The Santa Fe Review

I haven’t been here long enough to remember Zook’s Pharmacy, Bell’s Department Store, the Canton Cafe on San Francisco Street, or the Union Bus Depot (now the Coyote Cafe). These are among the downtown institutions whose passing marked for some longtime residents the moment when Santa Fe no longer felt like home.

For me it would be the Burrito Company. I headed down there this morning for breakfast, as I often do on Sundays, only to find it gone, replaced by some horrible thing called the Coffee Beanery. Along with several other disgruntled Burrito Company customers I stared dumfounded through the door where hip, young employees were installing generic chain store furnishings and signs. Just what Santa Fe needs, another place to buy expensive servings of warm flavored water identically available in two dozen other states. I kept thinking about the nice family (from Nayarit, Mexico, I believe) who recently began running the Burrito Company. The food, barely changed since I first ate there in 1992, was as good as always and the service friendly. It was my favorite place to grab a quick meal downtown. I liked watching the people from the pueblos stopping there for breakfast on their way to sell pots and jewelry beneath the portal of the Palace of the Governors. It was hard to imagine many of them buying lattes and frappucinos. Later in the day I noticed a security guard posted outside the door and wondered whether the new owners were anticipating a riot. What a relief it was to learn Monday morning, from Julia Goldberg at the Reporter, that the sudden transformation is for a movie set. According to the October 11 edition of El Mitote the Burrito Company will return on October 24.

A block away, on Lincoln Avenue, came another surprise. Beneath the red awning next to the Talbot’s clothing store was a sign that said “Buffalo Thunder Resort & Casino.” I crossed the street for a closer look. There were no slot machines or prostitutes inside, and a small placard in the window said Glenn Green Galleries. Is the Buffalo Thunder sign supposed to be conceptual art or an advertisement? I don’t know what to think.

I continued on foot to the new Railyard commercial development where business seemed as subdued as ever. The Bin 132 Wine and Cheese Bar was still “Opening Soon.” A sign for the Second Street Brewery in the Farmer’s Market Building insisted that it was “Coming This Fall.” In two more months it will be winter. I looked through the dirty windows and saw nothing but raw, empty space. (Another sign on the building said, “Please Do Not Loiter and Do not burn fires.” There must be a story there.)

As I headed toward Don Wiviott’s half-empty Artyard Lofts, which have been holding a perpetual open house, I passed by the hole where the Railyard movie complex was supposed to be. With private investors and the state unwilling to provide financing, the city is now thinking of underwriting the venture itself. I’m all for government economic stimulus, and I think the city’s decision to rescue the mismanaged College of Santa Fe was a good thing. But maybe the reason no one wants to invest in a Railyard cinema is because it’s a bad idea. Santa Fe has 28 movie screens. With a population of 72,000 that comes out to one screen for every 2,571 residents. The ratio for Albuquerque, with 71 screens and a population of 522,000, is one screen for every 11,900 residents.

On the way back to my car I walked through the Borders bookstore and overheard a customer asking a clerk where 500 Montezuma Street was. He said he was sorry but he didn’t know. 500 Montezuma Street is the address for Borders and the other businesses at Sanbusco Market Center, once known as Santa Fe Builders Supply Company.

This evening I was looking again through the late Kingsley Hammett’s wonderful book, “Santa Fe: A Walk Through Time,” with its before and after photographs. What a fine place this must have been.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

We’ve written here before about the great boondoggle of 1930, in which the City of Santa Fe was persuaded to give the most valuable piece of its Northwest Quadrant to a real estate speculator (and later governor of New Mexico) in return for a small cut of the proceeds. (Please see The Dempsey Papers, April 9, 2007.) The parcel, 2,000 acres of public commons granted to the town by King Philip V of Spain, is now the site of Don Tishman and Eddie Gilbert’s Zocalo condominiums, the Las Estrellas subdivision, Garrett Thornburg’s corporate headquarters, and numerous Northside mansions off Bishop’s Lodge Road, including Governor Richardson’s. The city hung on to the rest: 2,770 acres of hilly, arroyo-cut scrub land whose highest and best use was gathering firewood and piñon nuts, accommodating hobo camps, and disposing of old cars, mattresses, and recently swigged beer cans. The southwest corner of the grant became the city dump and a Japanese internment camp and is now home to the Buckman Road Transfer Station. But most of the area, classified as “Mountainous and Difficult Terrain,” has sat vacant. Because of the steep slopes, it would be an expensive place on which to build.

Northwest Quadrant Master Plan

Undaunted, the City Council took the first steps last week toward rezoning 540 acres of the old grant to accommodate the eventual construction of six new neighborhoods. There, it is envisioned, teachers, nurses, police officers, fire fighters, and other aspiring members of the middle class will be able to buy reasonably priced homes just two miles from the Plaza. The enormous development costs would be offset, in part, from the expanded tax base and $10 million in hypothetical government grants.

Described in the impressively illustrated Northwest Quadrant Master Plan, the project is an urban designer’s dream. There would be a Jane Jacobs-like neighborhood called Main Street — a dense, vibrant blend of townhouses, apartments, “live-work” units, and small businesses centered around a community plaza. There would be Happy Valley (really!), a “mixed use, arts-and-crafts community” of rowhouses and cottages that “will thrive around its diversity.” There would be more staid neighborhoods like those you might see at Rancho Viejo, and to help subsidize the whole effort, a ritzier Southwest Neighborhood of larger houses on bigger lots. All these places would be neurologically connected by a “backbone” parkway lined with hiking and biking trails. People rich and poor, of all races, creeds, colors, and sexual orientations, would bicycle to dinner or to a concert in the park — and when they had to leave their comfortable enclave they would get in their cars, funnel out through the single entrance on Ridgetop Road, and merge onto the highway for the short trip to town. In case of an emergency evacuation, a back gate could be opened onto Camino de Los Montoyas.

