Acequia Madre Rich in History

The Spanish explorers who came to Northern New Mexico 400 years ago based the founding of Santa Fe on "the laws of the Indies and two books on How to Build a City," according to local historian Pedro Ribera Ortega.

"They were the model for all the colonial cities of Spain. You needed to have mountains and rivers, lumber and irrigable land, and Santa Fe looked ideal," said Ortega, author of the 1961 classic book Christmas in Old Santa Fe.

"Santa Fe, which was founded in 1610, was a walled city. It is interesting that Paseo de Peralta approximates where the adobe walls were, but they were all gone by 1840."

Of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Ortega said, "We defended the city well but the Indians got us out by cutting off the water."

If this is so, the leaders of the Pueblo rebellion must have contrived a way to control the flows of both the Santa Fe River and the Acequia Madre (mother ditch), which was constructed at the same time as the founding of the city to direct surface water into residential areas for agricultural irrigation.

The city of Santa Fe presents a short history about the Eastside area in its Camino del Monte Sol Architectural Historic Survey (1984).

"Some of the trading caravans from the East followed the easy gradient of what is now Camino del Monte Sol to corrals that were established near the intersection of that street and Canyon Road, a short block north of Acequia Madre," the survey's authors write. "Even into the 20th century burros plodded this same brecha (trail) as they carried their burdens of firewood.

"Water flowed downhill from the Acequia de la Loma to the Acequia Madre. Had the land been divided laterally rather than vertically the landholder who held the upslope division could easily deprive others of water. Instead, as the land became fragmented, long, narrow plots were provided. Between them, brechas allowed farmers access to their fields and orchards. These brechas later became formalized into the streets and alleys known as San Antonio, San Pasqual, La Paz, Manzano and Sosaya.

"The early houses along Acequia Madre Street were made of adobe bricks - a technology brought by the Spaniards, who had learned it from the Arabs - with small windows and with debarked-log vigas supporting thick roofs of twigs and earth.

"Another element the Spanish introduced was the portal (porch) which covered the sidewalk, an architectural form commonly found in Latin America," according to the city's Historic Districts Handbook (1989). "As the need arose, rooms were added to form an 'L' shape or, in some cases, a placita (courtyard) was created when all linear building blocks were joined into a square."

Virtually all of the houses built in the Acequia Madre area prior to New Mexico's statehood (1912) were made of adobe. Even by that time the original Spanish-Pueblo architectural blend had been augmented with stylistic accents and building materials from the eastern United States.

The railroad had come to the vicinity of Santa Fe in 1880, bringing more people and new materials such as window glass and milled woodwork. These were incorporated into the Territorial-style homes after the Greek Revival style popular in the East. The new buildings included square porch columns and pedimented door and window frames, often painted white. Brick copings applied to the parapets of the adobe walls completed the formal appearance and helped prevent weathering of the adobe walls.

"Before the railroad there were really no changes in either building style or materials and so it is extremely difficult to date old buildings in this area," said Sara Melton, a 32-year Santa Fe resident and Realtor and a devotee of local architectural history.

"The materials and style of building were exactly the same for 300 years because it was all hand-done and they had to use indigenous materials. People used the European pattern of building up to the edge of the street and the houses evolved because they were constantly being added to. It doesn't do you any good to try to tree-ring-date the vigas because everybody recycled everything back then."

The city's 1984 survey lists a few buildings along the Acequia Madre that were constructed before statehood. One was built by Brian Boru Dunne, who also was a linguist, musician, magician and a feature writer for The Santa Fe New Mexican for 25 years.

Another, owned in 1912 by Frank Delgado, was likely an Acequia Madre farmhouse dating at least to the early 19th-century, according to the survey. However, the structure's windows, corbels and adzed portal beams point to the probability it underwent a major facelift during the 1920s.

"It was the 1920s that saw the most intense period of development of the district. Houses along the Acequia Madre began to be picked up by artists and writers, who remodeled the old two-room adobes along Pueblo Revival lines," the survey says.

"The area evolved in a very short span of years - two decades at the most - from agricultural and pastoral pursuits carried on by Spanish-American families living in small clusters of adobe houses to an internationally known concentration of artists."

Some of the artists and others initially came to Santa Fe for its tuberculosis sanatoriums. One was aviator Katherine Stinson, who had contracted TB during World War I service as an ambulance driver in France. During her treatment Stinson befriended another patient, architect John Gaw Meem, and she soon began remodeling and building homes.

Stinson built several homes, including one for herself and her husband Miguel Otero Jr., in the Plaza Chamisal compound, today located at the southwest corner of Acequia Madre and Paseo de Peralta.

The compound was a 19th-century settlement pattern, unique in the United States to New Mexico, often employed in Santa Fe's Eastside in the 19th century. Compounds served to keep extended families intact and enhanced security for the residents. Another compound highlighted in the historic survey is Placita Rafaela on the south side of Acequia Madre, east of Garcia Street. Epifanio Garcia built several homes there in the 1920s and named the compound after his wife.

Architects and builders working in the 1920s had a defined "Santa Fe Style" to work from. It was then, as now, a style contrived by Anglo immigrants, but it was based on the architectural vernacular that existed in pre-statehood days.

The oldest houses on Acequia Madre were likely among those photographed by the Museum of New Mexico's Jesse Nusbaum. He and the museum's Edgar Lee Hewett and Sylvanus Morley and artist Carlos Vierra used existing homes to synthesize the new Pueblo-Revival building style: flat roofs, stuccoed walls in natural earth colors, portales supported by posts and corbels, and projecting vigas and canales.

