Forgotten Albuquerque

The Strange Saga of Sandia Cave- Part 1

2008-03-12T09:36:00.000-07:00

Discovery

People have lived in the Rio Grande Valley for a long, long time. But how long exactly? There are no memories, no records that extend back more than a few centuries, and oral tradition quickly becomes myth in the space of only a handful of generations. Yet, despite the lack of certainty, it is in our nature to want to know, desperately, who came before. In the absence of history, we turn to physical evidence, the scattered leavings of our forebears- chipped stone, sooty hearths, pictures of animals and beings of unknown significance traced onto the rocks. We have developed ways to read this evidence, of course, a multitude of methods to determine age by what type of earth a flint hand ax is found buried in, to learn something about the character of a society by the bones in their ancient garbage heaps.

But, there is a problem. Our methods are human inventions themselves. Too often we forget that they are rooted in the perceptions of our own time, and frequently informed by the biases, hopes, ignorance, and even greed of the people making the discovery and analyzing the evidence.

1935.

In 1935, Kenneth Davis, a student at the University of New Mexico, brought a cigar box to the Department of Anthropology. In it was a collection of artifacts Davis had found in a cave while exploring Las Huertas Canyon in the Sandia Mountains, approximately 20 miles outside of Albuquerque. The artifacts, “a few bits of pottery… some fragments of woven yucca sandals and basketry”, indicated relatively recent occupation, and were therefore nothing astounding in themselves, but “the cave had been inhabited, and that…was something.” Prompted by these meager findings, several students, headed by a young up-and-comer named Frank Hibben, set out to explore the cave.

A nearby cave gives an impression of what Sandia Cave looked like before Hibben's discovery.
Sandia Cave itself is now enclosed by a metal cage.

Writing years later about this seminal event in his career, Hibben’s description of the party’s initial entry into Sandia Cave, and their surprising discovery, has all the dramatic flair of a boy’s adventure novel:

As the scientific party had crawled and groveled almost to the end of the tunnel-like passageway, a flight of bats was disturbed from a chimney-like aperture that led upward from one of the galleries. With characteristic squeaks and the rustle of leathery wings, the bats rushed down the narrow passageway for the cave mouth. As they passed, the party flinched close to the rocky walls to give them ample room. As they did so, one of the group felt beneath his hand, on a pile of debris, a curved bone. Even in the dark it felt unusual and important.

The bone, “shaped like the curved flat blade of a Turkish dagger”, was the claw-core of a giant ground sloth. This find indicated the cavern’s considerable age, and with mounting excitement, the students began their dig.

Their excitement was justified. Within a few days of careful excavation in the dust-choked cavern, the team had uncovered a crust of stalagmatic stone, which they broke and opened “like… the lid of a gigantic sardine can…”. Beneath that, they found the ancient cave floor littered with signs of early human habitation. Among the animal bones and assorted debris, there were Folsom spear points- relics of a known culture that had been dated to as early as 9000 BC. But they were soon to find more thrilling evidence of an even older culture that would prove to be one of the most important anthropological discoveries of the era.

Digging further into the cave floor, they next excavated a layer of yellow ochre, which rose up “in penetrating yellow clouds at the slightest disturbance” and necessitated the use of ventilation machines to clear the air. Beneath that, there was yet more indication of human occupation, but this was from a culture that had never been recorded -

The flint points that we carefully lifted… from among the debris of the Sandia Cave floor were totally different from the Folsom… we recognized at a glance that we were dealing with a different kind of man. These were Sandia Cave men, and they had lived as many thousands of years before Folsom times as it had taken to deposit the yellow ochre that separated their two levels of occupation in the Sandia Cave… In this level we traced out fireplaces… where ancient cooking fires had been, and around their blackened borders were the split bones and fragments that showed where men had sat around these same fires and had gnawed the greasy flesh from these same bones and thrown them to one side. We could almost see, in the flickering excavation lights, the Sandia Cave men of so long ago, squatting around these now-dead embers.

It was success beyond their imaginings. Analysis of the layering of the yellow ochre and later radio-carbon dating of bones and other materials would indicate that the relics had been deposited at least 25,000-35,000 years ago, a date far older than any other known human habitation in the Americas. Perhaps most exciting of all, the peculiar shape of the Sandia Points was unlike any that had ever been found on the North or South American continents. In fact, the only known antecedent for the odd, single shouldered design was a group of flint artifacts known as the Solutrean Industry in eastern France. The resemblance between the Sandia Points and the Solutrean Industry indicated a possible European origin for the oldest known settlers in North America, a possibility with profound anthropological and social implications.

