Tag: Los Alamos History (Page 5 of 8)

Thanks to the new Oppenheimer movie, Los Alamos memorabilia is a hot item on E-bay. A lot of this memorabilia includes postcards. I have to say that these are So. Much. Fun! While brainstorming ideas for this blog, I ran across a beautiful and very dated postcard photograph of the Post Office and Mesa Public Library circa 1945. It got me thinking about our two public library branches. Both are beautiful and modern. They offer our community a huge number of amenities and access to an enormous collection of information and artwork. So, how did this very small, remote town come to have such a great library system? The history might surprise you!

The First Library in Los Alamos

Considering the gathering of so many scientists, engineers, and pioneers of academia here in the early days of Los Alamos, it can’t be a surprise that creating a library became such an important task.

According to Lisa Bier’s research in “Atomic Wives & the Secret Library at Los Alamos”, the first librarian was Charlotte Serber, wife of prominent physicist Robert Serber. She was an unusual choice because she wasn’t a librarian at all. The history suggests that Oppenheimer chose her specifically because she wasn’t a librarian and therefore wouldn’t have the same hang ups about library protocol. It makes a lot of sense if you consider the haphazard and often slapped together quality of the Secret City during the early days. There probably wasn’t much time for protocol.

The original library materials had to be ordered, but could not be sent directly here. All mail to residents of Los Alamos was forwarded through a single post office box in Santa Fe. PO Box 1663 is still Triad’s LANL operating address today. In fact, many residents five to six generations back who were born in Los Alamos had PO Box 1663 on their birth certificates!

Library materials were ordered and borrowed through UC Berkley and numerous other scientific organizations. Over 1200 hardcover books and full runs of 50 different periodicals made the list.

But the coolest part of the library story illustrates the difficulty of keeping things secret. At one point, an investigator from Los Alamos was sent to Santa Fe to discover how random Santa Feans had gotten the names of some of the most secret and famous residents of Los Alamos. Turns out that these scientists and engineers had gotten library cards to the Santa Fe Library in their own names in order to borrow books! The books would be sent via mail. Can you imagine how strange it must’ve looked to the post office to have all of these books, periodical journals, and scientific research journals plus something like 250 copies of the Sears Catalog among other regular mailings. It would’ve been pretty obvious that there was something special going on in PO Box 1663!

This desire for secrecy prompted the security service to hang around in Santa Fe spreading misinformation about what was actually going on in Los Alamos. The “official version” was that we were making electric rockets up here. Eventually, as you might imagine, the Manhattan Project wasn’t able to be kept a secret anymore.

LANL Research Library

Of course, that original library is long gone. The current LANL Research Library is located on the main campus of LANL here in Los Alamos. It’s near the Otowi building and is able to accessed by the general public during regular business hours. As you might expect, not everything available to badged LANL employees is accessible to Average Joe, but just being able to go in there and see the building and some of the historical information housed there is worthwhile! If you do happen to work for LANL and have a badge, you can access the library 24/7. It’s an amazing collection of periodicals, technical papers, records of experiments, and books from every possible corner of the globe on any number of topics!

Mesa Public Library

The main branch of our local library is pretty recognizable to folks as they head toward the former location of Central School. Though the school was actually located more in the vicinity of Circle Drive, the library is just a little further up Central Ave with the main driveway entrance being just across from the Justice Center.

What a lot of folks don’t realize, is that the Mesa Public Library has tons of art on display and cataloged for educational use. Depending on the circumstances, some of the art can be checked out like a book. The gallery displays works from many well known contributors to the art world. The downstairs often offers kindermusic classes, story time, and any number of other kid friendly local activities.

The upstairs area of the modern library has rooms which can be reserved for meetings, group events, and other gatherings. There is no fee for local clubs or groups. You just need to chat with the ladies at the desk.

Of course, the first Mesa Public Library was part of the original Central Park Square Complex. The library was initially funded as a subscription library in 1943 by 70 local families who each donated $5. By 1945 it was free and open to everyone. In the image below, the library is on the right, but you can’t tell how far it extended. As I recall, the library building occupied all of the space between what is now the corner you can see in the image, and the jewelry store on the opposite corner. There were always stores fronting the parking lot at 15th and Central Ave. It really does give me a sense of nostalgia to see this photo image. I’ll talk more in another post about Central Park Square in general.

