Santa Fe is losing its sense of place

Ihave to say how disappointed I am in the decision of the City Council to approve the development at Zia Road and St. Francis Drive. How can it be that city leaders have forgotten, already, that we were awarded the National Geographic Society’s Sense of Place Award? This honor came in just 2017, so recently that anyone over 4 can remember the event. Our town was given the award out of an entire world of choices.

Yet, here we are in 2021. A developer has said that the corridors painstakingly thought through and passed to protect the approaches to our world-class destination are outdated and deserve to be scrapped. The City Council, in its wisdom, has agreed. We have worked since the 1912 “city plan” to take advantage of what makes this town unique, to keep it and to uphold it. How is it that the mayor and council (with the notable and brave exception of Councilor Carol Romero-Wirth) can so casually throw away this important part of our authenticity?

Our center has been desecrated by narcissistic vandals. Now the greeting to ourselves when we come home, to our visitors who come to be “enchanted,” now it is to be discarded with yesterday’s newspaper, as though 1912 and all we have made of ourselves since means nothing.

What is lost cannot be rebuilt. When our atmosphere, our sense of place, our identity, our credibility, that which causes us to top every Condé Nast poll and reader’s choice award, our integrity is discarded (“toss no mas” evidently has to do with trash only, not with integrity), this cannot nor will ever be had, again.

Certainly, our skies and our great land and its vistas will last, but people come to our town, first and foremost. Our town is why we live here, whether we were born here or were perceptive enough to move here. It is the physical environment of the City Different that caused, after 1912, the artists’ colony to grow up, that kept the world-class scientists who worked in Los Alamos, that brings retirees of imagination, sophistication and wide travel to live here. I mention these people because when someone asks me, “Has Santa Fe changed much since you were a child?” I answer, the one thing that hasn’t changed are the interesting people that live here and move here.

Will they continue without what is left of our integrity and atmosphere, of our old cultures, Indian and Spanish, that are part of our fabric? If they are wanted, the fabric must be kept whole and meaningful.

The entrances to our town are not “outdated.” They are a vital beginning, and views of the mountains are a vital part of what draws the heart.

Crowded corridors of apartment buildings can be had anywhere in the United States. They are not a draw, any more than a generous 10 years of “affordable living.” It is near tragic that the mayor and City Council do not seem to appreciate this, for one corridor leads to another, then leads to the Plaza and the older parts of town, where the, oh, magic dwells.

Rome cannot be rebuilt, not as it was, nor Warsaw, nor Berlin, nor the Forbidden City, nor any old and integral place. Santa Fe cannot be reconstituted once it is discarded or tossed.

Think upon this when you enter your house, when you cook chile, when you admire your Navajo rug or your figurine of Don Quixote.

To be meaningful, it must have context.

Certainly, our skies and our great land and its vistas will last, but people come to our town, first and foremost.