A Sandia Point, found by Hibben in Sandia Cave.
Note the single shouldered design.

Hibben published his findings five years later. His discovery of an American culture more than twice as old as any previously known sent shockwaves through the establishment, propelling both him and the University of New Mexico to international renown. History and Anthropology textbooks were rewritten to reflect the find, and Hibben became a giant in his field, and would remain so for many decades to come.

Next: The Strange World of Frank Hibben- Sandia Cave “Oddities”- and Why You’ve Never Heard of Any of This.

Works Consulted-
The Lost Americans- Frank Hibben
"The Mystery of Sandia Cave"- Doublas Preston, New Yorker Magazine, June 12 1995
Sandia Cave: A Study in Controversy- Dominique E. Stevens and George A. Agogino

The Beginning

2008-03-03T14:32:00.000-08:00

With this entry, Forgotten Albuquerque begins a trek back into prehistory. For the next several entries, the history will all be forgotten, will, in fact, be only varieties of speculation. For the next entry in particular, I wanted to start at The Beginning. But of course, there are many ”beginnings” to choose from- geologic cataclysms that no human eye ever saw, the primeval migrations of generation upon generation who kept no written record, early farmers in their pit houses, the trade routes of the Anasazi- and all of it, pre-historic, all of it forgotten. In fact, it isn’t until the province of Tiguex, whose verdant fields and cities a legion of lost and hungry Spaniards stumbled upon, that we find a beginning for what our culture considers “history”.

But we won’t begin there.

We'll begin in 1935.

In 1935, the scientific understanding of man’s beginnings in the Rio Grande valley, and indeed, the Americas as a whole, was profoundly rocked by a discovery in a dusty red hole in the cliffs of the Sandia Mountains just outside of Albuquerque, a cave only a few hundred meters deep, but which may have held the secret to a group of people who lived far earlier than any other on the North American continent.

Next: 1935

Forgotten Albuquerque: The Book

2008-01-21T09:09:00.000-08:00

So, obviously, I haven't been updating this much lately. Partly that's because of the typical post-holiday factors, new jobs etc, but ALSO it's because I've been putting together a book proposal, a book proposal that's been accepted. Yes, Forgotten Albuquerque *will* be a book, probably to come out some time next Autumn, maybe next year. So, this means two things:

1. If you like this site, soon there'll be a way to stick it in your pocket, more or less.

2. The site will live on as I'll be uncovering plenty of material in researching the book.

So. Look for more regular updates in the near future.

Remnants: Prebyterian Sanatorium

2007-11-01T10:32:00.000-07:00

There was a shame associated with tuberculosis, a justified fear of discrimination from those who were themselves justifiably afraid of infection. People who migrated to the Southwest because of TB often didn’t talk about their sickness, even decades after they had been cured; there was still a stigma that kept them quiet. Perhaps this is why, despite its enormous impact on the city’s development, the “White Plague” is often ignored in local history books, especially those written before the 1970s.

In the same way that the fact of TB's impact has been allowed to fade away, there seems to have been no real effort to preserve the old buildings of the sanatoriums themselves. It is as though, with the new availability of antibiotics and the resultant rally against the disease, people were only too happy to demolish the suddenly obsolete “sans”, replacing them with new, general purpose hospitals buildings, or warehouses, or parking lots. Who can blame them? Despite the beauty of some of the old complexes, I can readily understand why there was no lingering nostalgia, no desire to relive a time when that horrific disease held dominion over so many lives.

But somehow, a few remnants did survive, sometimes adapted to new purposes, sometimes simply forgotten in dilapidated neighborhoods. Very few remain in anything like their original form and context, most are lone buildings, or parts of buildings, divorced from their long demolished counterparts. I’ve been searching them out, and for the next few updates, I’ll share what I’ve discovered.

Presbyterian Sanatorium

The old Sanatorium complex, circa 1911. Looking south from Central Avenue.

The Presbyterian Sanatorium at Sycamore and Central was one of the largest and most successful of the early treatment centers. It was founded in 1908 by Rev. Dr. Cooper, himself a tuberculosis sufferer who saw a need for a sanatorium that would treat patients regardless of income or religious affiliation. Its first buildings were only four small cottages erected on donated land, but within a few years donations from Easterners had financed a major center for the treatment of patients. Soon, Presbyterian Sanatorium dominated Albuquerque's medical arena.

The Sanatorium Quarterly announces the Presbyterian Sanatorium's need for a research laboratory.

