There is one thing that has always been and will likely always be true about housing in Los Alamos. It’s creative. Whether you live in group housing, a condo, an apartment, a single family home on Barranca Mesa, a five acre plot of land in Pajarito Acres, a mobile home, or even an Air BnB. You’ll probably agree that housing options in Los Alamos are sometimes unusual, but always creative!

There are currently three mobile home parks in Los Alamos. La Mesa and Tsikumu Village are up on North Mesa and of course Elk Ridge (formerly Royal Crest) is on East Jemez Rd at the top of what we locals often refer to as the “Truck Route”. Each mobile home park offers its own unique array of amenities.

Homeowners in Tsikumu Village own not only their manufactured home, but the lot it sits on. Some of these homes have incredible views from the canyon’s edge. La Mesa Trailer Park has a more traditional arrangement with manufactured homes owned by the homeowner and lots owned by a landlord. The park itself has a great location on North Mesa close to a dog park, playgrounds, athletic fields, and the Middle School. Elk Ridge offers a little more flexibility in the sort of “trailer home” an occupant wants to put on their rented lot. If you’ve got a travel trailer of any sort, you’re welcome to set up for “permanent” use at Elk Ridge.

It might be difficult to imagine choosing to live in your fifth wheel or camp trailer for months on end while working at LANL. However, if you look back at the beginning of Los Alamos housing history, you’ll find that Laboratory employees have been doing this since the very beginning. Not only that, but the sort of camping trailers available on the market in the 1940s weren’t going to come with a full kitchen, shower, satellite television, and perhaps even a gas fireplace. They were pretty basic back then. And a good number of them were manufactured by their owners.

Back in the early to mid 1940s, the Los Alamos site had already far exceeded its original call for “sufficient housing for a dozen scientists”. It didn’t take long for even the most skilled workers to be given a bed in 23 expandable trailers and 47 standard trailers. Even though the term “expandable trailer” calls to mind any number of modern camp trailers, these were most definitely not modern. By the time the sides had been folded away from the middle, the living room wound up being about 13×6 feet. If you can’t imagine what sort of space that is, think a box stall for livestock in a barn. Thank goodness they weren’t trying to fit their big screen television inside!

The trailers brought in to serve for temporary housing weren’t going to win any esthetic design contests.

Of course, if came to the Manhattan Engineer District when the trailer park was already full, you might have been assigned a hutment. Quonset Hutments were originally designed for war in the Pacific theater. Thanks to this fact, Los Alamos residents dubbed the huts the Pacific Hutments. Shaped a bit like an airplane hangar, these were used as duplexes with one front door on either end of the tube.

Last but not least, we come full circle to the folks who took the option to drive their own campers or “caravans” up to Los Alamos in order to take up residence in the trailer park. In his book about Los Alamos housing, Craig Martin estimates there were over 250 privately owned trailers parked in town to provide housing for their owners. If you’ve ever looked at a RV from the 1940s, they weren’t going to provide you with the creature comforts we expect from such a vehicle today. In fact, these didn’t even have any kind of indoor plumbing.

These days it isn’t uncommon for people to debate what to do with the MariMac Plaza or the old Hilltop House hotel. There’s been a lot of talk about how to best present Los Alamos to the public when newcomers first drive into town. Now, imagine a time before tourism. The first thing people saw when they approached the general vicinity of our new roundabout was a maze of over three hundred expandable, standard, and camper trailers. It’s rather amazing anyone stuck around!

Quonset Huts in the Pacific were white. Here in Los Alamos they were Army Green!

That’s right, folks. The location of Los Alamos’s very first “trailer park” is the lot occupied by the MariMac Plaza and the Hilltop House hotel. Just across Central Avenue from this “trailer park”, the Pacific Hutments crouched in rows of round topped buildings. Keep in mind that none of these dwellings had indoor plumbing. This meant that there were latrine and shower trailers parked in between the rows of trailers and hutments.

While Los Alamos wasn’t exactly putting its best foot forward back then, people were here for the mission and not the housing. Maybe, like almost all of us at one time, newcomers were so transfixed by the incredible views that they simply didn’t care how creative their housing was. They just wanted to be here in this amazing city on the hill. If you’d like to join the community of Los Alamos, give me a call! I’d love to talk Real Estate with you!