"The town was moving very rapidly in the name of progress, thinking we couldn't just stay this funny little-mud-hut town," Melton said. "So Hewett and Vierra and the rest wanted to keep a local distinction in the approach to building. They didn't want to see Santa Fe borrowing from everybody else and part of that was due to the fact that Santa Fe had taken a big economic decline when the railroad bypassed the town so they were scratching around for ways to keep the town functioning."

Period anthropology had just begun to be popular and Santa Fe had a lot of real character that way, so for 40 years the town traded on being the 'City Different.' It was an attempt to encourage following the established patterns rather than covering ourselves with someone else's clothes.

"What exists in the Acequia Madre area today is really just a remnant of what Santa Fe looked like in the pre-railroad days, except it's much denser today. You can tell when the streets were built by the placement of the houses and the architectural style. Delgado Street, for example, is basically a late-1920s bungalow street, an Anglo pattern with front and back yards."

Today's visitor on Acequia Madre and the Eastside's other small streets to a large extent can't see the houses for the walls. There is some historical precedent for the pseudo-adobe walls of the newest owners, but the attitude has changed.

"I think if we could track it down we would find that the high adobe walls only existed where there were houses in separate ownerships very close together that needed to have some privacy," Melton said. "They were not perimeter walls for individual lots. The reasons for building walls have changed completely."

Melton has been struck by the fact that Santa Fe is unique among Spain's colonial cities in not having tiled roofs on the houses.

"In Mexico they used kiln-dried adobes. It's easy enough to make those tiles: You just slap the mud over your knee and fire it but we never had the firing," she said. "I think we got up here too early and it was too far away, we were too poor, so we never imported that particular technology.

"I think the Jesuits further south had that capability but the Franciscans, who were the big masters of mission architecture in this part of the country, didn't know how to do it."Melton lives on Sosaya Lane, named after Augustin Sosaya, who also named San Antonio, another of the small streets off Acequia Madre. Back in the 1920s, Sosaya's wife prayed to St. Anthony that the land her husband desired would be available. An option held by another man was dropped and Sosaya named the street after the saint.

Many of the bungalows on San Antonio and Sosaya were built by him in the early part of the 20th century.

"Mr. Sosaya went to California in the late teens and came back with new notions about how houses should be built," Melton said. "Thus the bungalows on San Antonio and those things with tapered rock pillars on the front porches. He started out with a cornfield on Sosaya, on the east side of the street, and his own house, which in the 1970s was a double-adobe Craftsman bungalow with rock pillars and three steps up to front porch. Mary Goodwin bought it in about 1980."

That was the only house Benjamin and Loyola Alarid could see from their living room for 20 years.

The Alarids, who are part of one of the area's oldest families, built their house in 1949. It's next door to the house that Benjamin's father built in 1930 and his mother, Josefita, still lives there.

"She's 96 now and she's doing pretty well but she hates the vigas in that house because they're hard to clean," Benjamin said.

His father, Ben, had a blacksmith shop in the back of the house; he had learned the craft from his father and an uncle who forged horseshoes and repaired wagon wheels in a shop next to La Fonda in the days before the automobile.

Benjamin, whose great-grandfather owned a large tract of land between Canyon Road and Acequia Madre, and Loyola, an Ortiz whose ancestors lived in Nambe, remember several large apple orchards and planted fields in the area before it was built up with houses.

Although water rights to the acequia water survive, the Alarids know only a few residents who use it today.

"My grandfather used the water from the acequia," Benjamin said. "He had a garden with alfalfa and corn, chile and garlic. The neighbors have a pump and when the water gets let down the ditch on Wednesdays and Sundays they use it to irrigate their garden.

"One reason the Alarids love the Acequia Madre neighborhood is the memory of their children growing up there and being able to walk to Acequia Madre Elementary school.

"We couldn't live anywhere else," Loyola said.

Acequia Madre Elementary School opened in January 1954. Before that, area students attended First Ward School at Garcia and Canyon from 1906 to its closure in 1928, then Wood-Gormley Elementary in the Don Gaspar neighborhood and Manderfield Elementary on Upper Canyon Road.

In spite of its advantage for local families the school district twice considered closing Acequia Madre Elementary - in the early 1980s and in the early 1990s.In order to boost enrollment, the school added a kindergarten in 1993-94 and an arts-immersion program.

In 1997 Acequia Madre Elementary was one of 10 U.S. schools selected for a Business Week award for instructional innovation and its partnership with the Santa Fe Arts in Education Initiative. Nevertheless, in a bid to cut district costs the principal position in 1997 was split between Acequia Madre and Atalaya elementaries.

Today Acequia Madre again has its own principal, Ted Hallstrom, and enrollment is at 145 students, about two-thirds attending via interzone transfers. The school's small size and the arts program are among its draws.

Real estate in the historic Acequia Madre neighborhood is at a premium.

"I'd say prices on Acequia Madre are among the highest in Santa Fe," Realtor Lisa Barker said. "Even the tiny, old places are worth a fortune. It's pretty rare that they come onto the market and when they do they're gobbled up.

"We recently sold a small, very rundown adobe with original vigas and low ceilings - something that, if it wasn't on the Eastside, People would laugh at you - and it went for $525,000.

"The area has tremendous character," Barker said. "It's very interesting to see how many innovative developers are wanting to mimic that character with its narrow streets and slow traffic in their plans for new projects like Aldea de Santa Fe and Los Santeros."

Two homes for sale in the neighborhood at this writing were a two-bedroom Territorial adobe marketed by French & French Fine Properties for its "Acequia Madre charm and sophistication" at $576,000; and a remodeled Plaza Chamisal home with three bedrooms, four fireplaces, new appliances and a large yard offered by Dougherty Real Estate for $1,295,000.