By the end of the 1920s, the Sanatorium was expanding again. Donations for the creation of a research laboratory were eagerly solicited in the pages of the Sanatorium Quarterly, the Presbyterian's newsletter, and soon an endowment had been secured from F.L. Maytag (of the Maytag corporation). In January of 1931, and with great fanfare, the Maytag Reserach Laboratory was officially opened. One hopeful writer in the Sanatorium Quarterly said, "We all hope to live to see the time when a cure may be discovered and as some one said at the dedication of the Maytag, 'who knows but that such a cure may be discovered here?'"

The west facing entrance of the Maytag Research Laboratory, dedicated to researching a cure for TB.

Sadly, the exuberance was not to last. In the 1930s, the Great Depression crippled all aspects of American society, and the sanatorium industry was hit hard. The river of tubercular patients who could afford to migrate to the West was quickly drying up, and worse, once-wealthy patients who had received treatments had ceased paying for their care. Additionally, charitable donations to the Sanatorium were understandably at an all time low. Although the Sanatorium had always prided itself on providing care no matter the financial straits of its patients, the fact was that it was barely scraping by itself. "Our Sanatorium is a business and we are sharing in the trials of business men who are unable to pay their bills at the end of the month. We say with others if only we could collect what is due us we could pay, but we cannot collect, therefore we cannot pay as promptly as we should," ran a 1934 article, titled "Keep Me From Sinking Down", in the Quarterly.

The situation became much worse when the Sanatorium was sued by their "benefactor" F. L. Maytag for not having honored the conditions of his "gift" of a research laboratory, namely that a certain amount of research be performed according to the Maytag Corporation's instruction. The Sanatorium Quarterly's pages were now filled with desperate pleas for financial aid, even for donations as small as "25c in coins or stamps."

An advertisement asking for donations.

Against all odds, the Sanatorium did survive this difficult time. The Depression ended, patients were able to pay again, F. L. Maytag died and his lawsuit was soon settled. Still, despite the sudden upswing, the Sanatorium was only to last another decade or so.

In 1943, the antibiotic streptomycin was first isolated, not at Maytag Research Laboratory, but at Rutgers University. This would prove to be the death knell for tuberculosis's long reign, as the drug provided the first effective treatment of the disease. Soon, streptomycin was being given to patients all over the world, and within 10 years, tuberculosis almost entirely eliminated. Sanatoriums everywhere were forced to either close their doors for good or evolve to better suit a changing world.

Modern hospital buildings loom menacingly behind the old Sanatorium, which was demolished soon after this photo.

Presbyterian Sanatorium adapted. In the 1950s, it changed its name to Presbyterian Hospital Center to better reflect its now generalized medical mission. New buildings sprang up around the old, and soon the old "san" was deemed obsolete. In 1967, most of the old Presbyterian Sanatorium buildings were demolished, and a group of high-rises sprang up in their place.

Presbyterian Hospital today, view from north of Central Avenue.

Today, the Presbyterian Hospital is an enormous complex, one that would have surely boggled the minds of the patients who once rested in the enclosed porches of small cottages on the same land. It serves any number of medical needs, and is regarded as one of the foremost hospitals in the Southwest. It's hard to believe that anything could remain from the era of tuberculosis in this modern and towering center. But, sure enough, in the southwestern corner of the complex, just off I-40's off-ramp and dwarfed by the massive buildings around it, a peculiarly out of place ornamental facade and the chimney of an utterly obsolete coal heating system testifies to the continued existence of the once crown-jewel (and near-bankrupter) of the Sanatorium: the Maytag Research Laboratory. Sadly, it's glory days are long gone, and today the crenelations of its once grand art nouveau entrance mark a "hazardous waste and trash exit" instead of a cutting edge X-ray facility. But it survives, a link anda testament to the charitable dream of Reverend Doctor Cooper.

The Maytag building's facade, now a place to unload trash and hazardous waste.

More:

Tuberculosis in Albuquerque Part 1
Tuberculosis in Albuquerque Part 2

Tuberculosis in Albuquerque Part 2

2007-10-16T09:43:00.000-07:00

Life in the Fever

None but the initiated know
the wealth of the lunger’s woes,
or the piquancy of his joys
or speak the lunger’s tongue
-Unknown, Killgloom Gazette, 1914

Tuberculosis. A bygone disease that scarred a bygone city, transformed it from booming railroad and mining town to a home for the sick, a place for the ill to arrive and do nothing more strenuous then breathe, rest, and then either get well or die.

