Old Santa Fe

Old Santa Fe Today is an engaging read about Santa Fe's architecture, history, and important figures through its culturally significant properties, among them churches, government buildings, and homes. The book also serves as a walking tour guide for locals and visitors wanting to sightsee. Originally published in 1966, Old Santa Fe Today has been used by writers and scholars exploring the history and architectural significance of Santa Fe. With new essays updating the 1991 fourth edition, this fifth edition of the classic reference book also has a complete inventory of properties--now approximately one hundred--including those recently added to the Historic Santa Fe Foundation's "Register of Properties Worthy of Preservation" since 1961. Each property entry includes revised and expanded narratives on its architecture, history, and ownership, providing social and cultural context as well. Among the Register are the former homes of past influential artists and writers such as Olive Rush and Witter Bynner. The William Penhallow Henderson House, 555 Camino del Monte Sol, was the home of the famed painter and craftsperson and his poet wife Alice Corbin Henderson. Constructed over a decade from 1917 to 1928 and designed in the Spanish Pueblo Revival Style, it would serve as a model for other artist home studios in the heart of the Santa Fe art colony. The de la Peña house located at 831 El Caminito is a nineteenth-century Spanish Pueblo adobe farmhouse owned by the de la Peña family for eighty years. Artist, writer, and historic preservationist Frank Applegate purchased the home in 1925. In the late 1930s, the National Park Service added the house to its Historic American Buildings Survey, an honor reserved for the most important historic structures in the United States.

This remarkable book unfolds a detailed and thoughtful history beginning in 1598 and continuing through 1924. Chapters are devoted to events preceding the founding of the city; the Pueblo Revolution; the reconquest of the city by General Diego de Vargas; its 25 years as a Mexican provincial capital; the city during the military occupation period; and stories about Billy the Kid, Gov. Samuel B. Axtell, and the Santa Fe Ring.

The special customs and traditions of the Christmas season in Santa Fe, New Mexico are carefully and clearly explained in this book that has become a classic. Lightly falling snow, covering everything in sight with a soft mantle of white, burning luminarias and mellow-light farolitos, the warm adobe architecture, the peace and quiet that settles over the land on Christmas Eve, all tend to strengthen the comparison between Santa Fe and the land where Christ was born. At no time of year is it more apparent that Santa Fe, New Mexico is a foreign city still relying on the traditions of the past. Pedro Ribera Ortega's richly descriptive book gives all the details, including the difference between luminarias and farolitos, in case you have lived in Santa Fe all your life and still do not know the difference.

The Santa Fe Trail was one of the two great overland highways originating in Missouri in the nineteenth century. Several decades before settlers streamed over the Oregon Trail, traders were heading southwest. The caravans carried the wares of Yankee commerce; they returned loaded with buffalo robes and beaver pelts and the rich metals of Mexican mines. The thousand-mile journey “was a perilous cruise across a boundless sea of grass, over forbidding mountains, among wild beasts and wilder men, ending in an exotic city offering quick riches, friendly foreign women, and a moral holiday,” writes Stanley Vestal. Vestal begins where the trail does. He describes outfitting for the trip, the society formed for survival, the hunt for meat, landmarks, and the dangers. He evokes the history and legends surrounding the trail at every point, including figures like Kit Carson, Jedediah Smith, the Bent brothers, and Uncle Dick Wooton.

Lightly falling snow, covering everything in sight with a soft mantle of white, burning luminarias and mellow-light farolitos, the warm adobe architecture, the peace and quiet that settles over the land on Christmas Eve, all tend to strengthen the comparison between Santa Fe and the land where Christ was born. At no time of year is it more apparent that Santa Fe, New Mexico is a foreign city still relying on the traditions of the past. Pedro Ribera Ortega’s richly descriptive book gives all the details, including the difference between luminarias and farolitos, in case you have lived in Santa Fe all your life and still do not know the difference.