Michael Romero Taylor Interview

Nuevo Mexico Profundo started on an oral biography/heritage archive project conducted by Frank Graziano. The interviewees are a cross-section of experience in New Mexico. Profundo’s Frank Graziano presents another extensive, personal look at the life and work of Michael Romero Taylor.

Michael Romero Taylor has been working for the last forty years in historic preservation. His experience includes historic site management, architectural conservation, management of cultural routes, museum/visitor center management and archaeological site preservation. In the United States, he served as the New Mexico State Historic Preservation Officer in 1994-95, and was the Deputy Director of New Mexico State Monuments from 1995 to 2001. Taylor earned a masters certificate from the Architectural Conservation Course through ICCROM in Rome, Italy 1987, and has been active with the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) for the past twenty five years. He has lectured on historic preservation with emphasis on earthen architecture, site management, and cultural routes in Latin America, Europe, and Asia. In 2010, he was selected as a visiting scholar to the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles. Taylor earned a certificate in Historic Preservation and Regionalism from the University of New Mexico in 2016. He retired in 2019 from the National Park Service working as a cultural resource specialist for nine congressionally designated historic trails in the United States. His research interests include international approaches to preservation, protection and management of cultural routes.

More on Nuevo Mexico Profundo here.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Park Project by Sofia Horn

Introduction by Pete Warzel

Sofia Horn is a senior student at the Academy for Technology and the Classics in Santa Fe. She is the daughter of Claudia Meyer Horn, architect and landscape architect, and principal of Design Office, and of James Horn, architect, and partner at Spears Horn Architects. She is also the granddaughter of Jacqueline Hill, our long time office manager at HSFF, until her retirement at the end of September. It was through Jacqueline, at her last staff meeting, that we heard about this project and its gathering for planting the weekend before. As you will see, in Sofia’s words below, it was quite an undertaking, of community and private/public cooperation. The planning was intensive – note the image of Sofia’s planting and landscape plan – and the coordination maybe only something a committed high schooler could accomplish. It is not quite completed yet, as Sofia tells us about some final steps to take place at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Park. I urge you to go and take a look at what vision and commitment can accomplish. The park is located at 2739 Calle Serena, Santa Fe, between Zia Road and Rodeo Road, just before they merge as Rodeo. Congratulations to Sofia and to the city for recognizing the importance of this project, and assisting in getting it done.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Park Project by Sofia Horn

I did this project to work on my Girl Scout Gold Award Project initially, but during the planting at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Park, I knew it was much more than a badge. It was bringing community together, and helping the environment.

For a Girl Scout Gold Award, a girl has to spend 80 hours on a project she organizes and leads. I spent that time finding the perfect place to improve with plants, planning out where all of the trees and shrubs needed to go, asking for donations from nurseries and Lowe's. It was a long journey, but the day to plant finally came on September 25th. There were neighbors that showed up, my friends, family, arborists, horticulturalists, the mayor, and two city Councilors (Carol Romero-Wirth and Jamie Cassutt).

 We planted two big bur Oaks and a lot of small pollinator plants donated by the Xerces Society through a grant to connect the city on a pollinator trial. In total there were 105 plants planted including trees, shrubs, and cacti. I plan to plant some roses in the front of the park as well because Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s wife really liked roses, and I also plan to put some yucca and other succulents on the other side of the park. I will build and place a native bee hive at the park so all of the pollinators have a place to live during the winter when the flowers are not in bloom. 

During the process, I wanted to get input from the neighbors who lived in the area, so I held a public meeting at the park. I drew up a plan to get an understanding of what the park would look like and I talked with a horticulturalist to get his opinion on where the plants should be placed. Then my mother and I went out to the park to place flags where each plant would be placed so it would be easy to see on planting day. 

I wanted to do this project because I love plants, I wanted to help the community, and planting pollinator shrubs is beneficial to bees and butterflies.