Many devices were marketed
for the treatment of tuberculosis.
More than a few were of questionable efficacy.

But, who were they? Anyone who spends too long looking at the lives of the gone eventually asks that question. Who were the people who came here out of hope for a cure, but who must have lived in constant fear of their own likely deaths? Who traveled thousands of miles into a strange desert landscape far from friends and family and the world they knew, who spent all day and all night out-of-doors in the hope that the air itself, though too hot in summer and too frigid in winter, would miraculously send their terminal disease into retreat? Who coughed blood and kept their sputum in boxes for fear of infecting others, who turned to miracle drugs and experimental electrical treatments and snake oil and quackery and peculiar bicycle pump “inhalation apparatuses”? Gone now, of course, irrevocably gone, the mark of their presence fading into time, the old sanatoria now grown outward into hospitals or collapsed inward to forgotten remnant buildings, the convalescent cottages with their open air back porches renovated beyond recognition in the streets of downtown neighborhoods. The patients, of course, mostly dead, row upon row of them in the City’s old cemeteries. I wake up to breath the same air that they so desperately wanted to save them (maybe a bit dirtier now, but still the same dryness that they fetishized, and cleaner than most cities of this size), and I want to know them.

TB patients carried small boxes and jars to spit in
called "sputum boxes" or "pocket spittoons". A small
industry sprang up around their manufacture.

It’s not easy. Remnants of buildings do a poor job in communicating people, and endless accounts of the “war on tuberculosis” focus on institutions and methodology, social trends and class disparities, rather than cold nights and lungs filling with blood, the loneliness of dying in a strange desert. There are documents from the time, but they are mainly in the form of advertisements for the sanatoria or the City itself, endlessly extolling high recovery rates in ridiculously qualified hyperbole:

[T]hose who seek this climate while the disease is yet in its earlier stages are invariably benefited, and nearly always permanently cured… the person with incipient consumption may be reasonably sure that he will not die of that disease as long as he remains in the atmosphere of Central New Mexico. The disease is unknown among the natives of this section, and they have no name for it in their dialect¹.

Page after page of such material glosses over the single most prominent facts in a “lunger’s” life: death, disease and discrimination. When mentioned at all, the high death rate is ascribed to “physicians of the east [who] keep tuberculars who can pay until the cases are hopeless, and then send them west to die.”² The disease itself is only discussed in the many exhortations to seek fresh air and to spit only into small boxes which should be burned afterward. In fact, a ubiquitously published set of guidelines for living with tuberculosis admonishes patients to avoid discussing their disease at all, “and allow no one to talk of theirs to you. Remember the saying, ‘I have troubles of my own; go tell yours to the policeman.’”³ In the age before antibiotics, denial was a palliative.

And the discrimination? Like so much discrimination, it is barely noted in any official publication, and we must turn to the memories of one Mela Koeber, a Spanish resident of the North Valley, long after the fact to get a taste of it:

When I was a little girl I remember that everybody was scared to death of the people who came out here with tuberculosis. I was warned absolutely not to play with children who came from TB families. At school we were given instructions about avoiding people who walked down the sidewalk and carried little cartons to spit into…

One of the warnings my mother gave me was to be sure that any house I went into didn’t have a back porch with awnings because that’s where the tuberculars slept out… One of my best friends when I was in second or third grade was a beautiful little girl and her parents were from Chicago. One day my friend, Grace, called me on the phone and asked if my mother would let me go with her and her daddy and mother uptown for a Coke… Her father was dressed like an easterner. He was wearing a little derby hat… He was very pale for a man- I mean, he looked ill… when we got back they insisted I come into their home. I went in. She showed me their house and where her father slept in an enclosed porch that had been added with just a cot. It had awnings which were lowered when it was very cold. That was the cure- to sleep out winter and summer.

When I got home, I didn’t dare tell my mother that I had gone into their house. It was really terrible. I never told her, I never told anybody because I was afraid for years that I’d caught TB… everybody was afraid of catching tuberculosis, and since we already lived here in a land that was supposed to cure it, if we got it- where could we go⁴?

Her account is heartbreaking, both for the story of the local people living in fear of their transformed city, and the image of the pale father and his lonely little girl. I want to know more about his experience in the moment he was living it, what it was like for him and others like him, but I find nothing. Even accounts from survivors are brief and superficial, a mere mention of the disease as something overcome.