White Rock Branch Library

The first branch library in White Rock was opened in 1985. It was located in a small section of the White Rock Community Center on Longview Dr. The space still hosts the White Rock Senior Center, but in 2015 the county built a fabulous library on the corner of Sherwood Blvd and State Road 4 directly across the highway from the White Rock Visitor Center. If you’ve never been to the White Rock Branch Library, it’s worth a visit just for the spectacular views from the windows. Handily enough, the library is right next to the White Rock Youth Activity Center which offers kiddos 3rd-8th grade the opportunity to go back and forth depending on what activities they want to participate in. If you haven’t visited, make a plan to do it soon!

Regardless of whether or not you love books, it’s hard to deny the value in our local libraries. It’s just one more amazing thing about life in Los Alamos. When you’re ready to make the move, give me a call! This is a great time to sell real estate in Los Alamos County and a popular time to join our community. I’d love to talk to you!

On March 5 of 2022, Los Alamos lost a member of our community who had far more impact that a lot of us probably ever realized. It’s been nearly a year since the passing of Roger Waterman. If you haven’t been part of this community for long, you might not realize the enormous impact that the Waterman family and their company TRK Management have had on the Los Alamos landscape. But as I was passing by the now empty lot where the Hilltop House Hotel used to stand, I was thinking about all of the other creative and sometimes bizarre building projects around Los Alamos that happened because of the Waterman family creed: conceptualize, reuse, repurpose, recycle, move, and move forward (all for the good of the town).

The Hospitality Business

In a previous post, I talked about the history of the Hilltop House. This one structure has been the talk of the town decade after decade as it was recycled, expanded, renovated, moved, renovated again, and then eventually abandoned. But this property wasn’t even the first creative use of building materials the Waterman family brought to Los Alamos. And it is only one example of the Waterman Family’s successful hospitality based businesses.

Their first local business was the Los Alamos Motor Lodge at Trinity and 15th Streets. The motor lodge is still there, but it now houses Trinity Urgent Care and a smattering of local office and retail space. In fact, if you consider the motor lodge concept from the seventies when you look at the narrow parking set up, it might make a whole lot more sense! But to get the whole picture, you need to know that those buildings weren’t built on that site. They were purchased in Western New Mexico and moved up to Los Alamos. In later years, that would become one of the things the Watermans were known for: picking a building up off its foundations and moving it to a new location.

The Waterman family also “built” and maintained the White Rock Motor Lodge, which has since become the Hampton Inn. The original structure was one story of repurposed buildings moved from a demo job on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. But that was the way the Watermans like to do things. Reuse, repurpose, recycle. Some of you might remember the original White Rock Motor Lodge. It was one story to begin with. But then – because this was something else the Watermans were known for – they jacked up the first story and built a first floor underneath. The motel later became known as the Bandelier Inn in the nineties before eventually being torn down.

The Motor Lodge wasn’t the only building that Waterman opted to lift in order to double its size. There are also several distinctive homes in the neighborhood around Oakwood Loop and Myrtle Street that began as typical one story homes. At some point during the nineties, these homes were also lifted so that a footprint sized first floor could be added. Roger Waterman’s comment to another local contractor was that it was far easier to build a floor than a roof!

As I stated in my previous post about the Hilltop House, when the gas station moved from the front of the building beneath the restaurant to the end of the property near Central Ave, the former one time cafe and short time real estate office was separated from the other portion of the building and moved from Los Alamos to Rover in White Rock where it is still a part of Herman’s Automotive.

While that might seem more than a little ambitious, it’s not nearly the largest building here in Los Alamos to be picked up and moved off the hill. In the late 1980s, the Los Alamos Christian Church on East Road decided it was time to replace their fellowship hall and auditorium. Instead of demolishing the current building, Waterman suggested recycling the structure by moving it someplace else. The original building had been a dormitory during the early years of Los Alamos. The former dormitory looked very much like the women’s dormitory still located near Peach Street which was recently acquired by the Los Alamos Historical Society.

