99% Invisible - Roman Mars Describes Santa Fe As It Is

Episode Date: March 2, 2024

Roman Mars is on a mission to describe the cities that shaped who he is and how he thinks about design. Next up, Santa Fe. Santa Fe wasn’t always on the proverbial map — in fact, the Santa Fe railroad just passed it on by. A lot of care has been taken to keep Santa Fe cute and quaint over its history, with steps to preserve native architecture and historical design. The result is a mixture of structures old and new, but mostly made to look old, for better or worse.Roman Mars Describes Santa Fe As It IsNote: This series is made possible by the new 2024 Lexus GX and SiriusXM. 

These special episodes of 99% Invisible are brought to you by the Lexus GX and Sirius XM. The new Lexus GX shows how an off-roading, overlanding vehicle can also be a true luxury vehicle. Every GX comes standard with Sirius XM, offering a rich array of music, sports, talk, and news. Huge thanks to the Lexus GX and SiriusXM for making this episode possible. Later, we'll meet up with a special guest, SiriusXM host, Rich Davis, and experience the GX firsthand. So stay tuned. To learn more about the GX, visit lexus.com slash GX, and with every purchase, you'll get three months of SiriusXM free. The all-new Lexus GX. Live up to it.

The all-new Lexus GX. Live up to it. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars in Santa Fe. This is the second episode in a three-part series of me recording on location guides to the design features and cool architecture in the cities I love. These bonus episodes are made possible by the new 2024 Lexus GX and Sirius XM who heard this idea and sent me on my merry way and then shipped a Lexus there and took pictures of me bottling next to it, which is not something I thought would ever happen to say the least. So over the past few years, we have fallen in love with the city of Santa Fe in Mexico. We, I mean, me and Joy. Hey Joy.

Hi there. So we've been to Santa Fe many times together and we've learned about its history together. So a lot of this might be a little bit remedial and mansplaining, you know, but you know. What do you mean mansplaining? Well, I mean like, I'm not falling for that. Okay, so we are in Santa Fe Plaza in the historic district of this city. So could you describe the buildings for me? The buildings are short and earthen and brown and beautiful. I think they're amazing. That traditional style of adobe that's on display here looks the way it looks because of this high desert terrain. Early builders in the region didn't have much access

to tin or wood or rock. But what they had in great abundance was dirt and clay. And that's what's used to make adobe bricks. And then they're stuck on top of each other. And then they're stuck out with mud. One of my favorite lines ever uttered in the history of Nine Ims Unvisible was said by Sconofay resident Delaney Hall, who

I'm taking most of this information from when she said, being in northern New Mexico will convince you that beige is a criminally underrated color. I totally agree. So everything about the look and feel of Santa Fe today stems from the fact that when they completed the Santa Fe Railroad in the late 1800s, even though it was called the Santa Fe Railroad, the tracks did not in fact pass directly through Santa Fe. So without being on the main rail line, Santa Fe just couldn't get any industry going and it was struggling economically and the population was rapidly shrinking. And so the mayor at

the time put together a planning board and told them that they needed to come up with a plan to save the city. And they landed on tourism. So they aimed to be this authentic Southwest tourist destination. So the board wrote up a document that's become known as the 1912 plan. They recommended that the city preserve its traditional Adobe architecture, but the plan went even further than that. It said that any new development should also be done in what's called the Santa Fe style. They wanted to create a kind of city-wide architectural brand based on historical precedent.

And nothing like this had ever really been done before on this scale and it was pretty radical at the time. Like there's preservation of like Monticello and like old houses and things like this but this was like the idea of preserving the architectural style of the whole city and it was really kind of radical and interesting. So traditional adobe buildings were preserved like the palace of the governors which is right across the street from us. It dates back to 1610. And new traditional earthen construction was encouraged along with a new modern twist called the Santa Fe style, which doesn't always use actual bricks and mud. Like it said, it used reinforced concrete and steel to create the frame. And then they slapped some stucco and mud on top of it to make it look like a dopey and some people call that a faux dopey, which I think is funny.