The TB patient is a public menace
in this not-very-funny comic strip.
click for a larger image

In the Albuquerque Library’s Special Collections branch, I find something different. It’s a newsletter, of sorts, but hardly the slick, illustration heavy pamphlets of a sanatorium’s official publication. Calling it a “publication” is a misnomer, actually; it is nothing more than faded typewriting across thin paper, a few corrections made in pen over smudged lettering. “THE KILLGLOOM GAZETTE” it reads in blurry capital letters at the top of the page, “Published by the able minded lungers of the Methodist Sanatorium. Jan. 1914.” Clearly, I think as I flip through the roughly bound collection, this is something different.

It is. As stated on its opening page, the ‘Gazette was written by patients at one of Albuquerque’s sanataroria, and because it was written by those who suffered it offers a unique glimpse into their attitudes. The emphasis on the positive inherent in the name “Killgloom” is not rare among the documents from the time, but in the pages of the ‘Gazette it did not mean shying away from the grim realities of their condition. The opposite was true, in fact, and the writers painted themselves as madmen who saw the encroach of death and mocked it. Page after page of the ‘Gazette is taken up with poems referencing inevitable trips to “Fairview on the Hill” (one of Albuquerque’s largest cemeteries at the time), and losing battles against the “cough”:

Hear that lunger with the cough,
Hacking cough-
From the world of busybodies’ taken off:
He was inclined to scoff
At the little hacking cough;
Told the doc that he would bet him
That the cough would never get him,
But he found that he was off-
That he couldn’t bluff the T.B.s or the cough
Hacking cough, cough, cough, cough
Cough, cough, cough,
And they got him- did the T.B.S and the cough⁵

The Gazette's "artistic supplement",
depicting the shack where it was published.

In many issues, the unstable condition of the writers was a source of humor:

THE GAZETTE’S TEMP.
It is said that everything in New Mexico is affected by one or more of three things- the climate, the altitude, or the freight rates. This is not true however; the KILGLOOM GAZETTE is affected only by temperature. And that doesn't mean the weather, either. it means the clinical temperature of the editorial staff.

It has been suggested that the staff submit to Nurse Corbin a schedule something like the following-

Temperature normal- We get out a paper of 8 pages.
“ 98.8- We get out a paper of 6 pages
“99.0 - 4
99.2- 2
99.4 - 1
over 99.5 - We don’t get out any paper.

If the anarchic braggadocio found in their pages is to be believed, the antics of those with little to lose often caused them to butt heads with local authorities:

The importation of a quantity of Annheuser-Busch Malt Nutrino by one of our conspicuous residents has aroused the activity of City Clerk Silent Jim Gates and the (illegible) in general and it is highly probable that unless said resident, mentioning no names, can prove an alibi, legal action will be taken against him. What for? Just because the down-with-the-liquor-traffic organizations are suffering from ennui.

OF COURSE the stuff is medicine.

It is hard to say if the picture these jovial "lungers" painted is to be taken as typical, but there is an undeniable humanity in the pages of the Gazette. For the first time, I feel as though I have an inkling of what life must have been like in the "sans": the boredom, the need to turn away from the despair, the enormous amount of time one must have had while waiting for "the cure", and the need to fill it with something other than brooding. I can see this, I can picture myself there.

In only a few months, the inspired amateurism of the Killgloom Gazette had been usurped by its own success. The ‘Gazette transformed into The Herald of the Well Country, a far more typical and prosaic affair. Articles written by doctors and representatives of the various sanatoriums edged out the macabre musings of worsening patients (several of whom left the newsletter due to their illnesses), and within two years the Herald was indistinguishable from a dozen other sanatorium newsletters.

Next: Remnants.

Methodist Sanatorium, which the writers of
the Killgloom Gazette called home.

Footnotes:

1. Albuquerque Illustrated, 1892
2. Sanatorium Quarterly, March 1928
3. The Herald of the Well Country, 1916
4. Shining River, Precious Land: An Oral History of Albuquerque's North Valley Sargeant and Davis
5. Killgloom Gazette, Jan-March 1914 (and all following quotes)

Tuberculosis in Albuquerque

2007-10-01T12:01:00.000-07:00

Part 1- Chasing the Cure to the Heart of Well Country

A little experience is worth more than much theory, and the experience of hundreds whose testimony would cheerfully be given shows that the climatic conditions existing in this part of the country will undoubtedly cure consumption in its earlier stages…
-Albuquerque Illustrated, NM, January 1892

So who’ll be next, who’ll be next
As this bright new year rolls round
To be laid out in a gorgeous shroud
In his casket underground?