The church building was sold for one dollar to another church community in the Chama region and moved out of Los Alamos. The cost of moving the building was $100,000. Not a small amount of money by any stretch in the late 80’s, and yet the project made the cost of a “new” church building entirely doable for both church communities. One church saved on demolition costs and the other on building costs. And that was what Roger Waterman and his family found so very satisfying.

Ironically, the new auditorium designed and built by Waterman for the Los Alamos Christian Church and Waterman’s later Bradbury Science Museum look oddly alike in some ways. Most of the similarities can be attributed to architectural trends of that era, but both buildings certainly have presence.

TRK Management

If you know anything about commercial real estate management, you might be familiar with TRK. However, you might not recall or ever have known what TRK stands for. It’s deceptively simple. Bob and Alice Waterman, the first Watermans to settle here in Los Alamos, had three sons. Ted, Roger, and Kent. This wasn’t the first clever business name in the brothers’ history. Their first home building operation in the 1970s was called Namretaw (Waterman spelled backwards). TRK building and later management is still a successful company here in Los Alamos to this day with several commercial and residential complexes in their holdings. TRK currently owns and manages the Bradbury Science Museum building which houses the museum, offices for LANL contractors such as N3B and Compa, Yuan’s Noodle House (did you know Subway started out there?), and even the new offices of Los Alamos Family Council.

In later years, Roger Waterman was heard to comment on the sad shift of construction that makes it no longer feasible to recycle and reuse buildings due to simple labor costs. I think a good number of us would like the idea of adding a piece of history to our current home by recycling beams or metal or repurposing old wood. Perhaps there will be another shift in that direction in the future. Or maybe we will come up with new and creative ways to tip our hats to the old when building the new. Either way, I’d love to discuss housing in Los Alamos with you! Give me a call when you’re ready to buy or sell real estate here in Los Alamos. After all, I’m your hometown real estate broker!

In my last post, I barely scratched the surface of where, why, and how our schools here in Los Alamos have evolved. If you didn’t catch that post, please click back and take a look. I won’t recap here, mostly because there are A LOT of schools left to cover!

Something that has always puzzled newcomers to town is the placement of our elementary schools. Sometimes their locations make sense. For example, Barranca Mesa Elementary serves residents from both Barranca and North Mesa. Yep. Those areas are certainly on the “far edge” of town and nearest to that elementary school. But why would the only Middle School in the county be in that area too? Honestly, I began my exploration of current and past schools because I was curious, and because I get asked about schools a lot. It’s almost the first question parents ask when they’re looking at a potential home purchase. So, continuing from my last post, I thought I’d focus solely on the elementary schools for a moment.

Mountain Elementary

The third elementary school built after Central School outgrew its ability to educate grades 1-12, Mountain was named by the AEC because… (drumroll, please) it’s closer to the mountains than the previous two school buildings. Mountain Elementary was built in 1950 and was the only “original” elementary school that did not eventually have a satellite school, but more about that in a moment.

Aspen Elementary

Aspen Elementary was number four. Built in 1951, it was named for the popular Aspen trees visible from the schoolyard. If that seems a bit odd in modern times, it might be that you never had an opportunity to view the fall colors from Aspen’s parking lot prior to the Cerro Grande fire. The name was actually one of the school’s most distinctive features. It was the first school named for a local plant species, a trend which would continue. Aspen was also one of the first elementary schools to receive a much needed construction overhaul. If you’re wondering what it looked like before, take a look at the other schools built in that general timeframe and you can probably get the correct idea.

Pajarito Elementary School

Built in the late 1950s, Pajarito Elementary school is located at the “top” of town on Arizona Avenue. The school building has been an office complex for far longer than it was a school. If you look at an aerial photo of the building, it’s possible to see why it was chosen for downsizing. The school was built during a population boom, but did not have the capacity to make it useful for that purpose in the long term. Why didn’t they build it bigger to begin with? During that time period, it wasn’t as much of a concern that all of the students assigned to an elementary school be at the same building. If they could find two classrooms here and eight there and maybe the rest at the main building, that was just fine.

Barranca Mesa Elementary

Even though the first homes went up on Barranca Mesa in 1958, the elementary school did not become approved by the AEC until the second group (subdivision) of homes on Barranca Mesa was well underway. The first students attended classes at the elementary school in 1962. The elementary school looks significantly different these days after undergoing a dramatic renovation in 2020. Considering the dates of their initial construction, it isn’t surprising that Barranca Mesa and Pinon were nearly identical in architecture.