The architect John Gall meme is the person most associated with the Santa Fe style. He moved here in the 1920s because he had tuberculosis and he came here to recover and he fell in love with the architecture and he began perpetuating it with that sort of twist. There's a whole side story about how tuberculosis and coming out to New Mexico territory for curing tuberculosis is really the origin of the state and that's a whole like other story that someday John Green will tell us I think because he's right now looking about tuberculosis. And the thing about the 1912 plan is it really works. NFA really did thrive as a tourist destination for decades.

But modernism and more and more modern buildings were beginning to encroach. They were selling the traditional style that the tourism boosters were trying to preserve. And so in 1957, the city leaders took that 1912 plan and they doubled down like the city passed an ordinance that required the Santa Fe style in historic areas. It elaborated a number of sub-styles, a design board was created that had to approve all the aesthetics of any new construction or remodeling, and they created this large historic district in the center of the city,

which is where we're standing now. So over the decades, this created some seismic knock-on effects around density and gentrification, and all that was described really, really well in the story that Delaney Hall did, called Stuck Out in Time. And so this is just the short version,

but it's the foundation of kind of everything we're gonna see today. So I kind of had to like go through it again because you have to understand that that's what was happening The key takeaway from all this and the reason why all this looks the way it does is because over 150 years ago Someone decided that the Santa Fe railroad shouldn't stop in Santa Fe I mean eventually like a spur came out about 18 miles away from the main line But the damage was already done. If it's not on the main line,

it just, it really is kind of on its own. So I think that this like very slippery idea of authenticity is the key to understanding this place. Like, and I say that without judgment. It's not that like authentic is good and inauthentic is necessarily bad. I don't even know what those things mean anyway when it comes to things like architecture and design.

But it's something that I always have in mind here and it's something to really think about when you think about all the stuff that's around. So we should cross that way over the plaza to the Five and Dime General Store on the corner of the plaza. And it brings us to the subject of Frito pie. So can you describe Frito pie?

Yes, I love Frito pie. You have Frito chips and it's topped with some chili and some diced raw onions and you eat it with a spoon and you eat it directly out of the bag. The thing to keep in mind for people who've never heard of Frito Pie, it is not a pie. It's a pile of chips and chili and cheese and onions and sometimes sour cream or you know something like that. But the great innovation when I think it's pretty cool is that it's served inside of a bag of Fritos. You know, it's pretty cool. Yeah. The reason we're talking about FritoPie is that you'll find FritoPie on a lot of menus

around Santa Fe, but according to some, FritoPie was invented in this location, the Five and Time, by a woman named Teresa Hernandez who worked at the lunch counter here when it was a Woolworth's in the 1960s. So it is no longer a Woolworth's, but they do still manage to have at the lunch counter here when it was a Woolworth's in the 1960s. So it is no longer a Woolworth's, but they do still manage to have a small lunch counter which in and of itself seems like a miracle and they still serve Frito Pie. Now this history of the Frito Pie does not comport with the official history from the Frito Lay Company of Texas. And they say that Daisy Dean Doolin,

the original fryer of Fritos, like the inventor of Fritos, and the mother of Elmer Doolin, the founder of Frito-Lay, is the true inventor of Frito-Pi. Like she's the first person to put chili on top of Fritos and add cheese and onions and stuff and eat it with a spoon. But I do think that Teresa Hernandez

has given credit for eating it out of the bag, which I think is like a real leap forward. For sure! But if you order Frito Pie some other places, it might not be in the bag. Just just just be warned, okay? So the reason I'm bringing all this up is because there are all these kind of food feuds and fuzzy food origin stories in the world. Like there's two cities and like Pennsylvania and Ohio respectively who fight over who invented the banana split, one in 1904 and one in 1907. And there's this contested origins of who made the first like mission burrito in San Francisco, though you know the big one with the with all the rice and

stuff in it and the big mission burrito. And it's kind of like all these people in the Midwest who fight over who has the largest ball of twine, you know? And just like that example, it doesn't actually matter who's right, in my opinion. It's the fight that matters. It doesn't behoove anyone to have this matter settled, especially the people at the Santa Fe Plaza of Ivan Dime. Like it doesn't matter which is the most authentic

or the most real. What matters is that the fight kind of stokes your passion and you form an intractable opinion about its true origin and the authentic way to eat it. Like for example, that it should be eaten only out of a bag of Fritos with his rune. Yeah. And you come to the five and dime or any other place and you express that preference with your dollars. That's really what matters. You know, I think the fight is what matters. So I don't really care who did it first.

