homes varied unevenly both in style and cost.
Surveys of these additions indicate that many of the earliest houses built, those dating before the mid-1920s, incorporated elements of the Bungalow Style. Employing low-pitched gable roofs with wide overhangs and exposed rafters and beams and having exteriors consisting of brick, clapboard, wood shingles, or stucco, many had wide front porches supported by decorative tapered piers, as well as rear porches. Most of these bungalows situated on the upper sand hills, the East Mesa lacked the more ornate detailing, and grander scale associated with contemporary bungalows being constructed in the Fourth Ward. The latter, for instance, often reflected their wider plans by locating the gable ends at the sides of the house, while the former generally located the gable ends at the front and rear, often with a stepped gable porch to the front and a shed porch to the rear. The narrower plan also permitted room on the fifty-foot wide property for a driveway to a garage, usually located at the rear of the property. This new building type suggests how the residents of the city’s suburbs were coming to rely on the private automobile. Although the East Mesa represents the farthest extension of Albuquerque’s streetcar suburbs, more importantly it represents the first suburbs in which the role of the automobile became primary over that of the electric trolley and, later, the city bus line.
The efforts of promoters such as D.K.B. Sellers and others to induce newcomers to settle in Albuquerque’s eastern suburbs and access to these suburbs through the electric trolley and, increasingly, the automobile only partially account for the gradual settlement of the East Mesa. Accompanying this active boosterism and improved modes of transportation was the city’s rise as a health center. As the 1908 pamphlet had noted, since its inception in 1902, St. Joseph Hospital had handled 2,500 cases and had assembled a staff of skilled physicians. With “hundreds of tuberculosis sufferers” having “found long life and health in Albuquerque and a number of additional sanitariums projected,” promoters expected thousands more “health chasers” to arrive seeking “the same ideal combination of dryness, medium altitude, and large percentage of sunshine.” By the early 1920s, their hopes for the city’s emergence as a health center had made great strides toward realization.
New Mexico Territory had been a destination for weak-lunged travelers since the days of the Santa Fe Trail. Josiah Gregg and countless others had found that as they reached the Rocky Mountains not only their respiratory systems but also their general health improved. With the arrival of the railroad, more health seekers came to the territory, many well-heeled visitors seeking early health resorts such as the Montezuma Hotel near Las Vegas. By the end of the century, thousands, both rich and poor, had come to the Southwest “to chase the cure.” At first, those afflicted were drawn by accounts of the general health of people living in the Southwest. Later, the medical profession began to develop “scientific” reasons supporting the efficacy of recuperation at higher elevations and in dry climates. Combining this advocacy of climatological therapy with an emphasis, by the turn of the century, on a rigorous monitoring of patients’ conditions, many Southwestern promoters saw the potential that hospitals and sanatoriums held for expanding local economies. From Colorado Springs to Silver City and the towns of the Arizona desert, civic leaders set about boosting their communities as offering the ideal setting for overcoming the leading killer of the 19th and early 20th centuries, tuberculosis.
Albuquerque was no exception, and from 1900 through the late 1930s, local promoters advertised the town’s ideal climate. The Commercial Club, forerunner to the Chamber of Commerce, for instance, organized and financed an advertising program in 1915 that produced the popular slogan, “Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the sick get well and the well get prosperous” (Spidle 1986:101). Sometimes investing funds to underwrite health-related businesses, the club succeeded in attracting at least sixteen sanatoriums between 1902 and 1937. While some contained only few beds and endured but a short time, others thrived, becoming a leading component in the town’s growing service industry and spawning two of the city’s current major medical centers.
As medical historian Jake Spidle concedes in his study of New Mexico’s tuberculosis industry, assigning exact figures to the number of people who took up residence in New Mexico in pursuit of their health is an “exasperating” task (Spidle 1986:97). Conservatively, he suggests that by 1920 at least 10 percent of New Mexico’s residents were consumptives. Moreover, most of them were concentrated in the state’s few larger towns that offered the care the medical profession so strongly urged. A United States Public Health Service investigation undertaken in 1913, for instance, estimated that in the “majority of New Mexico towns anywhere from 20 percent to 60 percent of all households had at least one family member who was tubercular” (Spidle 1986:98). In Albuquerque, the study noted, as much as 50 percent of all the population consisted of consumptives and their relatives. This estimate corresponds to an analysis of Albuquerque’s consumptive population completed in 1915 by one of the state’s leading tuberculosis specialists, Dr. LeRoy Peters, who held that of the town’s population of 11,000 fully 2,500 were consumptives. All estimates agreed that a sizeable percentage of the health seekers, perhaps as high as 90 percent, were non-natives.
The implications of these statistics when applied to the growth of Albuquerque’s early eastern suburbs are considerable. Although the German bacteriologist Robert Koch had first identified the tubercle bacillus in 1882, it was not until just after the turn of the century that the medical profession began to address the threat of the communicability of the disease. By 1908, the New Mexico Medical Society had turned its attention to protecting the public, raising the issue of enacting public health laws. Gradually the public began to discriminate against the “lungers,” making it more difficult for them to find lodging and work in the older sections of the town in the valley. At the same time admonitions against living in damp, smoky environments prompted consumptives to look above the valley, just as Sellers had urged, for an optimum setting for convalescence.