Jacqueline Hill Retires from HSFF

Pete Warzel, Jacqueline Hill, Mara Saxer, and Melanie McWhorter - staff of HSFF

Jacqueline Hill Retires from HSFF

On March 17, 2014, I entered the office of the Historic Santa Fe Foundation for the first time as an employee. Three people greeted me. Graciela Tomé, then Chair of the Board, Mac Watson, head of the search committee for the new Executive Director, and Jacqueline Hill.

Jacqueline had been hired several months before to try and organize administration, left to its own devices for some time. Board Directors were hands on, running the place. Jacqueline and the Board created order.

She has been here ever since, and now suddenly, she will not be. September 30, 2021 was her retirement day, and one she was very much looking forward to. Most people I know are ambivalent about retirement, and hem and haw as they near the time. Not so with Jacqueline. She relished the day and the time to explore new things. She laughs out loud. She is most genuinely happy to greet that day.

A small non-profit staff has to have each other’s backs, and cover duties not necessarily in a job description. We are blessed with people who jump in without complaint, and handle issues a staff twice as large could not. Jacqueline’s title is Office Manager, but so much more. She designed the award certificates and frames for the annual Heritage Preservation Awards, our Architectural Stewardship Award. She vetted and gave counsel on potential new tenants, and mostly was right in her assessments. She handled the flow of invoices and payments and when accounts went out whack or a bill missed it was invariably my fault. She has been a strong supporter of new programs and a cheerleader for the El Zaguán Master Plan, often giving ideas on how to make the plan more efficient. She is a very wise person.

In eight years, El Zaguán has in many ways become her place. She is the only one who can unlock and open the door to Apartment #1 without a problem. She is a master at engaging visitors to the Foundation, and finds out more about their lives than they likely seem to offer. She has lived many adventures in her life and talking to her, listening to her stories, is a joy. Now just to wait for the next endeavor and the next story…she will not disappoint.

Sincere thanks Jacqueline, for all you have done for me and for the Foundation. Have a blast. But also come visit. You have been a very good friend and partner in getting all this done and should be proud of how much has been accomplished since you came here to work.

Email melanie@historicsantafe.org to send your well wishes to Jacqueline and we will pass along all messages.

Help us welcome aboard Linda Williams as our new Office Manager, linda@historicsantafe.org.

Images: Jacqueline Hill's retirement party with artist-in-residence Paul Baxendale (above) and with Ken Stilwell (below).

A Tale of Santa Fe: Betty Stewart in the City Different

Reviewed by Pete Warzel

I have heard about Betty Stewart homes during our dealings at the Historic Santa Fe Foundation, and while searching for extraordinary properties to engage for our Steward events. I do not believe I have ever been to visit one. I now most definitely want to.

Mark H. Cross tells the story of an amazing life, one that he binds to the architectural and preservation history of Santa Fe, and like Stewart herself, Cross sides on artistic and architectural creativity, not the restrictive condiitons of the Santa Fe Historic Styles Ordinance of 1957. He sees both Stewart and the City of Santa Fe on parallel but divergent tracks – each in a search for identity. “Santa Fe’s ordinance was written to restore the entire historic district to what it should look like.” Betty, on the other hand, stated in a city council meeting appeal to stop one of her pitched roof houses, “I like a pitched roof. Why do you like a blue jacket. It’s a matter of taste.” And that is where the line was drawn, taste. 

The house in question was her own, an addition that was designed with a pitched roof at Acequia Madre and Garcia Street. The debate was on, vociferously, with a cast of friends and family of our foundation – the Old Santa Fe Association, John Meem, Irene von Horvath, Pen LaFarge, and our neighbor at our former Hovey House, Pat French. This makes for fascinating recent history (1980) and I will not spoil the outcome here.

Betty Stewart was the daughter of a successful Texas automobile dealer and a privileged and refined mother who attended finishing school in Nashville. By all accounts Betty was a real pistol. Born in Dalhart, Texas, the family bought a working cattle ranch on Ute Creek in Harding County, New Mexico where she and her brother Pete were home schooled. Her mother eventually sent Betty to the Brownmoor School in Santa Fe, then housed at Bishop’s Lodge, a school similar to the regime at the boy’s equivalent school in Los Alamos, the Los Alamos Ranch School (soon to be the secret city). Betty became acquainted with her future home.