In Fairview on the hill
There’s a tiny lot we’ll save
We feel It will
Just fill the bill
While you will fill the grave

-“The Undertaker’s Refrain”, The Killgloom Gazette, Vol 1, Issue 1, Jan. 1914

They called it “The White Plague”, and, according to a U.S. Public Health Service report, in 1913, 50% of Albuquerque’s population either had it, or shared their household with someone who did. 90% of those sufferers were born in other states and had fled west at the instruction of their doctors, and the city’s population was exploding as a result. Central Avenue, which had begun life as Railroad and would later enter its golden age as US 66, was now granted another name by a wryly macabre populace: Tuberculosis Avenue, lined by the sanatoriums that were rapidly coming to define the city in the eyes of the world .

For over a century, the tuberculosis epidemic had ravaged through American and European society. The disease spread quickly and mysteriously, its symptoms (bloody cough, fever, chills and a rapidly wasting physique) were debilitating, lingering, and almost always fatal. Disconcertingly, it seemed often to affect the young and otherwise healthy, and wealth or class provided no barrier to its onset. The science of the day had yet to find a cure and instead grasped at straws: in desperation doctors prescribed thrice daily bleedings, marathon horseback rides and a myriad other red herring “treatments” that did little besides distract, and weaken, the patient.

In the late 1800s a medical fad called "climatology" caused multitudes of ailing easterners to forsake their homes in order to "chase the cure" into the newly opened West. According to the precepts of the theory, the spread of tuberculosis was linked to the humid, hot airs of sea level environs, the damp soil of the eastern states responsible for the disease's escalating assault. Conversely, promoters of the theory pronounced that the dry, cool breezes of the high mountain deserts of the exotic Southwest would surely dry out the lungs, and thus cure the ailment. Perhaps thrilled to have an excuse to unload their dying and contagious patients, doctors eagerly ordered them to “go west.” And if the patients had the means to, they complied.

For many of them, “west” meant New Mexico, and quite often, Albuquerque. "Take a map and place one point of a compass on Albuquerque, New Mexico, and with the other describe a circle which will touch the Mexican border, west Texas, southern Colorado and eastern Arizona. Within that circle, you have what may be termed the health country, with Albuquerque as its heart. If you are in search of health, the nearer you live to the heart of the health country, the better chance you have of getting well," stated an unnamed writer in the pages of The Sanatorium Quarterly. “Without exception Albuquerque has the finest climate the year around to be found in the United States. New Mexico is the world’s sanitarium for consumptives and Albuquerque, by scientific observation, is the dryest and most healthful spot in the Territory,” ran the patter in Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Chief City of a New Empire of the Great Southwest, a 1908 brochure printed to feed the city’s emerging industries.

A person with incipient or active tuberculois cannot withstand the damp, foggy, penetrating weather... He needs clean air and dry air and an invigorating climate... to make a man feel like puffing out his chest and boasting of the goodness of being alive. He needs a climate where the very air will bring a spring to his step and an edge to his appetite... where the out-of-door life can be lived during the winter without a bundle of wraps; and where the summer can be taken in stride without the loss of energy because of oppressive heat... He needs, in few words, the Albuquerque climate. He needs, even more, the Albuquerque attitude, the Albuquerque spirit, the Albuquerque morale- a thing as definite when once you come in contact with it as the Sandia mountains and the flowing Rio Grande. - The Sanatorium Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 4 March 1928.

They came in droves. The Albuquerque population swelled with the ranks of the "lungers" (the slang, and pejorative, term for the infected), and although no specific records were kept on the number of tuberculous patients who arrived from the East, contemporary reports speak of them in “thousands” and “multitudes”. Sanatoriums, group homes for “consumptives”, sprang up along Central Avenue and on the East Mesa, in the canyons of Sandia, and high in the mountains.

“… the person with incipient consumption may be reasonably sure that he will not die of that disease as long as he remains in the atmosphere of Central New Mexico,” claimed the author of Albuquerque Illustrated(1892), a booklet published by the Commercial Club and designed to attract immigrants to the city. Sadly, this statement was little more than hyperbole. Because of the limits of medical knowledge at the time, there was little the sanatoriums could offer except an emphasis on rest, fresh air, and good food. Residents were encouraged to spend as much time in the outside air as possible, even in winter, in the belief that the clean, dry, high altitude atmosphere would purge their lungs of their ailment. However, there is no evidence to support the wild claims of climatology, and it is estimated that as many as 60% of Albuquerque's tuberculous arrivals died within their first few years.