Pinon Elementary School

By 1963, the student population of White Rock Elementary was bursting at the seams. The AEC decided to build a much larger, modern school on the other side of White Rock. Of course, the name Pinon came from the rather excessive population of Pinons in the White Rock area. Realistically, Pinon was built to accommodate a large number of students. As Mirador expands, Pinon is once again absorbing a large number of students, a situation that will be addressed with the exciting new school remodeling plans underway in our district.

Chamisa Elementary School

Even with the addition of Pinon School in 1963, the new building wasn’t able to keep up with the exploding population of White Rock in the sixties. By the mid 1960s, the AEC was in the process of turning over a good number of public services to civilian control. The last thing that the AEC did for the Los Alamos Public Schools prior to turning responsibility for the district over to LAPS, was to build Chamisa Elementary School. The new school went up on the grounds of the former White Rock Elementary School, which is why many locals remember Chamisa as older than Pinon. According to Craig Martin, the first principal of Chamisa wanted to call the school Chaparral Elementary, but the AEC decided that Chamisa was more appropriate due to the enormous presence of Chamisa shrubs in and around the White Rock area. Even in their final moments, the AEC stuck to their naming formula!

Satellite Schools

You don’t have to look far into Los Alamos history to see the enormous ebb and flow of our population. I spoke in my last post about the incredible way that our schools have tried to accommodate the student population without making it necessary to bus our kids outside the county. In the beginning, this had a lot to do with the nature of the “Secret City” mentality. As I mentioned above in my discussion of Pajarito Elementary School, sometimes students are educated in whatever space can be utilized for that purpose. Throughout the years prior to a stabilization in the population sometime in the seventies, the schools would often find or build “extra”space for learning environments. This need gave rise to “satellite schools” in the fifties. There were “officially” five of these schools, and most are still being used as “school” facilities.

Canoncito School

Craig Martin describes this very first satellite school as an overflow of Canyon Elementary’s population. The structure used had originally been built in 1947 as a laundromat and was repurposed into two classrooms in 1956. The building only had room for first and second grades. Las Cumbres currently occupies the original Canoncito School. However, just around the corner on Canyon Rd, Canyoncito Montessori is now a private pre-K school here in town.

Little Valley School

Little Valley was a satellite school of Mesa Elementary and also part of the high school at one point. If you went to LAHS fifteen years ago or more, you’ll remember the Little Valley building as L Wing. The building is technically down the hill and across Orange Street from the high school at the “head” of “Olive Street”. Olive Street is a trailhead these days and “L Wing” now houses the Family Strengths Network, which means it’s doing very much the same thing it always has.

Little Poplar School

Little Poplar was named for its parent school, Aspen Elementary. An Aspen tree is a variety of poplar after all. Little Poplar was located on 36th Street. It’s likely that whatever building housed this satellite school was either lost during the fire or was torn down to make way for housing.

Little Forest School

Little Forest is now a privately run daycare and preschool, but the building began life as a second satellite school for Aspen Elementary. One look at the current building and you can see striking similarities between it and almost all of the original school buildings here in Los Alamos. Little Forest was named for the surrounding pines which were far thicker in that area.

Little Sagebrush School

If you’re getting into the rhythm of naming schools, you’ll probably already guess that Little Sagebrush was a satellite school located in White Rock. The school actually served the original White Rock Elementary School prior to Pinon Elementary being built. A good number of you might remember a Montessori school in White Rock called Sage Cottage which unfortunately did not survive the pandemic. I’ve not dug any further into a connection between the names, but a connection is entirely possible. Sage is a common plant on the Pajarito Plateau, which is why the AEC chose the name for Little Sagebrush in the first place. The building did not survive the expansion of White Rock in the sixties.

If you’re still a bit turned around trying to see how all of these schools fit together to fill the educational needs of a growing Los Alamos, check out their locations on Google Maps. And if you’re still wondering how our secondary schools fit in, check back next time. I’ve finally made my way through the primary schools to the point where Middle School and Junior High meet High School and the Freshman Academy. And if you’re ready to move in or out of our amazing school district, give me a call! I’d love to talk education and housing in Los Alamos with you.