By Kathleen Walls
Lodging
Santa Fe is known as “The City Different” and it really is. A great way to get the feel of it is to stay in a home instead of a hotel. I used Glamping Hub to locate La Paloma. This Two Casitas’ vacation rental is over a hundred year old. It’s an adobe dwelling that epitomizes Santa Fe. The casita is a studio with a separate kitchen and bath and it has everything needed for a great stay including a warm gas-lit cast iron stove type heater.
There’s a red leather sofa that converts to a bed if you are traveling with family. It accents the colorful New Mexico style painting on the wall behind it. The coffee table seems to be made of petrified wood and fits the décor. A babbling fountain and light combination provides the soothing sound of flowing water along with a soft light. The cottage is real adobe so all corners and edges are softly curved.
The kitchen is equipped with pots, pans, dishes and glasses so you can prepare a real meal. The bathroom shower has a New Mexico feel. The tiles in the shower and the mirror over the lavatory look as if they have straight from old Mexico. There is lots of tile in the kitchen too with an interesting pattern on the counters and backboard tiles and a red tile floor that looked like handmade Mexican tile.
One plus is that it is about three-quarters of a mile from the Plaza and even less to Canyon Road. Much of Santa Fe’s culture revolves around those two places. A majority of the city’s historical sites and museums are on or near the Plaza. Canyon Road is a doorway to Santa Fe’s art world.
If you prefer a hotel, La Fonda is the only hotel on the Plaza. It was the first hotel in Santa Fe. The present day building was built in 1922 and is as much a museum and art gallery as a fine hotel. In fact, art is so important to La Fonda they have an artist-in-residence in the lobby Thursday through Saturday.
There are unique art works throughout the hotel and in each room. Each headboard is hand painted by a Native American artist. Bed runners have the look and feel of a native woven fabric. Cabinets are decorated with native carvings and elaborate tin work.
In 1925, Fred Harvey took over management. He owned a chain called the Harvey Houses famous for the well-trained waitresses known as Harvey Girls.
The La Fonda offers free docent led tours of the hotel Wednesday through Saturday at 10:30. Good idea to make a reservation for a tour.
La Plazuela Restaurant in the hotel maintains some of the hotel’s original features. It was an open area. Today, it has a skylight and hand-painted windows but is enclosed. The chandelier is gorgeous. Food is excellent.
Cathederal
The Romanesque Revival style Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi was built between 1869 and 1886 on the site of an older adobe church. Above the altar is the San Damiano Crucifix, a replica of the crucifix in Assisi, Italy. Behind it, you see a mural of saints of the New World.
Three statures grace the front grounds. There is a statue of St. Francis, the patron saint of the diocese, installed in 1967. To the left of St. Francis is Saint Kateri, the first Native American to be canonized. The statue was installed in August 2003. To the right side of the walkway is Father Lamy, first Bishop of the Diocese of Santa Fe. He is buried in a crypt underneath the Cathedral floor
Museums
A good starting point is The New Mexico History Museum. It’s Santa Fe’s newest museum but it covers New Mexico’s 400-plus years from earliest days of Native Americans to the atomic age and space exploration.
Once you step inside past the covered wagon out front you view in rich detail, clothing, weapons, tools and art of the natives and those of the Spanish conquistadors, missionaries and settlers. You follow New Mexico’s struggles as it became free of Spain and part of the Republic of Mexico in 1821.
See the journey of six Missouri traders with mules laden with trade goods who took advantage of Mexico’s open borders for commerce and blazed what became known as the Santa Fe Trail.
There are some interesting exhibits on the Mexican American War which ended with us taking over New Mexico. Some views were not like the “Remember the Alamo” version of history we learned through the movies. Neither are the outlaws and heroes of the old west.
The coming of the railroad began a new era for New Mexico. There is a section dedicated to Fred Harvey and the Harvey Girls.
The museum moves into the Atomic Age with information on Robert Oppenheimer and Los Alamos. There are exhibits of an atomic bomb assembled at Los Alamos. There is a bomb at the museum similar to the Fat Man dropped in Nagasaki. I don’t think this one has its radioactive innards.
The Palace of the Governors is the oldest continuously occupied public building in the United States. Construction on it began in 1618. During the time of the Lincoln Wars and Billy the Kid’s escapades, Lew Wallace was governor of the territory and wrote the final parts of Ben-Hur in the building.
When I visited, most of it was closed to the public and expected to reopen in early 2020. The few parts I did see are interesting. The courtyard had a big adobe oven.
The Palace Press is like stepping into a frontier newspaper office or book printer in the 19th century with exhibits of many old presses, inks, and types. There are many printing presses even some old hand presses. One press, a Platen Press dates to 1899. It was used until around World War II in the little eastern New Mexico town of Estancia at the News Herald office. In its later years it was steam powered but can be treadle operated and hand-fed as it was originally designed to function.
