Walk through TIME
Downtown streets tell stories of Albuquerque’s early history
Political boss Clyde Tingley held court here. Glamorous actress and socialite Zsa Zsa Gabor slept here. And, so the story goes, Old West law dog and frontier legend Wyatt Earp lay low here.
Here is Downtown Albuquerque, the stretch that runs along Central Avenue from First Street west to Eighth Street. It’s a section studded with storied buildings such as the old Hilton Hotel, now the Hotel Andaluz; the Sunshine Building; the KiMo Theatre; and Maisel’s Indian Trading Post. It’s a belt of blocks sprinkled with memories of long-gone landmarks such as the Alvarado Hotel, the Grant Opera House and the Armijo House.
Walk along this memory lane with people who know where to point, and you can touch the ghosts of the bankers, lawyers, physicians, merchants and impresarios, the movers and shakers, who started Albuquerque along the path to what it is today.
Walking history
“Albuquerque was founded in 1706, but the Albuquerque you are going to hear about today started when the railroad arrived in 1880,” Janet Saiers said.
Saiers is vice president in charge of programs for the Albuquerque Historical Society. On this Saturday morning a couple of weeks ago, she was talking to a group of five people, including two from Denmark, who had gathered at the southwest corner of First Street and Central Avenue for the Historical Society’s weekly guided Downtown Walking Tour.
“We are going to talk about architecture,” Saiers said. “Some of the buildings on Central are
100 years old, which is old for Albuquerque. It might not be old for Denmark.”
Initiated in 2014, the Historic Society’s walking tour is led, on a rotating basis, by one of the 11 guides especially trained for the task. Guides carry binders containing photos of historic buildings and some use an amplification device to be better heard over the roar of motorcycles, cars and buses coursing the city streets.
Sometimes 10 or more people show up for a tour, sometimes only one and, on occasion, no one at all. But Saiers said people from all over the state, all over the country and all
over the world have taken the tour.
“It’s a really nice way to get a quick brush up on history,” said Rasmus Pedersen, 34, of Copenhagen, Denmark, who, with Tine Nielsen, 30, also of Copenhagen, took the walking tour July 15. “You see things you don’t notice if you just walk around on your own. You take a tour like this and you begin to notice things.”
New Town
The tour route is made up of what was known as New Town 137 years ago when railroad tracks were put down a mile and a half east of Old Town, the original Spanish settlement.
Streets were laid out east and west of the railroad tracks. Back then Central Avenue was called Railroad Avenue, a name it would retain until it was rechristened Central in 1904. The buildings that grew up along those
streets in the early days were made out of adobe and wood.
“None of the buildings from those earliest times survive today,” said Shannon Wagers, a semi-retired journalist who is a tour guide. “Many of them burned down.”
Some buildings, such as the lavish Alvarado Hotel, a Fred Harvey-operated railroad facility opened in 1902, were torn down. The Alvarado, despite
efforts to save it, was demolished in 1970. In 2002, the Alvarado Transportation Center, a scaled down replica of the Alvarado Hotel, opened on the hotel’s old site on the southeast corner of Central and First Street. The center serves ABQRide, Amtrack, Greyhound and the Rail Runner Express.
“My favorite place on the tour is the beginning at First and Central,” Saiers said. “I enjoy showing the photo of the 1902 Alvarado Hotel and then allowing people to note the architectural features — bell tower, arches, curves — that were mimicked in the construction of the transportation building.”
The Sunshine Building at 120 Central SW is another building special to Saiers, a 1966 Del Norte High School graduate. Opened in May 1924 as a 920-seat movie palace, the six-story Sunshine was among Albuquerque’s first “skyscrapers.” It continued to show movies until the 1980s.
“As a kid, it was a big deal to be dropped off at the Sunshine to go to the movies,” Saiers said. “Then, if my dad gave me money for a soda and popcorn, that was beyond belief. To the mind of a child, the inside of the theater was gigantic. I didn’t know the difference between 500 seats and 5,000 seats. And the smell of popcorn in the lobby was heavenly.”
Saiers told her tour guests that the Sunshine is now an office building and that most of the offices are occupied.
Seat of power
In 1939, San Antonio, N.M., native and hotel magnate Conrad Hilton built the Albuquerque Hilton at 125 Second St. NW. Now called the Hotel Andaluz, the luxurious California Mission style hotel is among Wagers’ favorite tour attractions.
“I always like to take people into the hotel because it’s quiet there,” she said. “It’s just a nice stop.”
Not to mention that it is exquisitely beautiful and filled with colorful stories. Hilton honeymooned here with Gabor, his second wife, whom he married in 1942. Tingley was the center of attention during frequent sessions in the hotel lobby between 1940 and 1953, the years he served as the powerful chairman of the Albuquerque City Commission . The chair Tingley is said to have used back then is preserved in the hotel.
Exiting north from the hotel onto Copper Street, Wagers notes that Copper and Third streets marked the heart of Albuquerque’s red-light district from the 1890s up until the 1920s, a time when vice operated pretty much in the open.
“There were brothels here,” she said pointing west along Copper. “Some were upscale, in particular the Vine Cottage, which stood about where the entrance to that parking garage is. There were also a few opium dens around.”
Gunfighters and fires
If your roots run deep enough in Albuquerque, it may be easier to see things that are not here anymore, things you didn’t see even when they were here.
Tour guide Abraham Santillanes grew up in Old Town and passed his childhood in the stores and theaters along Central Avenue. He pointed to the
southwest corner of Central and Third Street.
“That was the site of Albuquerque’s first major hotel, the Armijo House,” Santillanes tells the party he is guiding. “It was started by a prominent New Mexico family.”
Built in 1880, the three-story hotel was thought to be the only first-class hotel in Albuquerque at the time. Some believe that Wyatt Earp, John H. “Doc” Holliday and several others involved in the infamous Oct. 26, 1881, gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Ariz., and/or its bloody aftermath may have stayed at the Armijo House in April 1882 while seeking refuge in Albuquerque from their enemies in Arizona. The Armijo House was destroyed by fire in February 1897.
It was a fire many years later, in 1953, that proved to be the most significant for Downtown Albuquerque. That fire damaged the Sears Roebuck Building, which was built in 1937 and still stands at 501-505 Central NW. While repairing the damage, Sears opened a temporary store east of Downtown in the Central and San Mateo Boulevard area. That site proved so popular that it signaled the coming migration of businesses, starting in earnest in the 1960s, from Downtown to the Heights.
“The Sears fire was the beginning of the end for Downtown Albuquerque,” Santillanes said. “It had a good run from 1880 to about 1965. But by the ’60s it was congested. Parking was impossible.”
Magnificent remnants
Downtown may have dimmed down some since its glory days in the early 20th century when the electric lights embedded in the exterior of the Albuquerque Gas, Electric Light and Power Company, then located in the McCanna/Hubbell Building, 418-424 Central SW, blazed up that section of the street for blocks around.
But magnificent remnants, such as Maisel’s Indian Trading Post, boasting marvelous Native American murals on its entrance way at 510 Central SW, and the wondrously ornate Pueblo Deco KiMo Theatre, opened in 1927, rescued by city purchase in 1977 and restored in subsequent years, are alive and well and doing business.
And the memories of things lost and times past are stirred up most Saturday mornings during the Albuquerque Historical Society’s walking tour.
“I always enjoy it,” said Greg Naranjo, a New Mexico native and longtime Albuquerque resident, who walked his second tour earlier this month. “I always learn so much, and you get different perspectives with different guides.”