Coal Avenue and the Murals of Downtown

Coal Avenue, Gallup's main commercial street, is tied to the coal that built the town. The coal seams in the mesas to the east fueled the Santa Fe Railway's steam locomotives for decades, and the miners who worked those seams, arriving from many parts of Europe and Mexico, gave Gallup its working-class polyglot character. Today Coal Avenue is lined with murals that narrate that layered history: Navajo weavers, Zuni potters, Route Sixty-Six travelers, railroad workers, and Code Talkers appear on building walls painted by local and visiting artists. The murals are a public archive of a city that tends to get overlooked in New Mexico tourism despite sitting at one of the most historically dense crossroads in the American Southwest.