Transformation at Palace marks an evolution
Although Santa Fe’s historic Plaza might have lost its centerpiece — the fate of the damaged Soldiers’ Monument remains uncertain as the city awaits completion of a mediated “community reconciliation process” — the four-century-old adobe Palace of the Governors still anchors the downtown historic district. But inside the national landmark is undergoing the latest in a long series of transformations since its construction as the seat of colonial government for New Spain’s northern frontier.
Thick-walled white rooms and hallways stand almost empty as various electrical and structural improvements are completed, finishing work for a major project that closed the ancient palacio to the public from August 2018 to June of this year while crews installed a heating, ventilation and air conditioning system and fire safety equipment. The work was prompted in part by a desire to avoid the kind of tragic fires that in recent years befell Brazil’s Museu Nacional or the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.
Now the state Department of Cultural Affairs is preparing to ask the Legislature to fund the next phase of an overhaul that is changing how the country’s oldest continuously used public building is presented to some 100,000 visitors in a normal year.
The temporary closure for the equipment installation required the complete removal of exhibits and allowed curators of the History Museum complex, including the 3 1/2 story space opened next door in 2009, to begin rethinking how to interpret the Palace itself as an artifact.
What began in 1610 as earth-and-wood casas reales, or royal buildings, for administering a vast region from the Spanish outpost of Santa Fe, surrounded by Indian tribes, was connected to a military presidio and apparently had two stories until some point in the last half of the 18th century.
The structure has seen various states of ruin and repair under governors who resided there during the Spanish, Mexican and American periods. Historians say Juan Bautista de Anza, the province’s governor from 1778-87, even proposed demolition of the Palace and construction of government buildings on the more defensible south side of the Santa Fe River, in the area known as the Barrio de Analco.
Lew Wallace, who took up residence a century later and completed his novel Ben Hur while serving as territorial governor, pleaded with Congress for money to renovate the old Palace, which about that time was “Americanized” with Victorian touches that included addition of a balustrade along the roof of the portal facing the Plaza. A post office and a bank occupied rooms in the building’s west end.
In addition to its changing appearances, the building has had a variety of uses over the centuries, including executive, legislative, diplomatic, commercial, archival and penal, among others. It even was part of a multistory pueblo that Native New Mexicans constructed after they sacked the building while forcing Spaniards out of Northern New Mexico for 12 years in the late 17th century.
But beginning in 1909, it began functioning as a museum. That’s when the territorial legislature was convinced it should become the home of the nascent Museum of New Mexico to promote pride in the territory’s colorful past.
Archaeologist and photographer Jesse Nusbaum oversaw substantial renovations to the Palace, including fashioning the existing portal in what he decided is a “Spanish Colonial look,” one that became the model for Santa Fe Style. Historical archaeologist Emily Abbink later wrote that Nusbaum’s vision was “based more on nostalgia for the past than on careful historical research.”
Current History Museum Director Buddy Garrett said recently close to $500,000 will be requested from the New Mexico Legislature for fiscal year 2023 to finish rooms, repair exterior plaster and such items as wood work on windows and doors.
As for the following phase, deciding how the rooms will eventually be used, he said, “We are still in the process of exploring different types of approaches.”
He said now-dismantled “period rooms,” which were intended to represent how spaces in the Palace might have been furnished at certain documented points in its history, won’t be part of the plan. “One of the problems that we have when we are doing interpretive work on a building more than 400 years old,” he said, “is what period do you pick?”
The only long-term exhibit put in place when the Palace reopened in June is called Palace Seen and Unseen, a series of wall panels in some rooms that feature items found during archaeological digs and references to documentary records intended to guide visitors through the numerous changes that occurred at the Palace through the centuries.
Former museum director Frances Levine has noted that, “As a National Historic Landmark, the Palace stands beside other great symbols of U.S. history — Paul Revere’s home, Mount Vernon, and Monticello. Each U.S. landmark reminds visitors of the events and people who played a role in developing this nation.”
As for what happens with the 152-year-old monument to Civil War soldiers across the street on the Plaza, itself also a designated National Historic Landmark, it’s unclear whether the obelisk will be restored or what happens now that its top was pulled over by vandals apparently protesting the fact that an inscription on one side of its base once included a reference to “savage” Indians.
If it can’t be fixed (historian Marc Simmons speculated the stone came from the same quarry used to build Santa Fe’s cathedral), it wouldn’t be the first centerpiece to disappear from our town square. Historians Janet Lecompte and Joseph P. Sanchez wrote an 1820s resident of the Palace, Gov. Antonio Narbona, built a rock sundial on an adobe base about 8 feet high in the center of the Plaza as trade on the Santa Fe Trail was starting to bring major changes to the city.
They wrote: “The sundial bore a Latin inscription, ‘Vita fugit sicut umbra’ (Life flees like a shadow), and like a shadow, it disappeared before 1832, probably knocked down by traders’ wagons.”