Tag: Los Alamos History (Page 5 of 8)

The word “upcycle” is a word you hear a lot these days. It’s become trendy to salvage furniture or building supplies, renovate and refurbish, and eventually turn trash into beautiful new furnishings and art. It might surprise you to know that Los Alamos has been upcycling since the very beginning.

Not long ago, I received a message from a local gentleman offering a wonderful memory of growing up here in town. He spoke of the mid 60’s when he was six years old. He recalls his father and a group of men who were employed at the National Scientific Laboratory helping to build houses on Barranca Mesa in the evenings after work. There had been several contractors building homes on Barranca Mesa since December 8, 1958 when a resident named George White became the first private home owner in Los Alamos. With street plans and neighborhood plots designed by Stanley and Wright, the building project was full steam ahead by 1964.

Our storyteller went on to say that contractors purchased salvaged materials from laboratory buildings located near the site of the present Justice Center. He and his brother, along with several of the other workers’ children, were part of the crew paid a penny per brick to dig through rubble. The brick was then upcycled to build several lovely brick homes in the vicinity of Los Pueblos and Zuni. These homes are still providing warm, comfortable living spaces today!

Much of the bricklaying on those Los Pueblos homes was done by our storyteller’s father. His family intended to purchase one of the homes. However, financial issues involving their previous home in Pennsylvania, steel mill strikes and closings, caused his family to choose an uncompleted home in the newly redeveloped White Rock instead. A few years later our storyteller then became part of the first class to attend Chamisa School in White Rock.

Craig Martin tells of other homeowners on Barranca Mesa who placed bids on both the B-Building and the Los Alamos Ranch School’s Ice House. These buildings had been used in the 1940’s to assemble components of the atomic weapons. The group of industrious homeowners used hand tools, determination, and their personal pickup trucks to upcycle lumber, flooring, plumbing, lights, and wiring to use in the building of their new homes. In theory, you could identify these homes by backtracking property records. Martin names the original homeowners in his book, “Quads, Shoeboxes, and Sunken Living Rooms” as James Bridge, John Lundren, Bruce Morrison, and Dale Holm. Holm was a well known housing activist who had been instrumental in the AEC’s decision to privatize housing in Los Alamos.

It’s such a cool thing to imagine pieces of historic Los Alamos buildings being upcycled to create homes for our residents! The building of Barranca Mesa was part of the AEC’s response to what was referred to at that time as the “critical housing shortage”. As I remind folks on a regular basis, there have been very few times in the history of Los Alamos that we haven’t experienced a major shortage of housing. And as twisted as it sounds, it can be considered a good sign. Our community is growing and expanding. People are excited to move here and become part of the local landscape. We’re growing! And when you’re ready to grow with us, give me a call! I’d love to chat Los Alamos with you.

Central Park Square has been a lot of things over the years. The name “Central Park Square” emerged in 1998 when local developer Tom Netuschil gave the Los Alamos Community Center a facelift. Until that time, Los Alamos had never actually had a “Main Street”. Simply because of location, Central Avenue has always been “Main Street”. But Netuschil’s efforts to re-energize our downtown shopping district have become a rather important moment in our local history. Now a part of the New Mexico Main Street and National Main Street America movements, Los Alamos Main Street hosts community focused activities all year long!

But what was Central Park Square before 1998? While it might surprise you, some folks speculate that our Los Alamos Community Center, built by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947, was one of the first “mall like” shopping centers in the country. The AEC owned and operated the Community Center in those days.

One might suggest that the building of the Community Center was what made Los Alamos “official” in some capacity. Remember that prior to this point the community itself was somewhat temporary. A good number of buildings you still see around town, (including homes), were created with the goal of either tearing them down or moving them elsewhere. Yet here they stay. This is something I often find impressive when I see the creative ways members of our community have refaced, renovated, and upcycled these structures!

Our beautiful US Post Office was a big part of the Community Center. With it’s unique, stylized Thunderbirds, it’s a rather eye catching centerpiece. There was a bigger picture that we often don’t recall though. While the Manhattan Project was still hush-hush, folks were receiving mail at the address, PO Box 1663. The current post office was built on the former site of the Los Alamos Ranch School Trading Post. Thinking about that causes some rather mixed emotions. The history nerd in me wishes the old Trading Post was still exactly in the same spot and operating as a sort of pit stop on the Los Alamos Living History tour. But the current post office has an equal amount of nostalgic value as a childhood memory.

The Mesa Public Library had been operating in the former Central Cafeteria building since 1950. The old cafeteria was in dire need of repairs and updating. During the construction of the Community Center Complex, the library was given a facelift to match our snazzy new post office, and the rest of this new “mall” began to take shape.

Given the number of changes the Community Center and downtown Los Alamos has undergone in the last several decades, it might be difficult to visualize where things were then, and where they are now. This annotated image should help a little.

