Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
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December 1988 | Volume 39, Issue 8
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
December 1988 | Volume 39, Issue 8
One cold January a few years ago, the daughter of a French friend of mine wrote that she was coming to America. She would, of course, visit New York, and then she hoped to see some of the rest of the country, possibly les Grands Lacs. It was not hard to imagine a young tourist unfolding a map of the United States and settling on Rochester or Duluth as the kind of lakeside resort you might enjoy poking around in the off-season. What was hard was thinking where to send her instead. Miami? Los Angeles? Now I wouldn’t hesitate. I’d send her to Santa Fe.
I visited for the first time last December, approaching the city as most travelers do, on a shuttle bus from Albuquerque Airport sixty miles to the south. Santa Fe has always been isolated. When Spanish colonists founded the city in 1610 as part of their campaign to find gold and save souls in the New World, they were twelve hundred miles from Mexico City and five thousand miles from Madrid. Even by 1879, when the railroad approached, residents were so unenthusiastic about it that the Atchison, Topeka laid the tracks to Albuquerque instead. Then, as now, travelers bound for Santa Fe had to make the last leg of the journey by coach.
Yet once the bus pulls into the center of town, any inconvenience is forgotten. Santa Fe turns out to be an ideal destination. It is arranged, as all towns should be, around a grassy central square. It’s small enough so you can walk everywhere. It has a handful of fine museums, including the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian and the Museum of International Folk Art. Watching protectively over all is a cathedral, the story of which is told in a classic American novel you can read during your stay, Willa Gather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. And perhaps most important for Easterners and Europeans, Indians live there.
But most impressive to me was the fabric of the city itself. Virtually all of Santa Fe is built of adobe, mud bricks that are fired and then covered with a smooth outer layer. Not all of the buildings are old; but old and new blend together, and the rich brown tone of the adobe sets off any color put against it. Even a yellow no-parking stripe painted on a curbstone looked as if an artist had placed it there.
It was Georgia O’Keeffe and other painters (John Sloan, Robert Henri, Ernest Blumenschein, and John Marin all worked in Santa Fe or in nearby Taos) who taught us to see beauty in these massive adobe shapes. The first Anglos to describe Santa Fe style didn’t think much of it. When the explorer Zebulon Pike saw the city in 1807, it reminded him of “a fleet of the flat-bottomed boats . . . descending the Ohio River”; he particularly remarked on the “miserable appearance of the houses.” And to William