American Indian artists sell their wares under the Palace’s historic portal. This is as part of the Native American Artisans Program. It looked like some interesting jewelry as I passed through.
IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts
This museum is affiliated with the Institute of American Indian Arts and is dedicated to the advancement of Native American art in all forms. The exhibits include paintings, works on paper, sculpture, ceramics, jewelry, photography, contemporary apparel, textiles, cultural arts, new media and installations.
One interesting exhibit is a mural by Native American artist, Lynnette Haozous, called Abolishing the Entrada. It shows Native American people protesting a reenactment that had been performed annually depicting the re-entry of conquistador Don Diego de Vargas into Santa Fe after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Many historians have said the reenactment was not an honest portrayal of the event makeing it look peaceful and ignoring the bloodshed and brutality that really took place.
Art
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum showcases one of the first American artists to paint pure abstraction of New York skyscrapers. She is well known for her huge flowers. When she visited New Mexico in 1929, she began new genera. Her landscapes of startling color and almost abstract mountains are breathtaking.
For the next two decades she bounced back and forth between her New York home and New Mexico. After her husband’s death, she made New Mexico her permanent home in 1949.
Our museum guide, Christina, led us through the museum. She did a great job of telling O’Keeffe’s life thorough her paintings, sketches, and many personal artifacts in the museum. Some of the displays are a surprise. One relates to when O’Keeffe began painting bones. She said, “When I started painting pelvic bones, I was most interested in the hole in the bones. What I saw through them.”
There is a small cardboard with a hole to look through so we get the feel of what she wanted to do by looking through that hole. Christine explained that is what we do when we crop in Photoshop today. Another exhibit is of O’Keeffe’s painting called Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory and next to it an actual skull she used as the model. Incidentally, it’s not a ram; it’s a Spanish goat skull.
There are sketches she used when she could not remain at a scene long enough to paint it. One shows where she noted the colors on the sketch for later painting.
You leave this museum feeling you know not just the artist but the woman, Georgia O’Keeffe.
Meow Wolf: House of Eternal Return is unlike anything you have ever seen. It’s a cross between what Timothy O’Leary might see after a large dose of LSD, combined with a Stephen King book, and set in an escape room. Take ten almost-starving artists who want to shake up the art world. Provide them with paint and brushes, bits and pieces from a dumpster dive, and lots of colorful, blinking lights. Now, you can begin to envision Meow Wolf: House of Eternal Return.
George Martin, author of the Game of Thrones books, came to their rescue and provided the money for a start up. You enter Meow Wolf; the first exhibit is a replica of a Victorian home. There is a mystery. You enter into the spirit of it and know something happened here. What? I doubt anyone knows. You wander through it reading notebooks, looking at family photos, newspapers. Meow Wolf is interactive. You step into the refrigerator and emerge in a strange neon world. You crawl through the fireplace and enter an imaginary seascape.
Can you visualize excavating a pyramid at the edge of the world while a giant mouse overflows your worktable? How about a wagon filled with old furniture and a trash can lit with orange and green lights? There is music, paintings, images, lights, cameras, action, and anything else you might imagine here.
Today, it is one of Santa Fe’s most popular attractions. From 10 artists, it has grown to over 500 people running the show.
Canyon Road
If you haven’t found the New Mexico treasure you want already, try Canyon Road. It is filled with art galleries and boutiques. There are some good dining choices there too like Geronimo. It is housed in the Borrego House, circa 1756. Built by Geronimo Lopez, it has adobe walls, kiva fireplaces, and wood beams found in old New Mexico architecture.
Food
Food is a big part of Santa Fe. A great way to learn about Santa Fe cuisine is a class at The Santa Fe School of Cooking.
We met Nicole Curtis Ammerman, the director, who explained her mother, Susan Curtis, had a midlife crisis thirty years ago and opened this cooking school. They are still going strong so obviously they are doing something right.
Our chefs, Jen Doughty and Noe Cano, showed us how to cook Santa Fe style. In New Mexico “red or green?” is the big question, of course relating to which chili pepper to use. Our chefs used both and explained a lot about the differences in the peppers.
Chef Jen showed us a simple way to roast and peel peppers. She showed us how to make both red and green chili sauce and when to use ground chili.
Chef Noe taught us to make tortillas. They let us sample as they cooked. Like the vanilla. Smelling fresh vanilla is like testing perfume. I learned vanilla is a Native American plant. Right in front of us, they cooked a complete and tasty meal; Enchiladas with red or green sauce, pinto beans, posole which is a kind of Mexican hominy with vegetables and chili peppers, corn tortillas, and for dessert, Capirotada, a type of Mexican bread pudding .
One of the nicest things is that everything is fresh and mostly local.
All Photos by Kathleen Walls
