Some good news around town in 2016
Santa Fe local George RR Martin, world famous as the writer of the books behind the “Game of Thrones” TV series, summed up the current zeitgeist with a blog post this week called “A Bad Year Gets Worse.”
As the Washington Post reports, Martin mourned the passing of two of his heroes: “Star Wars” actress Carrie Fisher and “Watership Down” author Richard Adams. “Death, death and more death . . . this year just keeps getting worse and worse,” Martin wrote.
The Post, of course, noted the irony of Martin lamenting the grim reaper’s work over the past 12 months. His books and “Game of Thrones” are known for the vast number of characters who are killed off, often at unexpected times and in excruciatingly creative ways. The Post says 246 people died on the show’s fifth season this year.
Despite the bad news in both the real world and Martin’s fantasy universe, Martin should be proud of helping bring what Star Wars fans might call “a new hope” to part of Santa Fe in 2016.
He purchased an old bowling alley that arts collective Meow Wolf has turned into an immensely popular interactive experience called “The House of Eternal Return.” The exhibit is chockablock with nooks, crannies and passageways that lead to rooms ranging from antique to Jurassic to space age. Their contents tell a story that plays out like a combination of “The X Files” and a sitcom.
Meow Wolf has been attracting 35,000 visitors a month and this week got new notice from USA Today, which ranked its exhibit as the most popular New Mexico locale on Instagram, the photo sharing site. Meow Wolf CEO Vince Kadlubek said Meow Wolf has been tagged 30,000 times since it opened in March.
More important in the long run, “The House of Eternal Return” appears to be becoming the centerpiece of a vital arts district, as new performing spaces, galleries, pubs and other creative businesses open in what’s long been a nondescript industrial/ office park zone around Rufina Street and Siler Road. It’s fun to drive around what’s been called the Lower Siler District (LSD) or the Rufina Arts District (RAD) and see something new pop up.
Meow Wolf got a lot of encouragement from City Hall, but as far as we know the only public money in the project was $60,000 provided under a jobscreation grant. It now employs about 100 people. Things will become really exciting in the LSD/RAD if someone builds new housing there with both quality and reasonable prices — a tough concept in Santa Fe — and the area becomes a real neighborhood.
There’s also an overall upswing at another newish district, the city-owned Railyard near downtown, where the city has invested a lot: more than $20 million to purchase the 50-acre site in the mid-1990s and few million more to buy a portion of a private commercial building there for city offices, a move to settle a legal dispute with the building’s local owners.
The Violet Crown cinema (finally built after an earlier developer, who wanted public assistance with financing, couldn’t make the movie theater project work) seems to be booming; Second Street Brewery’s Railyard location is a popular spot; construction of apartments has been approved; and, just this week, plans for a new Railyard building with retail and office space and a rooftop beer garden were unveiled by an ownership group that includes the Violet Crown’s head man. That old Santa Fe standby, art galleries, along with the revered SITE Santa Fe art space, the Warehouse 21 youth center and a great farmer’s market are also part of the mix.
But Market Station, the main Railyard commercial building, remains roiled in a bankruptcy battle, to the point that the bankruptcy judge has hired an “audio consultant” to help figure out whether a mostly built, second-floor bowling alley that the Market Station owners have developed could somehow be compatible with a now-vacant restaurant space below and city offices next door.
If the bankruptcy can be resolved, and REI keeps its Market Station location, the building’s retail spaces would seem to be primed for success as the rest of the Railyard blooms.
So the good news during 2016 is that both areas, the Railyard and the Rufina/Siler zone, are burgeoning with new businesses and ideas that are different from the City Different’s traditionally historic traditions and tendencies focused on the east and north sides of town. Unlike the Railyard, LSD/RAD is a more organic creation that didn’t depend on government help. But the city’s role at the slow-moving Raillyard shouldn’t be mocked — the community feared out-of-control development there 20 years ago when the city stepped in to buy it. The slow approach to making the Railyard work appears, post recession, to be on the cusp of success.
The cycle of life ensures that more of our favorite musicians, actors, writers and artists — representing our collective family, in a way — will pass away in the new year. And who knows where the nation’s political life is heading. But look around town and there should be good things happening in 2017, too.