SF’s Railyard development approaches its original vision
Great Recession froze progress, but former ‘ junkyard’ bustling
Remembering what the Railyard looked like 20 years ago, Debbie Jaramillo described it as “just another junkyard.”
“What I remember is a lot of grease,” said Jaramillo, mayor of Santa Fe from 199498. “It was just, ew. Dirty. Greasy. The train was the only thing that really used it. A lot of old lumber blocks thrown around.”
The area was facing potential development by a major corporation. The people of Santa Fe wanted the city to take over the property, Jaramillo said. So she pushed for that.
“You have to have some kind of vision in your mind and not something like, ‘This could never happen,’” she said.
It was in 1995, during Jaramillo’s tenure, that the city bought the 50-acre property, including both the North and Baca subdistricts, for $21 million, plus millions more in debt service. It wasn’t until 2008 that the project made its public debut.
This weekend marks the 10-year anniversary of the opening of the Railyard, including the Railyard Park created with help from the Trust for Public Lands. The anniversary will be celebrated with weekend-long festivities.
Tenants like REI and the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market opened their doors in fall of 2008, joining already existing entities like Warehouse 21 and SITE Santa Fe. The Flying Star restaurant — which closed in 2015 amid bankruptcy — and Second Street Brewery came later.
On the heels of several slow years — the Railyard opened precisely at the start of a national economic crisis — the area has more recently seen the addition of the Violet Crown Cinema in 2015, the multimillion-dollar expansion of SITE Santa Fe last year and the opening this year of the three-story Railyard Flats apartment building.
“We’ve crossed over into a
place where we’re going to see the Railyard continue to fill out in the way it was originally intended,” said Violet Crown owner Bill Banowsky.
Two projects are under letter-of-intent status in the Railyard’s lower-profile Baca District: an 18-unit condo building, and the second phase of the residential and commercial development in which the new Opuntia teahouse is currently housed. If those plans come to fruition, the Baca area will be full by this time next year. That’s according to Richard Czoski, executive director of the nonprofit Santa Fe Railyard Community Corp., which manages the Railyard under a city contract.
“We’re very close to completion,” he said. “But even though a parcel is leased doesn’t necessarily mean we’re safe, because we’re not safe until a building has been built on it.”
Today, Czoski says the Railyard’s parcels are about 95 percent leased. That’s the same amount as at its September 2008 opening, but in the Great Recession, many prospective tenants had to pull out. The available indoor space in the buildings up so far is down to 38,000 square feet, 90 percent of that being in the troubled Market Station Building.
“We opened at perhaps the worst possible time from a real-estate development perspective,” Czoski said.