If location is everything in real estate, Albuquerque has long been blessed. In the days of the Spanish conquistadores the colonial outpost was situated on the 1,600-mile trade north-south route known as the Camino Royal, or Royal Road. In the age of the automobile, beginning in 1926, Albuquerque became an important stop on Route 66, the Mother Road, as it crossed 2,448 miles of America’s interior from Lake Michigan in Chicago to the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, California.
But the two historic highways were going to different Albuquerques.
The Albuquerque founded in 1706 as a military presidio by the Spanish evolved into a sheepherding center, developing around a central plaza. When American rule of New Mexico began in 1846 the Post of Albuquerque was established here to supply military outposts in the Territory.
However, in 1880 when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad steamed into the town the tracks bypassed the Plaza and the passenger station was built two miles to the east. The bustling mercantile center that quickly grew up around the railroad became known as New Albuquerque and then New Town. The original settlement became Old Town. In 1920 the expanding City of Albuquerque gobbled up Old Town on its way to today’s land mass of more than 180 square miles and a population north of a half-million. Old Town has blossomed as a shopping and cultural destination and New Town has become downtown.
In 1937 Route 66 was re-aligned as it coursed through Albuquerque. Where it began by flowing north-south along 4th Street it was switched to a more east-west path along Central Avenue. The result is that Fourth and Central is the only place in the United States where the historic Route 66 crosses itself. The intersection also became the crossroads of the town for decades and that is where we will begin our tour of the city whose name honors Don Francisco Fernández de la Cueva y Enríquez de Cabrera, the Duke of the Spanish village of Albuquerque...
There were Spanish colonization attempts here in the 16th century but it was not until New Mexico’s third Spanish governor, Don Pedro de Peralta, founded a town at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in 1608 that habitation took root. Don Pedro called his settlement La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís, the Royal Town of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi and in 1610 he made it the capital of the province. For over 400 years Santa Fe has served almost continuously as a capital city.
That break occurred during the years 1680 to 1692 when the native Pueblo Indians, who had settled here some 600 years earlier, drove the Spaniards from their ancestral lands and the town was abandoned. Don Diego de Vargas reconquered the Pueblos and re-established Santa Fe as the provincial seat of Spanish holdings in the Southwest. In 1824 Santa fe was formalized as the capital of the Mexican territory of Santa Fé de Nuevo México and in 1848, when the United States gained New Mexico through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo it became the American territorial capital. Finally, in 1912, when New Mexico entered the Union as the 47th state, Santa Fe continued as the capital city, albeit with a population of scarcely 5,000.
By that time the main line of the railroad had bypassed Santa Fe and the federal government had abandoned revenue-producing Fort Marcy. Town officials pegged their future on tourism - at a time when the automobile was less than 20 years old and Route 66 was more than a decade away. The eclectic streetscape that had emerged over the previous 100 years was jettisoned for a total adherence to a single unified building style - the Spanish Pueblo Revival look with flat roofs, exposed log beams known as vigas and earth-toned exteriors. The 1930s saw an inclusion of the traditional Territorial style that featured white-painted wooden trim. Since 1957, by law, every new or rebuilt structure in Santa Fe must exhibit a Spanish Territorial or Pueblo style of architecture.
To see the faces of “City Different” our walking will begin where the Spanish laid out the city in accordance with the “Laws of the Indies,” whose fundamental principle was to create the streets around a central plaza...