The structure visible in the background is part of the enormous railyards complex that stands empty just south of downtown Albuquerque. In the foreground is an empty lot and surviving signage of a bar from the days when these yards employed many in the service of the Santa Fe rail.
Albuquerque is a railroad city - it would not exist today were it not for the fact that trains passed through this valley on their coast-to-coast journey. The railroad tracks that run just behind this structure mark the oldest center-artery of the city (for now excluding the Native and Mexican-Mission settlements)....the neighborhoods and houses nearest the tracks are the oldest in the city. The further away from the tracks, the newer the houses and the more affluent...and at the outskirts of this city you will find the newest developments of all, as the city mushrooms into the desert.
A person without knowledge of this history would get a different impression of this city's vital centers. Old Town - the old mission neighborhood -- has been "preserved" and packaged as The Historical Center of the city...approx. five miles northwest of this site. Tourists, when tourists come here, go there. Locals rarely do - thus Old Town is struggling. Popular commercial centers exist in the university area and far, far up in "The Heights"...near the mountains.
Downtown has struggled for decades....once the rail industry closed, there was no longer any reason for downtown to be downtown. It survives today only as a residue. It doesn't really have a purpose: An odd mix of government buildings and a few bars. There is virtually no retail, no supermarkets, few restaurants. For every new business that opens downtown, two more close and move elsewhere in the city. It is mostly a residential area. Becasue the courthouses are nearby - a residue of the city's former dependence on rail - there are many law and government offices. If you took these away, downtown Albuquerque would be a virtual ghosttown.
The Downtown Action Team is charged with sprucing up the neighborhood and also controls business and zoning. They have handed the keys of downtown to developers, who raid it like their own personal cookie-jar. No one really knows what the Downtown Action Team does.
Someone perseveres ever-hopefully with downtown "revitalization" efforts...new luxury lofts are springing up quickly, although many of these have gone recently bankrupt, leaving half-constructed shells in their wake. Just out of the frame of this picture is a row of new luxury "townhouses." They are unoccupied but I understand that they will soon be on the market as rentals.
If you follow the railroad tracks north from this site about two blocks, you get to the Amtrack station. Here used to stand the most far-out luxury hotel in all of New Mexico - the Alvarado. I believe it was part of the Harvey hotel chain. Interior photos depict the Baroque excesses of "Native American-Art Deco style" - a bizarre and truly unique aesthetic, almost completely extinct today. The Alvarado was (infamously) torn down in the 70s during another period of revitalization. It is today considered the worst historic preservtion loss in the region.
Today it is somehow impolite to be critical of current revitalization efforts in the downtown area. Everyone is a booster. Most people who live downtown believe that it is getting better, and if it isn't yet, it soon will be. I have lived here for 10 years.
Inside these great old railworks are still the enormous cranes that lifted the railroad cars and much of the infrastructure of this enormous complex, although much of it mysterious. Just recently the city fortified the perimeter fence and posted the whole site. It was easy to get in before, and in fact railroad workers who are sometimes still on the site show "vistors" around. Now it is inaccessable.
This is a portrait of my adopted city and its surrounds. Albuquerque is unlike any city I have ever known, an urban desert, in the desert. Here one encounters a complete absence of the typical design flourishes and architectural coherence of distant world capitals, that fill (or assault) the senses and dictate response, in other words the tyrrany of design ... as if this place sprung fully formed from the head of Donald Judd.
This is a place of subtlety. These photographs attempt to portray the melancholic blank negative spaces that define the Albuquerque experience. They were, initially, an attempt to compensate for this city's lack of an urban pulse. This was followed by discovery, and ultimately liberation. This place forces its residents to actively participate in beauty and interpretation, a rebuke to the passive & effortless consumption of typical urbanism "with a view." The empty, powerfully subjective desert surrounds in every direction, indifferent to humanism and human proportions, and Albuquerque reflects its desert and coexists with it without conflict.
The structure visible in the background is part of the enormous railyards complex that stands empty just south of downtown Albuquerque. In the foreground is an empty lot and surviving signage of a bar from the days when these yards employed many in the service of the Santa Fe rail.
ReplyDeleteAlbuquerque is a railroad city - it would not exist today were it not for the fact that trains passed through this valley on their coast-to-coast journey. The railroad tracks that run just behind this structure mark the oldest center-artery of the city (for now excluding the Native and Mexican-Mission settlements)....the neighborhoods and houses nearest the tracks are the oldest in the city. The further away from the tracks, the newer the houses and the more affluent...and at the outskirts of this city you will find the newest developments of all, as the city mushrooms into the desert.
A person without knowledge of this history would get a different impression of this city's vital centers. Old Town - the old mission neighborhood -- has been "preserved" and packaged as The Historical Center of the city...approx. five miles northwest of this site. Tourists, when tourists come here, go there. Locals rarely do - thus Old Town is struggling. Popular commercial centers exist in the university area and far, far up in "The Heights"...near the mountains.
Downtown has struggled for decades....once the rail industry closed, there was no longer any reason for downtown to be downtown. It survives today only as a residue. It doesn't really have a purpose: An odd mix of government buildings and a few bars. There is virtually no retail, no supermarkets, few restaurants. For every new business that opens downtown, two more close and move elsewhere in the city. It is mostly a residential area. Becasue the courthouses are nearby - a residue of the city's former dependence on rail - there are many law and government offices. If you took these away, downtown Albuquerque would be a virtual ghosttown.
The Downtown Action Team is charged with sprucing up the neighborhood and also controls business and zoning. They have handed the keys of downtown to developers, who raid it like their own personal cookie-jar. No one really knows what the Downtown Action Team does.
Someone perseveres ever-hopefully with downtown "revitalization" efforts...new luxury lofts are springing up quickly, although many of these have gone recently bankrupt, leaving half-constructed shells in their wake. Just out of the frame of this picture is a row of new luxury "townhouses." They are unoccupied but I understand that they will soon be on the market as rentals.
If you follow the railroad tracks north from this site about two blocks, you get to the Amtrack station. Here used to stand the most far-out luxury hotel in all of New Mexico - the Alvarado. I believe it was part of the Harvey hotel chain. Interior photos depict the Baroque excesses of "Native American-Art Deco style" - a bizarre and truly unique aesthetic, almost completely extinct today. The Alvarado was (infamously) torn down in the 70s during another period of revitalization. It is today considered the worst historic preservtion loss in the region.
Today it is somehow impolite to be critical of current revitalization efforts in the downtown area. Everyone is a booster. Most people who live downtown believe that it is getting better, and if it isn't yet, it soon will be. I have lived here for 10 years.
Inside these great old railworks are still the enormous cranes that lifted the railroad cars and much of the infrastructure of this enormous complex, although much of it mysterious. Just recently the city fortified the perimeter fence and posted the whole site. It was easy to get in before, and in fact railroad workers who are sometimes still on the site show "vistors" around. Now it is inaccessable.