Rehabilitating A National Historic Landmark: The Story of the National Park Service’s Old Santa Fe Trail Building

SALON EL ZAGUAN with Charles Vickrey and Flynn Larson, National Park Service

Rehabilitating A National Historic Landmark:
The Story of the National Park Service’s Old Santa Fe Trail Building

ABOUT THE SALON TALK
The Old Santa Fe Trail Building is a New Deal Era adobe building constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Constructed of 280,000 adobe bricks, the National Park Service Regional Headquarters adapts local building tradition to the Spanish Pueblo Revival style which was popularized in the 1930s in northern New Mexico and adopted by building NPS architect Cecil Doty. The building is unique in its expression of organic forms with sculptural massing and locally inspired textures and pigment that blend into the landscape. The Spanish Colonial style is adopted throughout the interior in decorative elements with CCC-crafted wood furnishings, and light fixtures to connect local forms with daily NPS functions. Some changes throughout the twentieth century, however, negatively impacted the building causing several technical issues. In 2018, the National Historic Landmark underwent a rehabilitation project to solve these issues, addressing architectural elements throughout to allow the building to function as originally intended. The project required the team to adapt to the unique needs of an adobe building, reversing years of water damage to protect the original adobe bricks. In this presentation, we will share the Old Santa Fe Trail Building’s journey from construction to rehabilitation, exploring its history and revealing its transformation from 1936 to today.

Find more information on the renovations in the Santa Fe New Mexican articles:
Park Service at work on iconic Santa Fe building, Paul Weideman, Jan. 12, 2019
Depression-era adobe office building to undergo renovations, Tripp Stelnicki, April 15, 2017

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Flynn Larson is a Masters in historic preservation student at Goucher College and is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is an SCA-Americorps intern with the National Park Service’s Intermountain Historic Preservation Services program working with historic structures throughout Regions 6, 7, and 8 of the National Park System. She is focused on the preservation of historic structures and landscapes throughout America’s national parks. She is also a member of the Historic Districts Review Board in Santa Fe.

Charles Vickrey started his career with the National Park Service (NPS) in February 1991 as a Drafter for the Design and Engineering Division for the Southwest Regional Office in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He served in temporary positions with the NPS in subsequent years, until receiving his degree in Architecture in 1997 from the University of New Mexico. In 1998, Charles restarted his NPS career serving as a Project Inspector on the construction of the Northwest New Mexico Visitor Center and Multi-agency Center in Grants, New Mexico for El Malpais National Monument. A year later, he joined the Intermountain Regional Office (formerly the Southwest Regional Office) of the NPS, based at the Old Santa Fe Trial Building. In early 2000, Charles served in a term position for the Regional Contracting Office in Santa Fe. In 2002 he moved from contracting to the Design and Engineering Division as an Architect. In 2018 Charles assumed the role as senior Architect for the Santa Fe Office.

Charles has spent much of his career working out of the Old Santa Fe Trail Building, with only brief absences to work in other parks such as Big Bend National Park, Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site, Hubble Trading Post National Historic Site and Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument. Charles has worked on small and large architectural projects from Arkansas to Montana for the National Park Service for over 30 years.

Jeff Pappas on New Mexico's Segregated Past - Salon on YouTube

SALON EL ZAGUAN
Jeff Pappas, State Historic Preservation Officer

New Mexico’s Segregated Past
Documenting Jim Crow and the National Register of Historic Places

About the talk:
The National Register of Historic Places does and is far more than its honorific title suggests. Sure, it’s the nation’s repository for significant structures and buildings, sites and districts. In fact, as of today, there are over 90,000 resources listed in the register, a list that grows by the day. In New Mexico alone, we have approximately 2,100 individually listed properties with an additional 2,400 contributing resources. There’s an entire office suite at SHPO filled with all kinds of files. Maps, nominations, correspondence, you name it. The collective history curated at SHPO operates like a small archive. It anchors our work and helps determine the historic fabric of our state. But despite these efforts there is still so much about New Mexico we don’t know. For example, certain topics and subjects like the African American story have hardly been explored. Part of what we do at SHPO is to try and find these stories, record them and make them accessible. Five years ago, my office began to research a small slice of the African American story focused on segregated schools in the eastern part of the state. This lecture will take a look at our progress to date and talk how we’ve engaged the national register to tell the story of New Mexico’s segregated past. It will also discuss a new research project that’s intended to broaden the story by looking at other types of buildings and structures associated with the African American experience.

Jeff Pappas holds degrees from Brigham Young University, Baylor University, and a Ph.D. in American Indian and Environmental History from Arizona State University.   Before joining NMSHPO, Pappas worked for National Park Service at Yosemite splitting his year between California and Fort Collins, CO, where he taught in the history department at Colorado State University.  He was appointed State Historic Preservation Officer in 2012 and teaches part-time in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico.

Jeff Pappas, Ph.D., Director
Historic Preservation Division &State Historic Preservation Officer
New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs
407 Galisteo Street, Suite 236
Santa Fe, NM  87501
jeff.pappas@state.nm.us
(505) 629-6510

Springtime on Canyon Road

Historic Santa Fe Foundation has recently partnered with Kyle Maier for multiple video projects including an upcoming interview with Tom Leech and Patricia Musick and a video tour of Acequia de la Murella with BC Rimbeaux. Please enjoy his production of Springtime on Canyon Road.

The "Art and Soul of Santa Fe." Produced in collaboration with Canyon Road Contemporary and The Historic Santa Fe Foundation. Original composition and soundscape by Gregory Webb. Shot and edited by Kyle Maier.