Today, there seems to be little trace of the "Well Country". The miracle of antibiotics put an end to the migrations of health seekers, and few Southwestern cities are interested in reliving their history as destination points for the victims of a "plague" of any kind. But there is no doubt that the Albuquerque of today would not have existed without the impact of those who came west under doctors' orders. Over the next several weeks, this blog will examine tuberculosis in Albuquerque, the remnants of the city's once incredibly profitable sanatorium industry, and the lives of those who came to "chase the cure".

The Last Words of Elephant Rock

2007-09-13T19:50:00.001-07:00

With a project like this, there’s no avoiding Route 66. It changed Albuquerque like it changed many cities: first at its inception, with the crush of new motorists enchanted with the idea of a newly opened West; then with its decline and abandonment, the suddenly quiet streets a hollow reminder of what had been. There was an undeniable magic in the way 66 brought people to cities: it showcased each of the towns on its path, celebrated them, almost fetishized the idea of travel more than destination, and the towns along it prospered. Now, a cross-country traveler follows the interstate, a river of asphalt that traverses the nation, not celebrating the towns along the way, but bypassing them. Destination takes prominence over travel, and the route of the Mother Road is littered with relics of a past glory.

Elephant Rock was a relic of the Mother Road that predated US 66 by untold years, but failed to survive it. At the bottom of Tijeras Canyon, an accident of erosion deposited one boulder precariously on top of another, and for the thousands of years of human history in New Mexico the striking formation stood sentinel over the only entrance to the Rio Grande valley through the East Mountains. When the Spanish came, it became a boundary marker along the horse track between the town of Carnuel, founded to defend against the raiding Apaches of the Canyon, and the nascent Villa de Alburquerque.

When the city of Albuquerque’s population swelled from Easterners seeking the healing air of the Southwest, the horse track changed to a road and Elephant Rock served as a sign for those who arrived by motorcar that their long journey to “Well Country” was nearly at an end. Its prominent location and striking shape made it a natural backdrop for photographs, and indeed, there are many early photos with smiling tourists perched upon its base, or even high atop its crown.

In the 1930s, US 66 extended through the Canyon, and commerce came in its wake, as well as the tourist hunger for the exotic. Elephant Rock soon began making appearances on hand tinted post-cards sent to relatives in the East, another example of the strangeness of the Southwest. Its high visibility made it a natural billboard, and local businesses decorated it with appeals for visitors to rest at their motels and campsites.

And then, the interstate came. In a very real way, I-40 killed Elephant Rock, murdered it, in fact, needlessly and in cold blood. In the late 60s, destination was the new rule and interstate highways webbed their way across the country. I-40 stitched itself to the former U.S. 66 for the most part, except where 66 had gone through a town’s heart, I-40 either bypassed the town entirely, or fortified itself against it with overpasses and walled channels. In Albuquerque, the plan was for I-40 to traverse the same route as 66, demolishing the motels and other attractions along the way in favor of expediency. This provoked an outcry, and the route was shifted several miles north to its present location, but not before an overzealous road crew brought the well-out-of-the-way Elephant Rock’s long career as canyon sentinel to an end. With dynamite and two bulldozers they toppled the crown from the base, and that was that: the landmark was gone. Today, motorists pass the site and give no second glance to the low, unremarkable granite base or its once-upon-a-time crown lying forgotten in the gully a few yards away.

I visited it recently. It’s even easy to find if you know where to look: just to the right of Central avenue past the Town and Country Feed Store on the way out of Albuquerque. There’s a bare pull-off beside it, as if people still stop from time to time, maybe people like me, looking for something that’s gone.

A friend of mine and I took a few minutes to walk around its severed halves, clambor over the base, poke into the cracks in the granite surface, looking for… something. I guess I wanted some reminder of its former prominence, some indication that these two banal boulders that now only serve as protection for pack rats had meant something once, that they had been important to us, to Albuquerque. I looked for scorch marks on its surface to mark the dynamite that had toppled it, for some trace of paint to indicate the signage that had decorated it in its time as landmark, but there was nothing. Finally, I crawled into a small space beneath the lip of the crown and the sandy New Mexico earth. There were cholla cactus branches and garbage in that narrow hole, indication of the pack rat that now made it its home, but also something else. Barely visible in the shadowed space, there was an indication of paint, letters printed on the stone's uneven surface. I took a picture, crawled out, and came back to the car, satisfied.

