Chapter 4
Within a period of about six months, from roughly December 1879 through May 1880, the New Mexico and Pacific and the Atlantic and Pacific Railroads, both subsidiaries of the AT&SF, with the collaboration of a small group of New Mexico residents, created not only a railroad service facility on the Rio Grande but also an entirely new town. In the process, the railroad appropriated the name, identity, and much of the vitality of the old farming community of Albuquerque and almost overnight replaced it, lock, stock, and barrel, with a different community two miles away. New Albuquerque, as it soon came to be known, was organized on very different principles and for very different purposes than Old Albuquerque.
There was a new community layout and new architecture; there were new people speaking unfamiliar languages; there were new customs and religions; there was a new way and rhythm of life that its adherents touted as superior to New Mexico’s venerable seasonal round. An urban-industrial ethos and way of life shouldered into and against a long-established rural-agrarian world. The result was the equivalent of a cultural tsunami that precipitated violent conflict between representatives of the two distinct populations, which lasted for years.
About this hostility, attorney and historian William Keleher wrote that by the late 1890s,
fighting and feuding between “New Town” and “Old Town” which had been waged between the years 1880 and 1893 as to which community was entitled to the use of the name of Albuquerque had begun to subside, and the diehards in both camps had indicated a willingness to bow to the inevitable and accept the fact that the “New Albuquerque,” built up around the railway depot and tracks was to be a permanent community, separate and apart from the old town of Albuquerque, located two miles to the west. The squabble had been settled as between the new town and the old town over the right to use the postmark “Albuquerque” in the respective post offices. A ruling from Washington provided that neither one should use the word “Albuquerque” [alone].1
Although Keleher portrayed this period of intense discord between the resident Hispanic population of the Albuquerque area and the newcomers associated with the railroad as quibbling, it was in fact far from a trifling matter. Rather, the period from 1880 until at least the middle 1890s was characterized by frequent, intense outbreaks of rage on both sides, focused on a large range of issues, for which the use of the name Albuquerque often stood as a proxy and a rallying symbol. For example, disparity between the two groups in terms of cash income quickly mushroomed as many newcomers secured good-paying jobs, for the time and place, as machinists and boilermakers in the Locomotive Shops, while the relatively few Hispanos who were hired by the railroad served almost entirely in low-paid, low-skill positions such as helpers and laborers. This was the result of both a higher level of learned technical skill among the new arrivals and a pervasive anti-Hispanic bias in the US railroad culture of the day.
The virulence of attitudes on both sides is reflected in an obviously—and today offensively—partisan summary of the animosity between residents of Old Albuquerque and New Albuquerque written years later by historian Benjamin Read: “Just then [during 1880] the A. T. & S. F. system was first building its railroad toward New Mexico to bring civilization and communication with the East. Unfortunately these advantages were to be accompanied by Protestant bigotry.”2 Likewise, many of the non-Catholic railroad workers sneered at local Hispanic adherence to hierarchical religious guidance emanating from Rome.
In the 1880s and 1890s, matters of religion were only one festering sore spot between “railroad people” and “locals.” Even such things as styles of clothing, habitual gestures, manner of walking, and formality or familiarity of address carried antagonistic cultural messages. The ten-hour-day, six-day-a-week railroad work schedule was sorely at odds with farming’s partition between night and day, rest and labor, as well as with the routine of religious activities on Sundays and many other special days. As almost always in cases of cultural collision, there was much concern among the established Hispanic population about gender relations, especially among young people. The upshot was that there was frequent cause for friction and animosity.
Ill will between the native Nuevo Mexicanos and newcomers from the East was expressed in many ways, including sabotage of the mule-drawn trolley line between Old Town and New Albuquerque. The trolley drivers “were often harassed by boys who placed small obstacles on the tracks, or who jumped on the sides of the fragile cars and rocked them off the tracks.”3 Such vandalism was common despite the fact that it interfered with the ability of Hispanic Locomotive Repair Shop employees to get to work or to get there on time.
Long-running friction also arose between the railroad and indigenous Pueblo communities in the Middle Rio Grande Valley, which became a regular feature of life for decades. The situation at Santo Domingo Pueblo, north of Albuquerque, is well documented. In 1880, when the railroad grading and construction crews reached the eastern boundary of Santo Domingo’s land grant, “a small army of construction crews drove their way through pastures, farmland, and ditches, passed within two hundred yards of the village itself, and continued south out of Santo Domingo’s land grant with no advance notice, negotiation, lease, permission, purchase, or papers.”4 The railroad established a station on Santo Domingo land just two miles from the pueblo village, around which a town named Wallace quickly grew. Settlers at Wallace were soon occupying Santo Domingo farmlands for their own purposes. Pueblo women were assaulted at Wallace, and Pueblo people and livestock were killed by trains that traversed the reservation.
Map 4.1. Partial map of Albuquerque in 1918 showing the Locomotive Repair Shops. Original streetcar line highlighted. Adapted from Tita Berger and Adam Sullins, comps., Pedestrians, Streetcars and Courtyard Housing: Past and Future Albuquerques (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, School of Architecture and Planning, 2008), 13.