I don't either. I just like that it's good. And I find a way that I find the most satisfying way to eat it. So much so that when we got married, you want to tell them that we had as our late night snack when we got married? Sure. We had to have Frito Pie. We had to have Frito Pie because it's the greatest snack.

And it was a great late night snack after everyone's dancing. You pass around bags of chips and it has chili on top of it. It's awesome. It made me so happy. Yeah, so good. Okay. So we'll get some couple bags of Frito Pie later. But let's go back across the plaza to basically where we were before to talk about an architectural feature that is super interesting to me

So if you look at the Palace of the Governors, you'll see these tree trunks sticking out of the walls near the ceiling and those are Vicas and they are part of traditional adobe architecture and they hold up the roof and they attach the roof to the exterior walls. And just like other aspects of the Santa Fe style, this was an essential and sort of structural thing in the building of these of adobe, but they became kind of ornamental. This old building, it's mostly structural and then and when they did some remodeling, that actually they had ornamental vigas. So newer buildings will have vigas

that are just there to look cool and to give sort of an authentic feel, like Adobe feel. And those sort of mid-century building codes that we were talking about, they're about preserving and perpetuating the Santa Fe style. They gave you like high marks if you have, you know, like ornamental vigas projecting from your building, whether or not they serve any purpose of them to just look like the Santa Fe style.

Okay, so the interesting thing about these original structural vigas is that, you know, they're real wood beams made out of a single tree trunk and because of wood characteristics and availability and transportation, vigas mostly max out at about 15 feet long. And so because of that limitation, buildings built for a long time in the traditional way could only have interior rooms that were less than 15 feet wide.

And I think that maybe you felt that, like we've been in a lot of these traditional buildings down here and everything's really small. Yeah, yeah. Even if you build a little taller, like a mission church or something like that, that central room, you know, that whatever you call it, like, where you pray, you know, the pews and stuff.

Uh-huh. Yeah. I'm not very familiar. I don't go to church. But, but, all, even those are not all that wide. They're tall, but they're not all that wide. And we've been to some of the mission churches here, and they're, again, pretty narrow. And I think that sort of that size limitation that the Vigas sort of necessitated meant that you can you kind of can fall in love like the scale of it feels like human scale you know and

it's meant to be interacted with in that way and you can just really put your arms around this place. So one of the people who really put his arms around this place was J. Robert Abenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. So here's a little segue for you. So when he was young, he said, my two great loves are physics and New Mexico. It's a pity they can't be combined. And when he was put in charge of the Manhattan Project, he finally got to combine them.

Like he loved to camp and ride horses in the New Mexico High Desert. So when the government needed to build a secret town to house all the scientists of the project, he suggested Los Alamos as their secret base of operations. So the problem is, if you're trying to get all these scientists and engineers and technicians to a top secret town in the desert, you can't just give them an address and tell them to show up. Like that we wouldn't be a secret town for very long. So instead he told the people that they recruited to go to 109 East Palace. It's about half a block from the plaza and we should go there now and into the little courtyard.

The primary contact person who greeted arrivals at 109 East Palace was Dorothy Scarrett McKippen and she would arrange transport for these scientists to go from here to the secret facilities and there's this plaque that commemorates all this in the back of the courtyard and it reads 109 East Palace Santa Fe office Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, University of California. All the men and women who made the first atomic bomb passed through this portal to their secret mission at Los Alamos. Their creation in 27 months of the weapons that ended World War II was one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time. The dates are 1943 to 1963.