So what are the last words of Elephant Rock? I don’t know, I couldn’t read them. They were obscured by the dim light, by the cholla laced pack rat nest, by the earth that the once-western-face of Elephant Rock had laid buried in for forty years. But what those words literally spell out doesn’t matter. Even if I could read them, their meaning would be lost in the banality of some decades old advertisement for a motel or autoparts store.

The meaning of those words has nothing to do with what they might say. They are instead proof of what once was, an indication of what that rock once meant, a connecting strand between the meaningful formation that stood as boundary between Albuquerque and the East, and a pair of unremarkable, anonymous boulders that sit clinging to a gully wall and lost in the weeds along a fading highway.

I owe a debt of thanks to Mike Smith for all his help, including providing the vintage photos above and the directions to find Elephant Rock. For more about Carnuel, Tijeras Canyon and the Sandia Mountains, check out his excellent book, Towns of the Sandia Mountains, which is where I first heard about this forgotten landmark.

Forgotten Alburquerque

2007-08-23T16:07:00.000-07:00

I certify to his majesty: That I have founded a villa on the banks and in the valley of the River of the North in a place of good fields, waters, pastures, and timber, distant from this villa of Santa Fe about twenty-two leagues,... naming it the Villa of Alburquerque... There are now thirty-five families located there, comprising 252 persons, adults and children. The Church has been completed... the government buildings have been begun, and other houses of the settlers are finished with their corrals, irrigation ditches running, fields sowed—all without any expense to the Royal Treasury. – Governor Francisco Cuervo y Valdez

Alburquerque.

Once there was an ‘r’.

Somehow, it faded.

And that is the crux of this site: the essence of that fading ‘r’, a city’s evolution from one form into another, and how it came to pass.

Others have written of it, of course, but the story is Albuquerque’s in the end. It is the story of two cities, once separated by a few miles of barren land, but now interlaced and dependent, though sometimes uneasy, sometimes resentful.

One city was La Villa de Alburquerque, founded on the shores of the Rio Grande in 1709, amid the ruins of the Tiguex pueblos that had fallen to the myriad diseases of the Spanish settlers. It was a quiet place, despite the occasional Comanche raid, and soon it was seemingly forgotten, first by its sponsors far to the east, then by its stewards, far to the south. The settlers lived their own way, and became their own people: Nuevo Mexicanos.

The other city, founded nearly 200 years later: New Town, built beside the river’s modern twin, the AT&SF railroad. It was an American city, an Anglo city, and it rapidly filled with Easterners seeking the healing air of the Southwest.

The New Town grew with industry. La Villa de Alburquerque withered, its citizens seeking jobs elsewhere. Soon, La Villa de Alburquerque seemed dead; for many years it stood all but abandoned, its falling and empty buildings now referred to as the Old Town.

But, something strange happened, because La Villa de Alburquerque did not die, and New Town never took its place. Rather, a peculiar alchemy occurred: the New Town continued to grow in all directions, soon utterly absorbing the Old, but in the meantime the citizens of the Old had moved into the New and changed it from the inside. Suddenly, there was only one town, but it was neither of the ones that had preceded it. It was Albuquerque, a town of synthesis, its name steeped in the Spanish heritage of the Villa, but clumsily pronounced by Anglo tongues, misspelled on maps by Anglo hands. La Villa de Alburquerque and New Town were both gone, and Albuquerque stood in their place.

The ‘r’s absence, then, is one of compromise, of blending, of the way a city changes into something different than the sum of its components, and something more.

And yet, despite its seeming sacrifice, the ‘r’ reappears from time to time like an omen, or a ghost. It is in the speech of the old citizens, a dimly remembered. In Rudolfo Anaya’s book Alburquerque it is a lament for what is gone.

Perhaps the last stronghold of the ‘r’ is in the long-standing nickname of our city, “Burque”. Recently, in a bid to make the city more ‘marketable’, the Mayor announced his intention to brand Albuquerque as “The Q”. An immediate groundswell of contempt met his pronouncement, and now the ‘r’ serves as a rallying cry:
Soy de Burque!

Forgotten City

2007-08-18T13:10:00.000-07:00

A city dreams itself a certain way, sees its future down a certain path, briefly becomes its image, and then changes.

This is history, but a peculiar history of those who looked forward and of what they saw. Not a history of what was, but of what it wanted to be, and how it was changed. The maudlin truth is this: nothing that comes to pass is how we foresaw it. A city dreams itself a certain way, not with one dream but with thousands, and each of those dreams blends with the others to become something else entirely.

This is a journal of my explorations into a city’s forgotten dreams. The city is Albuquerque, on the shores of the Rio Grande.