That is the kind of monster that is born when idealistic visions collide with political reality. It would be good if Santa Fe had more affordable housing on the picturesque Northside. But to keep from undermining existing neighborhoods like Casa Solana with an intolerable amount of cut-through traffic, the proposed new community would be sealed off from the rest of town. It wouldn’t really be part of Santa Fe.

View from Main Street

On Saturday, to improve my mental map of the area, I parked along Los Montoyas and walked uphill on a steep, eroded dirt road that skirts the southern edge of Happy Valley. There were mounds of trash, old sofas, and broken bottles. All four walls of a PNM electrical substation were smeared with graffiti. (This is where, two summers ago, a young vandal electrocuted himself while trying to tag a 115,000-volt transformer.) But if you blur over the details, this is a magnificent piece of land. Near the site of the neighborhood to be called Main Street, I looked out from the top of the highest hill. Thompson Peak and Atalaya Mountain formed a striking backdrop to the National Cemetery, where rows of white markers undulated through green hills. Even Zocalo looked good from up there.

I thought about other ways that the city might use this land, as King Philip decreed, for the commonweal. Maybe when the economy improves, some of the choicest homesites — comparable to the best in La Tierra or Las Campanas but right in town — could be sold to a high-end developer, whose clients could afford the gravity-defying construction costs. The proceeds from the sales could be used to expand programs for down-payment assistance and low-interest rehab loans — subsidies to improve neighborhoods that exist on the ground instead of in architectural cyberspace. The $10 million in grants that the Northwest Quadrant would consume could go instead to projects like the one on West Alameda, where dilapidated public housing is to be bulldozed and replaced with a mixed-use development. The lower slopes of the quadrant might be a relatively economical place to build workforce housing. But most of these rollercoaster badlands beg to be cleaned up and turned into open space, Santa Fe’s Central Park in the wild.

There is only so much you can do to fight geography. The primary reason that affordable housing is mostly on the Southside is not a matter of social injustice but of practicality. The land is flatter there.

Overlooking Happy Valley

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

The New Mexican finally got around to covering the Thornburg story last Friday, but it wasn’t worth the wait. The editors might as well have run a wire service rewrite from the AP. No details or insight were offered beyond what others had already reported. All the flattering stories about Thornburg the New Mexican has published over the years didn’t even earn it an exclusive quote from a company insider. When it comes to covering business, Santa Fe’s paper of record is rarely more aggressive than a farm town gazette enthusing over the opening of a new hardware store — or, in these days, a McDonald’s. That might be tolerable for most towns this size, but Santa Fe is home not just to Thornburg but to powerful national real estate magnates like William Zeckendorf and Donald Tishman. They get the same fawning treatment as Garrett Thornburg.

Mr. Tishman is the developer of Zocalo, the brightly colored condominium complex built next to the interchange for U.S. Highway 84/285 and the Santa Fe Bypass. For days the New Mexican has been running advertisements (including those obnoxious front-page stickers) for an auction in which bidding for condos recently listed at $365,000 will start at $90,000. A story in today’s business section reads like a continuation of the ad campaign. Zocalo offers “a combination of style, comfort and value,” the auctioneer assures us in the third paragraph. (Some of the condos will have views, across four lanes of traffic, of the new Thornburg corporate headquarters.) In the story, a spokesman for the developer is allowed to get away with blaming Zocalo’s troubles on the usual “unprecedented downturn in the real estate market,” as though Mr. Tishman weren’t among those eagerly pumping up the bubble right until it popped. Missing entirely are comments from Zocalo residents who paid full price for their cubicles only to have the developer undercut their “investment” by overbuilding and then holding this fire sale.

I drove out to Zocalo this afternoon and walked around the half-built northern section where the units to be auctioned sit vacant. The highway noise was constant like wind. Surrounding the complex are large swaths of graded land that would have held even more unsellable condos. Nothing lives there now but ants and weeds.

Another of Mr. Tishman’s deals, the Tres Santos senior apartments, behind the McDonald’s on Pacheco Street (”our location simply can’t be beat!”) is also suffering. (A principal in the project is former city councilor Carol Robertson Lopez.) The New Mexican did a better job of covering this mess, reporting last month that residents were unhappy about plans to renege on the commitment to rent only to older adults. In this market some landlords will take whatever they can get — at the expense of tenants who took them at their word.

Bad judgments by people who were supposed to understand how money works, including the wizards of bankrupt Thornburg Mortgage, have left Santa Fe with a bottomless pit of junk real estate — apartments, both condos and rentals, that nobody wants. Remember the situation early last year near the Railyard where developers were rushing to pile multi-level luxury condos onto an old established neighborhood of single-family homes? (Please see Chapter 47. The “New Urbanism” Scam.) “I feel infill is an answer to global warming on a big scale,” said one of the speculators, who had shoehorned a three-story complex onto a small lot on Juanita Street. Since June, Los Alamos National Bank has listed two of the units for sale on its foreclosure page. You can also get a deal from the bank on a repossessed Dodge Grand Caravan.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review