That plaque is left over the coffee shop and... Casimir store, Casimir and chocolate. Casimir and chocolate shop. Has my name on it. It's called, it's called Oppies. It's named after Oppenheimer. So he has a connection to this place and they sort of keep some of that stuff alive. So let's leave the Plaza area and just go a few blocks away and meet up

with Delaney Hall. Okay, so we are here with our Santa Fe correspondent, Delaney Hall. Tell us about a very cool, very, very old Santa Fe thing. So tell me where we are. Okay, so we are standing here outside. It's chilly and kind of snowy. And we are next to something that you definitely wouldn't notice unless someone pointed it out to you. So it's a narrow ditch. It's like a few feet deep, a few feet wide, pretty modest. It's kind of lined with rock. But this is actually like a super important piece of infrastructure in Santa Fe. So it is the Asequia Madre, which is otherwise known as the Mother Ditch. And it has been here for at least 400 years since the earliest days of Santa Fe. And I brought you here because I think the history of this ditch will basically tell you something about the local culture of northern New Mexico

and also just how important water is in a place as dry as this. Okay, so tell me more about that history. Okay, so the Asakia Monterey, it was dug out not long after Santa Fe was founded in 1610 and it was designed to carry water from the Santa Fe River to the homes and gardens of the early settlers in Santa Fe. So it provided water for crops and livestock. And then over hundreds of years, this neighborhood has become not so much a farming community. Instead, it's like a quite fancy neighborhood with lots of very expensive homes. But the ditch is still here. And amazingly, it has been in continuous operation. So this is a 400-year-old ditch, like still doing its thing.

So is this ditch totally unique, or is this part of a system of ditches for irrigation? So this ditch is very unique in Santa Fe, and its history is unique, and its role here in town. But actually, like, all over northern New Mexico, can find Asakias like this one. So they're part of these branching systems of ditches that carry water from rivers out into the communities that surround them, and they have a pretty cool history. So the word Asecia actually comes from an Arabic term, which means water conduit, and this style of irrigation canal goes back to the ancient Arab world, where people were developing techniques to grow food in very dry

places. And then here in northern New Mexico, indigenous peoples developed similar irrigation techniques over the thousands of years they've lived here. And then when the Spanish colonized this area, they brought their own style of irrigation to which they had inherited from the Arab world. Is this part of ancient history, or is this still like, why is this ditch still here? Right, well, it is very old history, but it also is still in use. Like even this Aseke Amadre is still in use.

It helped, you know, the people who live along here, at least some of them will have water rights and so every summer the ditch will carry water and you can have these little diversion channels which like pipe it on to your lawn So um, so that's sort of the use of the Ezequia Madre and Santa Fe like I said This is not so much a farming community anymore But all over northern New Mexico there still are small-scale farms and farming operations

and even just local gardeners. And so you know I guess one of the things I find most fascinating about Asakias is that they are still very much an important part of the culture here and in fact they have shaped the culture here so so one really cool thing about them is that they basically have their own little systems of grassroots government that that have sprung up around them and the way it works is every Asecia has an Aakia association, which represents the interests of the people who live on the ditch and have water rights. And heading that association is Amir Domho, which is the water master, an amazing title,

who oversees the distribution of water and the maintenance of the ditch. And what that really looks like, just as a small example, is that every spring, all the members of the Ezekia have to come together to clear out the weeds that have accumulated to make way for the water that comes in the summer. And so that means meeting your neighbors and working alongside all the people who are part of your watershed. It's just a very cool example of the collective management of water and the traditions and community that spring up around water here in the desert.

Oh, that is so cool. I love the idea that they have like an adopt the highway system But it's about connected to watershed So you know like that because the real connection points the real like resource that you're dealing with is water Yeah, so like knowing like who's upstream of you is like so cool And you all have to come together to maintain that channel that brings the water to all of you It's really a neat system here. Well, that is so cool, Delaney.

Thank you so much for bringing us here. That's awesome. Absolutely, you're welcome. We have one more stop a little bit out of town right after this break. This special bonus episode of 99% Invisible is brought to you by the 2024 Lexus GX and SiriusXM. The Lexus GX is at the apex of high end luxury

and high end utility. When we went to Santa Fe, Lexus let us play with the GX Luxury Plus, the very top of the line of the GX series. They also sent us the very top of the line senior advertising planner, Eric Kavanaugh, to walk me through all the features of this model, including my favorite one. This model has three rows of seating. And as anyone who travels with kids or travels with stuff knows that you pile in the kids, you pile in the stuff, the rear view mirror

