‘I never made it past Santa Fe’
Ives touts his respect, experience, know-how
Santa Fe city councilor and mayoral candidate Peter Ives says he came to Santa Fe because it offered good art, good music and good mountains. He found all that and more. He also found love.
As fate would have it, he and Patricia Salazar were taking the New Mexico bar exam at the same time. They were introduced to each other on the third day of the exam by John Hickey, and got to know each other a little better at a pot luck dinner for the softball team Ives and Hickey played on.
“We fell into conversation, and I was smitten,” Ives said of his future bride.
They were married less than two years later. Patricia, who grew up in Los Alamos and whose family has ties to the Española Valley, is now a partner with Cuddy & McCarthy, a law firm she has been with for more than 30 years. Peter started with Campbell & Black, but has now worked for The Trust for Public Land for the past 20 years. Together, they have three adult children, who still live in the area.
“It’s been great fun to see them building their lives in Santa Fe,” Ives said.
Ives grew up the second oldest of four boys in and around New Haven, Conn., where his father was a professor teaching graphic art at Yale. That’s where his love for art came from. World-renowned artist Josef Albers and photographer Walker Evans were friends of the family.
“Dad collected pre-Columbian and other artifacts. We had a Mayan stela on the wall at home and different kinds of masks,” he said, adding that he grew up in a “rich artistic environment.”
“Mom collected fossils and shells, so it was a wonderful juxtaposition that brought a sense of not only made-made beauty, but natural beauty.”
Ives says his love of natural beauty stems from the time he spent outdoors as a young man. He was active in Boy Scouts and later got into rock climbing. He fondly recalls two-week-long backpacking trips on the Appalachians and attending the Adirondack Winter Mountaineering School at Lake Placid, N.Y.
So the Sangre de Cristo Mountains overlooking Santa Fe were an immediate attraction.
“Having kids diverted me from spending more time in those mountains, but I still feel a connection to the environment,” said Ives, who during his six years on the city council has championed sustainability and environmental causes, including sponsoring the resolution that calls for Santa Fe to become a carbon neutral city by 2040.
But perhaps more than the mountains, and more than Santa Fe’s reputation as an arts center, it was music that drew him here.
“I had heard of the (Santa Fe) Opera, and I had heard a reference to the Desert Chorale, which I think was formed the year before I came. So it looked like there was great music out here,” he said.
Ives sang in his high school’s glee club and close harmony group and was also a standout athlete. When he went to Harvard, where he majored in philosophy, he said he had to make a decision whether to join the men’s glee club or go out for the wrestling team. “The glee club at the time was the principal men’s choir for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which was hard to beat,” Ives said, a situation that made the decision easier.
He sang for an orchestra led by Leonard Bernstein and is on a recording of Igor Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex.” He later joined the University of Maryland Alumni Choir and performed the Verdi “Requiem” at Wolf Trap, and sang with the Washington National Cathedral Choir for a time. “That was the first time I got to sing with real countertenors,” said Ives, who sings bass. “It was a real treat.”
He was a member of the Gilbert & Sullivan Society when he attended law school at Georgetown. He did that while attending school fulltime and working 30 hours a week clerking for a D.C. firm that focused primarily on alternative energy issues.
While finishing law school, he worked at the office of newly minted New Mexico Sen. Jeff Bingaman.
“If I learned nothing else from Jeff, it was that you can’t be afraid to say if you don’t know something,” he said. “I liked Jeff’s approach. It was intelligent, it was reasoned, and very calm.”
But it was his classmate at Georgetown, Diego Zamora, who urged him to come to New Mexico and visit Santa Fe.
“We joke whenever I see him that it was actually his mother Emily’s chile that convinced me to move to Santa Fe,” Ives said.
Ives was working for a law firm in the Chicago area when he decided to make a move. Seattle, San Diego and Santa Fe were the three cities he planned to visit. “I never made it past Santa Fe,” he said.
While he never sang for the Desert Chorale — his day job prevented it — he served as the group’s third president. He says he has performed with just about every chorus in Santa Fe, except the Zia Singers and Santa Fe Women’s Ensemble, and continues to sing and cantor in choirs at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi.
Having spent 35 years in Santa Fe, marrying a northern New Mexico girl, raising kids here, following them as they participated in sports at St. Michael’s High School, working for The Trust for Public Land, serving on numerous boards for local nonprofit groups, and as city councilor for six years, Ives said he’s hoping that will strike a chord with voters.
“All of that has put me in that position to have the knowledge, the experience, and the respect, in terms of how I do what I do, to lead the city, which I think is the next logical step,” he said.