Prominent Santa Fe merchants Willi and Flora Spiegelberg constructed a home for their family on Palace Avenue, the town’s premier residential thoroughfare, in 1880. Willi was the youngest of the five Spiegelberg brothers, a Jewish family influential in business and politics across the state. The fourteen-room, two-story home was built of local adobe bricks in a modified European Style. The home also contained the first residential gas piping system in Santa Fe. Another prominent Jewish mercantile family, Solomon and Emilie Spitz, owned the house for over 50 years, from 1906 to 1963. The Spitzes operated a successful jewelry store on the Santa Fe Plaza. Both the Spitz and Spiegelberg families represent New Mexico’s long history of accepting Jewish families into the community during a time of rampant anti-Semitism around the country and in Europe. Still distinctive on Palace Avenue today, the Willi Spiegelberg House is now owned and maintained by Peyton Wright Gallery.
From Old Santa Fe Today, 5th edition by Audra Bellmore with photographs by Simone Frances.