Led by St. Joseph Hospital, other large sanatoriums began to construct facilities on the sand hills between the original town site and the East Mesa. Southwestern Presbyterian Sanatorium was established in 1908 at Oak and Railroad, and in 1912, Methodist Deaconess Sanatorium opened at Central and Plum. Nearby appeared other sanatoriums including Murphy’s, Monkbridge, and Albuquerque Sanatorium. Soon Central Avenue had earned the sobriquet “TB Row” and began to transform from a “wavering sandy lane” to a corridor lined with medical facilities and houses, many located on terraced lots above the lower grade of the street as it climbed the arroyo.
Since the costs of staying at the sanatoriums were substantial, especially of the patients required months to recuperate, many health seekers sought their own quarters, either in rooming houses near the sanatoriums or by purchasing their own houses. For many of these stricken newcomers the early East Mesa neighborhoods offered the perfect place to buy and to build. Dry, pollution free, near the doctors at the sanatoriums, free of the concerns found in the valley associated with renting to sick boarders, and offering inexpensive lots, the heights attracted numerous health seekers. After World War I, when soldiers who had suffered mustard gas attacks in the trenches of France joined the ranks of the health seekers, the East Mesa suburbs increased their rate of growth.
In the words of those moving to the East Mesa to recover, they were “out on the mesa chasing the cure.” Those who could afford it purchased houses built on speculation while others, especially veterans with some carpentry skills, purchased lots and set about constructing their own small houses or casitas (Blair 1987; McKay 1987). This new wave in building resulted in houses that varied in style and quality. Unlike many of the subdivisions platted in the mid-1920s, the lots in Sellers’ addition were governed by no building covenant, and many of these early builders literally designed the house on the ground. Despite these disparities, bungalow-inspired houses were common. Normally facing east and west and with multiple grouped windows along their sides, these modest bungalows became the housing style most closely associated with Albuquerque’s early suburbs on the East Mesa. With their, often, two porches allowing their residents to maximize that underlying dictum of the bungalow — to permit the outdoors to come indoors — they offered an ideal setting for a climatological therapy that prescribed fresh air and sun.
Rex McKay, the son of a veteran who was a victim of gassing in World War I, recalls that his mother and father spent every night of the year on the “sleeping porch,” and that when he and his sister were small they slept on the porch (McKay 1987). At first, because of the absence of trees, other foliage, and fences that created privacy, many of the “sleeping porches” were rigged with a canvas screens and pulleys. According to longtime residents of the area, the need of the health seekers to achieve privacy and protection from the winds for their prescribed sunbathing contributed to the transformation of the once treeless mesa into the extensively landscaped suburb it soon became (Blair 1987). In those instances when someone succumbed to the disease, family members sometimes enclosed one or both porches.
By the late 1920s, theories regarding the treatment of tuberculosis had begun to change. The chemotherapy now advocated could be administered anywhere and there was no longer the need to seek out the ideal climate for a supervised recuperation. The local health industry declined with some of the larger facilities converted to hospitals offering a full range of medical services. As these complexes expanded most of the buildings associated with their earlier role as sanatoriums have been replaced. Remaining as a reminder of the health industry’s role in the growth of Albuquerque during the first three decades of the century, however, are many of the houses lining the streets of the East Mesa’s early suburbs. The electric trolley climbing up “TB Row” to the East Mesa, the efforts of promoters such as Sellers to create subdivisions out of dry mesa land, and the role that the town defined for itself as a health center had given Albuquerque the impetus it required to push out of the valley and begin its eastward growth.
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_____. 16th Census of the United States Housing, Volume IV: Mortgages on Owner Occupied Non-Farm Homes, Pt.2. Washington D.C.: U.S. Printing Office, 1942.
_____. 17th Census of the United States Housing, Census of Housing, Vol .II, Non-farm Housing Characteristics. Washington D.C.: U.S. Printing Office, 1953.
University Heights Improvement Company. “The Coming Aristocratic Residential Section.” Albuquerque, 1906. In Albuquerque Collection, Center for Southwest Research, UNM.
West, Pamela. “The Rise and Fall of the American Porch.” Landscape, 20 ,3 (Spring, 1976).
Wilson, Chris. University Neighborhoods History Handbook. Albuquerque: University Heights Association, 1986.
____, “Auto-oriented Commercial Development in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1916-1956.” National Register Multiple Property Listing, 1997.
____, Deidre Gerbeth and Lisa Kersavage. “Nob Hill Historic Building Inventory, Final Report.” Albuquerque: City Planning Department, 1995.
Wood, Robert T. “The Transformation of Albuquerque, 1945-1972.” Unpublished dissertation, UNM, 1980.
Essay taken from "20th Century Suburban Growth of Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1904-1959", National Register of Historic Places, August 2000.
Albuquerque’s promoters published pamphlets boosting the new community. Often containing predictions about the town’s future based more on their hopes than facts, these brochures offer a gauge of the optimism that inspired many of its early leaders.
Albuquerque 1880-1900
Albuquerque 1925-1944
Albuquerque 1945-1959