is pretty much non-functional at that point. But you have a solution for that. We do. It's the digital rear view mirror. So of course, you can have it in the analog mode, which is like the normal old mirror that you would expect. But just with just a flip of that switch, and now converts it to the digital rear view mirror. Which turns the rear view mirror into a high-def screen that is connected to a high-def camera

that is mounted to the outside of the rear window glass. That's going to give you an unobstructed view of your surroundings. As a person who drives around a bunch of kids with a bunch of stuff, I cannot tell you how useful that feature is to me. The 2024 Lexus GX Luxury Plus is perfectly suited to taking a bunch of people on the road where everyone can see in all directions, including the sky,

because the massive panoramic roof and really experience the world in extreme comfort and style. That is the experience of being in the Lexus GX Luxury Plus. And when you're driving a bunch of people around who sometimes, you know, do not want to talk to me, even though I'm super interesting with fun facts and things and don't want to play road trip games and have very disparate musical tastes.

I recommend turning on Sirius XM or one of the most charming people I've ever talked to, will entertain people with 20 years of pop music. I'm Rich Davis, I work at SiriusXM. I'm a host on Pop2K, The Pulse, and HitsOne. And so what made you gravitate towards pop music? You've been at SiriusXM for a long time. So like, why was this the area that you became centered on?

Pop radio, I always just felt, was just so locked in. I know people are in rock and hip hop and country. I just feel like pop music, you're just sort of always in the loop. I enjoy mainstream stuff. Some people don't. I like living in the mainstream. So Pop2K is music from 2000 to 2009,

which is current to me, but oldies to my children. But tell me what's going on with hits one What I love about hits one is I like hearing these new artists come up and I sort of I sort of take pride in knowing that Like Ed Sheeran was a brand new artist. I met him before he was not doing anything I remember Taylor Swift me being one of her first interviews when she went mainstream from country to pop I love seeing someone go from playing small little clubs to, holy crap, they're playing big venues now. I love to watch their, their hustle.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And since you've been there doing it for a little while, you, you have that perspective. You've seen this happen over and over and over again. What kind of spark do they have that makes you think, oh, like this kid, I feel it that we're going to be talking about them in 20 years. It's hard to identify because there's some people that come in the room and kid, I feel it that we're going to be talking about them in 20 years. It's hard to identify because there's some people that come in the room and you're like,

wow, charisma. This person's a star. One of the fun things about Serious XM is that you're talking about all walks of life in one place. I remember I was interviewing Henry Winkler, the Fonz. Yeah. And who walks by the studio, the glass window, Bruno Mars. And you see Bruno Mars saying, holy crap, it's Henry Winkler, the Fonz. I just sort of stepped back and I let them have a moment. And it was amazing. You can hear Rich Davis on Pop2k, the pulse and hits one. And you'll get all those channels and so much more with your free three month subscription

to SiriusXM with the purchase of a new Lexus GX. To learn more about the GX visit lexus.com. The all new Lexus GX. Live up to it. So we are now 15 minute drive north of downtown in the foothills of the Sangra de Cristo Mountains at one of the trail heads of the Dale Ball trails. So, Dale Ball was a businessman who loved hiking. He came to Santa Fe kind of later in life and he noticed there was all this brilliant and beautiful

landscape but people didn't have the right to hike it. It was this mess of public and private land and so he founded the Santa Fe Conservation Trust to negotiate easements with property owners and purchase land for conservation, work with the city and county to donate land, all of that to build a 25-mile looping network of public trails over 1150 acres that connect the national forest to Santa Fe proper. And this is the trailhead parking lot. In fact, one of the things that the city contributed is they paid for the parking lot. They built the parking lot for us to stand in and park, I guess. His whole mission was to make the trails accessible to everyone who wanted to be outside and join New Mexico. When you come here, there's nothing quite like it, right?

No, there really isn't. You just want to be outside and looking at the sun. The color. Yeah. Yeah. It's unbelievable. And what's so great about these, the Dale Ball trails, is that they're really, they're close to town. They're easy to get to.