One of the Pueblo responses to the railroad-related deaths, injuries, and thefts was destruction of railroad infrastructure: breaking telegraph line insulators, tearing down the wires, and stealing ties and poles meant for laying track and building trestles and other structures. In response, settlers at Wallace threatened to invade the village of Santo Domingo and shoot people wholesale.5
As skirmishes between local Native Americans, Hispanic New Mexicans, and recent immigrant railroad employees repeatedly flared, though, AT&SF management remained focused on capturing and then expanding trade and passenger service between the eastern United States and California, which was seen as the railroad’s real prize. As a result, the roster of employees at the Albuquerque Locomotive Repair Shops continued to grow, as did New Albuquerque and the Territory of New Mexico. According to the official census, between 1880 and 1900 the population of New Mexico as a whole grew by more than 63 percent, due heavily to immigration from the eastern United States.6
The Albuquerque Weekly Journal noted on December 1, 1882, that “real estate took a big boom at just about this time last year, and history seems to be repeating itself.” The same issue reported, “Last evening’s express on the Atlantic & Pacific brought an unusually large number of passengers.” Furthermore, “Plans are now being draughted for a brick store for Ed. Strasburg, to be built on Lead avenue, near Third street.” The newspaper, operated by newcomers, was full of glowing and optimistic stories such as this one regarding the building of a very expensive house: “J. M. Wheelock is preparing the plans for a residence for J. N. Scott, of Chihuahua. The estimated cost of the structure is $15,000. Mr. Wheelock is also busily engaged at work on the plans for a convent to be erected in the Armijo Bros. addition. The plans show that the building will be a beauty.” In addition, the classified ads in the same edition of the newspaper listed eleven attorneys and seven physicians in New Albuquerque.7 All of this confirms that the new town was now expanding rapidly.
Writing about this early period of New Albuquerque’s history, attorney and historian Ralph Emerson Twitchell later stated,
New Mexico was then [at the end of Lew Wallace’s governorship] enjoying a great period of prosperity. The livestock, mining, and other industries were making tremendous strides. Investments and speculation in land grant holdings, town and city lots in all the cities and towns along the new railroad lines, and in other collateral enterprises, marked the prosperity of the period.8
Historian William Dodge notes that during the last two decades of the nineteenth century,
Manufacturing businesses in downtown Albuquerque benefitted from the arrival of the railroad. The Southwest Brewery and Ice Company produced 30,000 barrels of Glorieta Beer per year and forty-five tons of ice per day in its factory situated on the east side of the tracks at Roma Ave. The Albuquerque Foundry and Machine Works, located east of the tracks across from the rail yards, manufactured as much as $100,000 worth of iron goods per year—much of it for the AT&SF. Albuquerque’s central location in the territory bolstered its potential as a warehousing and distribution center. Immediately upon the railroad’s arrival, large commercial warehouses, such as the Charles Ilfeld Wholesale Company and the Gross, Kelly and Company, appeared on either side of the tracks, both north and south of Railroad Ave., to facilitate the storage and transfer of merchandise, such as grocery products, hardware, and other dry goods. The AT&SF accommodated these businesses by building several spur lines right up to their loading docks. Another major user of these spur lines was the Hahn Coal and Wood Yard, located east of the tracks and north of Railroad Ave. Wholesale warehouses and lumber yards, including the first office of a long-time Albuquerque business, the J. C. Baldridge Lumber Company were located south of Railroad Ave. along 1st St.
By 1900, New Town Albuquerque (now a fully incorporated city of more than 6,000 people) supported a wide range of small manufacturing and service industries including: brickyards, tanneries, flour mills, packing houses, wagon factories, steam laundries, bottling works, ice companies, and a cement plant.9
“Soon after its founding, the new townsite was divided administratively into four quadrants or wards. The wards, labeled First, Second, Third and Fourth (starting from the northeast quadrant and moving clockwise) were formed by the intersection of Railroad Ave . . . and the railroad tracks.” The axes of this schema were determined by the rail yards and in particular by the Repair Shops, which were by far the young city’s largest employer and the key to its development. “Even as the depot was being finished, the AT&SF shops and maintenance yards were under construction. By the mid-1880s, the locomotive and car-repair shops, and the roundhouse were completed. Within twenty years, 52,000 freight cars were passing through the city annually, and its shops and passenger facilities represented an investment by the company of more than $3.5 million . . . [by 1893], a public elementary school was opened within each of the city’s four wards.”10
Figure 4.1. Charles Ilfeld Company Warehouse in Albuquerque adjacent to AT&SF tracks, built 1911–1912, as it was being demolished in 1977. Photo by Jerry Goffe; Historic American Buildings Survey.
“To the south of downtown in the Third Ward, the Atlantic & Pacific Addition and the Baca Addition together with smaller platted additions that sometimes only encompassed a block or two were platted in the 1880s. The housing developments primarily served the AT&SF employees who worked at the nearby locomotive shops and rail yard. The housing stock was comprised primarily of small sturdy wood frame cottages.”11 Without doubt New Albuquerque was a railroad town, and it resembled other railroad towns throughout the West. There was one respect, though, in which it was different: its size. By the end of the 1890s, it was clearly destined to be the largest community on the Santa Fe main line between Kansas City and Los Angeles thanks in large part to the presence of the Locomotive Repair Shops.