The Railroad Builds a Second City

In April of eighteen eighty, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway reached Albuquerque. It did not reach Old Town. The surveyors chose a crossing about a mile and a half east of the original plaza, on higher, drier ground that would not flood when the Rio Grande ran. They graded the tracks. They built a depot. And within months, the city began moving east toward the rails.

Old Town had governed this valley since seventeen oh six. It had the plaza, the church, the acequia system, the families whose names traced back thirteen generations. But the railroad did not care about history. It cared about elevation and alignment. The new commercial district that rose along the tracks, in tents and quickly built frame buildings, was called New Town. The original community became Old Town, a name that in American cities almost always precedes a slow decline.

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe built its shops in New Town that same year. Albuquerque incorporated as a town in eighteen eighty-five. By eighteen ninety-one it was a city. The population doubled, then doubled again. Within a generation, Old Town was a curiosity a mile and a half from the action, its plaza preserved by inertia rather than intention.

The railroad also determined what came next. Thousands of health-seekers followed the tracks to Albuquerque, drawn by pamphlets promising a cure for tuberculosis in the high dry air. The railroad brought them. Then it brought Route Sixty-Six. Then it brought the Fred Harvey Company's Alvarado Hotel, which for nearly seventy years anchored the New Town economy. When the railroad demolished the Alvarado in nineteen seventy, a city that owed everything to the tracks had no say in the decision.