They're open year round. There are some steep parts and amazing views, but a lot of it's really gentle. It's very inviting, I think. And you can feel this intention, trying to bring people in, especially in the trail design, which you remember, it totally blew us away the first time we were hiking here, right?

Yeah, it was remarkable. Yeah. And now we're seeing anything like it. They were well marked trails, didn't get lost, it all made sense. There was no question. Yeah. Which fork I should take. Totally.

The signage is really clear and welcoming and it's a trail made for people who may be a little anxious about getting lost. That's right. There's a number given to each of the sort of crossroads and intersections and very clear directions to each. You know, we'd never seen anything like it. I was kind of amazed. In fact, it was the way finding and the trail design that made me want to look into the history of this place. Also, that it's called Dale Ball. You're like, why is it called Dale Ball? But you could tell there was a story behind the design, something very intentional. So the trail was designed by a retired US forestry manager named

Mike Wurz that Dale Ball convinced to come on board. And he, along with 50 volunteers, built these trails over five years until they were completed in 2005. An anonymous donor put up the money for all the trailblazing and the donor had two conditions for his donations. One was that he or she remained anonymous, that no one ever know who did it. And the other was that the trail is being named after Dale Ball. Yeah, it is a little suspicious. Okay. Um, but I do actually kind of believe it's an outside person. And the reason is because apparently through all this process for years

and years of him working for the San Jose Conservation Trust, um, there were attempts to name other things after him and he refused. And so, but this one, apparently they acquiesced to because they really needed the money to complete it. And it's this lovely set of trails. Like I love it, we've hiked it before. It's snowing now, so it has this nice crunch when you walk onto it. You know, like it's a real gift

that a person really cared about this place, gave this area. So Dale Ball died at the age of 91 in 2016. And so all this work that he did was all after he retired. He was in the 70s and 80s when he did all of this to build this place. So that just really tells me something. I think that's really amazing. So poor went out for Dale Ball in the Dale Ball trails. I love them. So that is our time in Santa Fe. This lovely place. It's the greatest. It is the greatest. Yeah, it's really, really lovely. I want to stay. Yeah, we could stay. Why don't we stay?

Dale Ball like showed up late in life and did all this stuff as if he grew up here. And I think that that I think that's a vibe. I think people show up here and and they and they go, oh, this is my place. Yeah, I mean, I've never seen anything like this. Or it's just different when you set foot in this city. Yeah. Hey, you want to walk a little bit? What do you want to walk a little bit? What do you want to walk? Maybe you could get into the trees.

Thanks for joining us for this special Santa Fe episode of 99% Invisible brought to you by the Lexus GX and Sirius XM. And thanks to Eric Kavanaugh, Rich Davis, and Joy Usan for being my special guests. The new Lexus GX showcases how aesthetic appeal complements utility. Proving luxury and capability can coexist. And when you throw a Sirius XM in there, you have everything you need to be out in the farthest reaches while still being connected to a passionate community of music-loving DJs, world-class talkers, comedians, and thinkers.

To learn more about the GX and Serious XM and Lexus vehicles, visit lexus.com. The all-new Lexus GX. Live slash GX. The all new Lexus GX. Live up to it. I also encourage you to go to this episodes page on 99pi.org where you can look at me posing with a very fancy car. And you can stream your first three months free of SiriusXM where you can listen

on the SiriusXM app online or on other compatible devices. You'll get more than 425 channels including ad free music plus sports, comedy, news, and more. You can listen anywhere on the all-new SiriusXM app. Go to 99pi.org to subscribe to SiriusXM. 99% invisible was reported this week by me, Roman Mars, and Delaney Hall, and edited by me, Roman Mars,

with production help from Isabel Angel and Sarah Bake. Mix and sound design by Dara Hirsch, music by Swan Real. Kathy II is our executive producer, Delaney Hall is our senior editor, Kurt Colestead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Barube, Jason De Leon, Vivian Lay, Lausha Madon, Christopher Johnson, Martin Gonzalez, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Nina Pothock, Kelly Prime, and Jacob Muldonado-Madina. The 99% of his old logo was created by Stefan Lawrence, special thanks this week to the Randall Davy Audubon Center and Sanctuary. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Vandora building. Our headquarters online is 99pi.org.