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Posted Mar 17, 2022, 11:37 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Dec 2019
Location: Albuquerque, NM
Posts: 578
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New Mexico Magazine has a piece that was published online yesterday looking at the Rail Yards in Albuquerque. The piece delves into some of the history of the site and also looks at what its future may hold. They also talk with the city's Chief Operations Officer, Lawrence Rael, about the challenges of trying to revitalize and restore the site.
BTW, the city hasn't said anything about the deal they were pursuing with a company to pay for the new roof over the Machine Shop. I hope something is still in the works there, since, as you'll read, the New Mexico Magazine piece mentions the steep estimated price tag of $10 million for the new roof. It's something the city apparently isn't ready or able to pay. I think the city needs to do and pay whatever is necessary to get these buildings up to snuff and ready for tenants and new uses. We can't keep measuring progress at the site in decades!
https://www.newmexicomagazine.org/bl...ue-rail-yards/
Quote:
ONE DECEMBER DAY IN 1920, Isadore Freed, a Russian émigré to New York and then Iowa, stepped off an Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway train at the Albuquerque depot. Behind him, the Alvarado Hotel complex displayed a handsome evocation of Mission Revival style. To his left, hundreds of men filled the many buildings of the Albuquerque Rail Yards with the noise, sparks, smoke, and sweat required to repair massive steam locomotives.
Freed had brought his family west upon becoming the rabbi of Congregation B’nai Israel, part of the “New Town” that had reoriented Albuquerque over the previous 40 years. By 1920 it easily eclipsed the former stronghold of Old Town, two miles northwest. Spurring the growth was a technology in dire need of brawny workers as it moved people and goods throughout the nation with futuristic efficiency. In what became Albuquerque’s downtown, restaurants, laundromats, stores, houses, saloons, brothels, a lumberyard, and a few new places of worship fanned out from the Rail Yards.
Rabbi Freed raised his hands to the sky. “Albuquerque is a special place on earth,” he proclaimed. “We must never leave here.”
The family stayed, and the city kept changing. By 1955, the railway’s notoriously finicky steam engines were waning, replaced by ten times as many diesel ones. Fewer workers were hired. In 1970, the ATSF closed the Alvarado, once a jewel of the Fred Harvey empire. Preservationists mounted a last-ditch campaign to save it. A month later, a wrecking ball crushed their hopes.
On January 20, 1977, the railway told workers this was their last day. But those workers had seen the industry survive bankruptcies, strikes, fires, and floods. Surely this wasn’t the end, they thought. Doubters showed up the next morning, dressed for work. They found the gates locked, the buildings silent.
Since then, the bright promise of the Albuquerque Rail Yards has dimmed. Its buildings, once a soaring tribute to Industrial Age steel, concrete, and glass, drew vagrants and vandals, a succession of stalled development plans, and environmental threats that ate money as fast as steam engines once consumed coal. Still, hope for a better fate flickered.
“This is the epicenter of New Mexico, of our history, our work, and our lives,” says Leba Freed, the rabbi’s granddaughter. “There’s awe in this architecture. It’s been called ‘the Notre Dame of Albuquerque.’ It will again become a major attraction.”
...
IN 1995, THE ATSF MERGED with Burlington Northern. The combined BNSF Railway has some workers in its portion of the yards. Amtrak and Rail Runner trains cruise past daily. In 2007, the City of Albuquerque pooled $8.5 million of city and state money to purchase the majority of the yards—including most of its buildings and all of their problems.
Creating a plaza and parking area in front of the blacksmith shop alone required removing 11,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil. Floors in the boiler and machine shops had been “paved” with creosote-coated blocks that had absorbed additional quantities of hazardous fluids. The largest building, the 187,000-square-foot machine shop, could house a manufacturing facility but can’t be used as anything more than a moody Better Call Saul set until its roof is replaced, at an estimated cost of $10 million.
New roofs now top the lofty ceiling braces in the boiler and tender repair shops, which also hold cranes capable of lifting up to 15 tons. The old flue shop has been transformed into an office still awaiting a tenant. Interest exists: A film studio has rented the yards for most of 2022, while allowing the Rail Yards Market to carry on every Sunday from May to October. The city has talked with Central New Mexico Community College about establishing a film program at the yards. The site has been rented for weddings, proms, and other special events. In late 2021, workers began developing a walking route from downtown to the site that will include landscaping and benches.
Other progress has been slowed by various asbestos and lead-paint challenges, and the city hopes to persuade the State Historic Preservation Office to overlook a key non-historic detail. Many of the buildings’ walls feature huge sweeps of windowpanes, some 55,000 panes in all, that originally held clear glass. Over the years, as glass broke, workers replaced them with plexiglass in a range of colors that now conjure the feel of a cathedral. Restoring their original look, Lawrence Rael says, could invite a public backlash.
“There’s a fine line to walk with historic preservation,” he says.
He considers the problem while walking between the blacksmith shop/farmers’ market and the flue shop, a strip so narrow that the buildings’ walls seem to reach far beyond their true height. “It feels you’re in Manhattan here,” he says with a laugh, before stepping inside the blacksmith shop.
Weeks earlier, it had drawn thousands of selfie-snapping shoppers to the annual Holiday Market for two days of food trucks, artisans, and live music both inside the building and throughout the plaza. Shea Lindner displayed his Schizoid Guru laser-cut jewelry, grateful for a way to connect with buyers as the pandemic lingered. “I show at other markets, but the Rail Yards one is great for tourist traffic,” he said. “Also, the space is just really fun. Every time I’m here I think about history.”
Rael ponders it, too, especially when skeptics regard the yards as a pricey barnacle. “I’m pretty proud we were able to get the north end of the site in this shape in just three and a half years,” he says as a setting sun turns the blue and green plexi-panes into a funky brand of stained glass. “If we have enough money to stabilize the machine shop and its roof, then we’re within a couple of years of reopening that. This is part of the history of the city. We want to preserve it as a source of pride and value to the community—and one that will also create economic opportunities.”
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