But to get there she had to struggle – through alcoholism, coming out as a lesbian in conservative Dalhart, physical deterioration – and then, suddenly quit drinking and began to find her true self. Santa Fe was now home, “ a place for misfits” as Cross states, “welcoming to eccentrics.”

In the early 1970’s Betty Stewart designed and built a house that was based on one her brother Pete had designed for a friend in Tesuque, with a pitched roof that would become Betty’s signature style. The inspiration was the Stewart family ranch house on Ute Creek, adobe wall construction, long portals, open ceiling to the roof, brick floors. But it was her sense of space and proportion that would define her style. “A Betty Stewart house feels honest….It was as if she had studied the Modernism rule book – in her houses, form follows function and materials look like what they.” Cross gives a primer a Stewart home, designated by elements and succinct descriptions that is well worth reading. The sections are accompanied by photographs that give life to the narrative, and call out the specifics that define her form. “The great room always had a chandelier, which might be glass, pewter or New Mexican tinwork.” And wonderful commentary. “Betty was not very domestic, so she had little interest in kitchens, bathrooms, and bedrooms.” More than the pitched roofs as defining of Stewart’s style, I see in the photographs the sculptural feeling of the interiors – deep door openings and window wells, ornamental and scalloped details over the door and window openings, all carved into the double thickness of adobe.

Cross then places Betty Stewart in the re-re-definition of Santa Fe’s identity with the invention of Santa Fe Style in the 1980’s as the “New West,” the trend du jour for fashion and interior design proclaimed by Ralph Lauren, Bloomingdales, Sakes Fifth Avenue, and on. “Soon,

New York-based decorators, designers, photographers and writers who never thought of Santa Fe were visiting the city and returning with their own ideas of how to promote it.” It was a boom of publicity, and a trend. Betty’s new house was the subject of an article in House & Garden magazine. “She was portrayed as a prairie savant who used traditional building techniques that others had forgotten.” Betty Stewart, after a difficult life, had become, like Santa Fe, a brand.

Mark Cross has written a well-researched history of a true Santa Fe spirit. Betty Stewart’s difficult road to sobriety and legitimacy ran parallel to the city searching, then creating, the most recent version of its identity. A Tale of Santa Fe it is, and a well written biography of an adoptive Santa Fean, who was uncompromising in her own vision of what style must be.

A Tale of Santa Fe: Betty Stewart in the City Different
By Mark H. Cross
Caminito Publishing LLC
Softbound, 240 pages
$26.95

Breathe: A Novel Joyce Carol Oates, Reviewed by Pete Warzel

Review by Pete Warzel

Terror…. Breathe. “He must breathe. He must not stop breathing.” A wife struggles with her overwhelming fear and attempts to maintain calm, nursing her husband as he careens towards death, unexpectedly, quickly, finally.

Joyce Carol Oates, at the age of eighty-three, still has the ability to become someone else, to get into her characters’ heads, and convey a sense of being intimate with the subject, in this case so thoroughly and terrifyingly inside the head of a grieving widow. Oates wrote one of the best pieces of short fiction I have ever read, Papa at Ketchum, an imaginative enactment of Hemingway’s last days. (One of the pieces in her book Wild Nights!) She becomes Hemingway so thoroughly you are seduced into believing Hemingway is narrating, internally, the road to insanity and his eventual suicide. It is stunning. It is terrifying. She creates the man as his mind disintegrates, and accomplishes much the same here.

Gerard McManus and his wife Michaela are in residence at the Santa Tierra Institute for Advanced Research where he is working on editing his magnum opus, The Human Brain and Its Discontents. A distinguished Harvard professor, he is loving, tender, older than his wife by eleven years, and a well-respected academic who can command the stage when he presents. She is a writer of memoirs, and teaches a seminar in writing at a satellite campus of UNM. They are living in a rented house not far from the Institute where Michaela lives alone after a sudden illness turns a quick hospital stay for her husband into the last stages of cancer, and a vigil that only has one ending. In the house she panics, remembers, and confronts her demons, real and imagined.

