Up on the hill
‘Oppenheimer’ creating buzz for Los Alamos, which has long history nestled in nature and science
With the July 21 release of the widely-praised “Oppenheimer” movie, I thought I would do something I’ve never done in this column – dust off, and update an old column that delved into a sliver of history about the small New Mexico town where the bomb was developed.
Two years ago, I wrote about a street named Bathtub Row in Los Alamos and how it came about its unusual name. Today, I want to widen that lens a little bit to bring the entire city into view.
It was the realization of one man’s dream that drew the eye of the federal government and its deadly plans to the northern part of our state.
Los Alamos is a Spanish term that usually refers to poplar or cottonwood trees, so it’s no surprise that when a free-spirited business man named Ashley Pond decided to establish a boy’s school in 1917 atop a mountainous Pajarito plateau northeast of Santa Fe, he called it the Los Alamos Ranch School.
The school existed for a quarter of a century and may have stayed there longer were it not for the rise of Nazi Germany and the start of World War II. Desperate to find a way to defeat Germany and its allies, the United States began working on a top secret project to build the atomic bomb, but to do that they needed space, safety and secrecy.
The military began its hunt for an ideal site and finally settled on Los Alamos, with the U.S. Army appropriating the school and 60,000 surrounding acres in 1943. Its remote nature, access to water, excessive land and already existing buildings made it an ideal location for the Manhattan Project.
With the arrival of the scientists and their wives, a secret city emerged to support their needs, keeping the name of the school that established its skeleton. The bomb-makers eventually left, but the town remained.
When the school was established, there was no town or city or other development. Just acres and acres of wilderness, making it the perfect place for Pond’s vision to come to life. A March 22, 1917 article in the Santa Fe New Mexican described the soon-to-open campus as a “school primarily without books and it aims to educate little else but the body. And the body is educated not by a rigid system of calisthenics, but by taking advantage of the superb
natural features of the American Southwest…”
Pond’s father was a well-respected attorney in Detroit who was at one time even considered for the U.S. Supreme Court, according to a piece by Los Alamos Historical Society member Sharon Snyder. But Pond wasn’t like his father and had no desire to spend his days in an office or a courtroom. His love was the outdoors, believing in its restorative powers. He also believed in the benefits of a hard day of physical labor. He brought the two ideas together with his school, which offered a college preparatory and rigorous outdoor curriculum for boys.
He hired A.J. Connell, a scoutmaster and a forest ranger in charge of the Panchuelo district in the Santa Forest as the school’s headmaster. Connell was an ideal candidate for the job because Pond modeled the school’s program after the Boy Scouts of America. In addition to academic studies, students were expected to exercise and help maintain the campus, which had buildings, including dormitories and faculty houses.
Seven of those homes sat in a row and included what was a luxury in that remote area at the time – bathtubs. The bathtubs, or lack thereof, would become more pronounced in the years to come, giving rise to the name of Bathtub Row.
The Bathtub Row homes, also referred to as master houses, were the residences of scientists working on the Manhattan Project. An Oct. 1, 1945, article in the Santa Fe New Mexican with the headline “Apartments Provide Comfort for Bomb People” described the living situations there at the time.
“The snootiest dwellings in the democratic community are six or seven houses on ‘Bathtub Row.’ They were the homes of faculty members of the school and were grabbed up by early-arriving scientists.”
The home built for the sister of the school headmaster, May Connell, would eventually house J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man behind the atomic bomb who came to New Mexico to become the director of the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer moved into the house in 1943 with his wife Kitty. They occupied the house for just two years, but their impact has lasted for generations.
Those living in the snooty dwellings, in addition to Oppenheimer, included Nobel-prize winning physicist Edwin McMillan and Englishman Sir James Chadwick, also a Nobel Prize winner.
Later in life, McMillan’s wife Elsie recalled that time in an interview posted by the Atomic Heritage Foundation. “Now we are on Bathtub Row,” she said. “They really don’t like us because we’ve got a bathtub and only about eight houses have bathtubs. But, shucks, we came so early. That’s the only reason we have a masters home.”
She went on to explain her house might have had a bathtub, but the luxury didn’t extend to the kitchen. There was no stove, and her husband suggested she cook over the fireplace, which left Elsie less than enthusiastic.
For a long time, Bathtub Row was simply a nickname and the road’s true name was 20th Street until residents petitioned the city council to make the nickname official in May of 2007.
The town has not shied away from its complicated history. The Los Alamos Historical Society owns the Oppenheimer House and allowed film crews to use it for the movie and has heavily promoted the film and the town’s role.
A story last month by the Associated Press explored the darker side of the Atomic bomb. Not only those it would eventually kill in another country, but New Mexicans who were downwind from the test explosion and died from cancer. The National Cancer Institute released the results of a yearslong study in 2020. The study concluded that some people, who were downwind from the radioactive fallout after the government detonated the first bomb at the Trinity Site in 1945, probably got cancer.
The city itself continues to sustain its legacy of scientific exploration. Pond probably never imagined his love of nature would morph into the site for building a bomb, and that the same site would lead to the creation of a town and the lab, which employs more than 13,000 people today.