Something this image shows that I’m certain plenty of folks in town have forgotten, is the Concrete Caves. These old dormitories lingered long into the nineties as studio apartment complexes. Beginning in 1993 with the construction of the current Bradbury Science Museum at the corner of Central Avenue and 15th Street, the Caves were torn down to make way for the modern buildings we now see everyday.

If you’re still confused by the enormous green lawn between the buildings, this further addition was made by Netuschil during his renovation.

The thoroughfare between Central Ave and Nectar Street has several parking lots and a small memorial tree where they intersect. If you look at that small street on Google, it isn’t named. Addresses on that street are referred to as Central Park Square, but the street isn’t a street. At least not officially. And years ago it was a lovely expanse of green grass with sidewalks stretching from building to building. I must say, the thoroughfare and parking lots are far more useful than the grass. Parking in that area of town certainly appreciates the space!

Some of the recreational amenities that were included in the Los Alamos Community Center Complex were a bowling alley, a movie theater, and plenty of restaurants and shops. If you’re feeling a bit critical of what’s on offer these days, let’s not forget that for a good portion of the late eighties and early nineties, our business district wandered over to Trinity Drive. Also remember that the AEC owned and operated the downtown area for a very long time. The recreation committee subsidized businesses or activity centers in order to keep the scientific and support staff happy in this remote community. I often remind folks who are both new and longtime residents that our community growing pains are unique in many ways. A company town struggling so hard to be anything but. And despite both internal and external setbacks, we are thriving in our own way!

When you’re ready to join our community, give me a call! Whether you’re buying or selling real estate here in Los Alamos, I’m your hometown real estate broker and I’d love to chat with you!

As I mentioned several posts ago, I was fortunate enough to acquire several postcards featuring scenic views of Los Alamos from the early years. Several of these absolutely fascinate me for multiple reasons. I thought I would share several and see if any of you have similar thoughts or reactions. Check out this one:

Of course, once my mind moved beyond the picturesque 1940’s era snapshot of what appears to be a beautiful neighborhood in a quaint mountain town, I began to wonder what on earth would make a simple photo of Western Area housing into the sort of thing you’d choose as a postcard?

The description on the back of the postcard reads: “Residential STREET SCENE at Los Alamos, New Mexico, the atomic research center.” The street pictured is Trinity Drive, not far from the Trinity/Diamond intersection.

To a modern mind so used to communicating via text, email, social media, and with the ability to send realtime digital pics to anyone on my contacts list within seconds, a postcard of a residential street seems, well… boring! But I suppose if I consider for a moment some of the pics I take with my phone and send off to friends and combine that with a decades ago mindset, it’s really not surprising that this would make the postcard rack. Perhaps to visitors, housing for the scientific staff responsible for atomic research is a novelty! Rather like buying a postcard featuring a giant sunflower when visiting Kansas.

My next thought? Holy cow! The neighborhood trees have grown taller and the mountains are awfully bare since Western Area was first developed! And The first houses were ready for occupancy in 1947. It was no wonder that Craig Martin credits the Western Area the housing development with “halting the exodus of the scientific staff in the summer of 1947”. The original Western Area three bedroom single family home was the nicest housing option ever to appear in Los Alamos.

Looking at both of these images, there seems to be so much space in the neighborhood! The original plan was to have ample open space and what appeared to be continuous green yards with no barriers. The needs of growing families almost immediately got in the way of that particular master plan. You can see several fences in this image. In those days, you simply had to apply to the Zia Company to put up a fence at your address. So one might suggest it didn’t take long for that wide open space to be disrupted by fencing in favor of keeping kids and dogs at home.

It’s still a gorgeous neighborhood, isn’t it? We all know the flat roofs became an issue. And who can forget the strange kitchen sink issue on the first few “model homes”? But the more I looked, the entire neighborhood began to look so very wrong in these photos. Which brought me to my next “hmmm” moment.

I went back to my Field Guide to Los Alamos Housing and re-read the section on Western Area again. That’s when I realized that in 1948, the housing shortage which had been so briefly addressed by the completion of this new and gorgeous Western Area neighborhood, once again became a major concern for the AEC. At that time, the notion of bridging Pueblo Canyon with utilities was considered a financial non starter. The solution? Squeeze another 150 homes into the Western Area neighborhoods.

Modified Westerns were built between existing homes, at the end of cul de sacs, and all up and down Fairway and Ridgeway, which hadn’t existed until that point. Can you imagine living in that beautiful, brand new neighborhood for a year and then being informed that part of your lot was about to be taken away in order to cram another house in between you and your neighbors?

The Modified Westerns offered much less in the way of amenities than the Originals. No carport or fireplace. No block and stucco this time. Only wood frame was offered. Rooms were 25% smaller and one resident stated in December of 1948 that, “a Christmas tree, a child’s play pen, a few pieces of furniture and a large dog literally filled the living room”.

But it was a roof over their heads, and here in Los Alamos, that means something! If you’re looking to change the roof over your head, give me a call! I love talking real estate in Los Alamos. I’m your hometown real estate broker and I’m always ready to put my knowledge of this wonderful and unique town to work for you and your family!

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!