A literary theme of the novel is that of Orpheus and Eurydice. Reversed, then reversed again. Michaela buys tickets for the Christoph Gluck’s opera, Orpheus and Eurydice, (Orfeo ed Euridice), hoping her husband will recover. As she nurses him, wills him to live, she is trying to lead him from the gate of Hades, the first reversal of the myth. Later in the book, in a harrowing section, (or is it a dream sequence?), an imagined Gerard tries to lead her into hell, the reverse back to male/female action in the myth, but a reverse from/to. The rhythm and memory of the myth throughout the book works. “Hope is the poisoned bait. Men eat of it and die.” 

The book also begins and ends with the same titled chapter – “A Voice Out of a Fever Cloud”. In its last place variation it is abbreviated, but the remaining words are exactly the same. In the first iteration we assume it is Gerard, perhaps in a coma, thinking of whomever, his wife perhaps, trying to lead him out (read Orpheus/Eurydice), holding his hand begging Breathe. In the last is it Michaela now, headed to the underworld, or back to the real world, her dead husband urging her to Breathe. Or is it? Perhaps it is simply a return, in her mind, to hope. The end is the beginning, and round, like Joyce’s rivverun past Eve and Adams….

So, why bother with reviewing a best-seller here, where we normally deal with New Mexico writers, or the history or art of the state? The book takes place in New Mexico, in the fictional city of Santa Tierra, an hour away Albuquerque by car. It is not Santa Fe, but it is, or a composite. There is the Institute, a walk to the renowned opera house, shopping for tschotskes, a memoir writing seminar at the University of New Mexico.

So, three thoughts here. I do not understand why Oates bothers with fictionalizing the landscape, the pueblos and their languages, when the real would do well enough. It seems an unnecessary invention, a detour that is inefficient and even irksome, given the citations of Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Busy work, I think. The second thought then is that it is flat with no life to this very alive landscape. She does not write New Mexico well, rather simply presents a poor resolution postcard of the land, even of the cultural climate. The third is this: Oates makes an attempt at New Mexico mysticism, twining the magical realism of native myth with a stilted search for spiritualism. The result is something hideous really, certainly not a reflection of native culture or mystical landscape. But maybe we know too much living here, and this fictional goop is fascinating to readers in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

On the other hand, this is a powerhouse of a novel. The momentum towards death is almost unbearable inside Michaela’s mind, and following the widowhood with the imbalance at being one instead of two, her madness shapes reality in sinister ways. Oates can write emotion, intellect, psychological infirmity, and angst so well, that she might have stuck to the knitting here and not delved into a fictionalized place.

 The book is dedicated to her husband, Charlie Gross, in memoriam.  

Breathe
Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco
Hardcover, 384 pages
$28.99

HSFF's 2021 Board of Directors and Executive Committee Announced

At the Board of Directors meeting held on June 24, 2021, there was a changing of the guard. Ken Stilwell completed his term as Chair, but continues as a Director through October 2021. Tim Maxwell completed his term as Director, but continues as an advisor with our interpretation of the history of El Zaguán as part of our Master Plan implementation.

Ken has provided us outstanding leadership through the sales of the final properties owned by HSFF, and the beginning of the focus on El Zaguán as a welcoming, reconfigured space for education, outreach, and the center for historic preservation in Santa Fe. Tim likewise gave us tireless attention and leadership in various roles on the Executive Committee, as well as Chair of the Education, Research, Archives Committee. All of our thanks to them both as they helped us reach this new stage in the history of HSFF.

Ra Patterson was elected to the Board, and the new Executive Committee is: 

Anne McDonald Culp, Chair
Tony Sawtell, Vice Chair
Harlan Flint, Treasurer
Nancy Owen Lewis, Secretary
Graciela Tomé, At-large Director

 So, there is a new composition of Board leadership, well-suited to keep us moving forward in our fresh direction as a significant and relevant force in the community. This Executive Committee is not short on ideas and has a true dedication to the mission of the Foundation.

Thanks to all for taking the charge forward.