VSA Annual Meeting 2004

ANNUAL MEETING BEGINS

Wednesday

April 28, 2004 (eve.)

7:00 pm

OPENING RECEPTION

Hearty hors d’oeuvres
Cash bar
Lecture

The Palace of the Governors, a National Historic Landmark (1960) and an American Treasure (1999), is the site of the opening reception. Built in the 17th Century, it is the oldest continuously occupied building in the United States. It included the Governor’s residence, vegetable gardens, an arsenal, a chapel, government offices and a jail. It remained the seat of government until New Mexico became a state in 1912. Today it houses exhibits which
chronicle the periods of New Mexico history from Spanish to Mexican to Territorial to statehood. Its exhibits, library and photo archives make it one of the premier museums in New Mexico. We will enjoy an hors d’oeuvres Reception in the beautiful courtyard, a tour of the museum and a lecture explaining the fascinating history and development of Santa Fe and environs.

Thursday

April 29, 2004

8:00 am - 9:30 pm

Village of Corrales and Albuquerque

Continental Breakfast on the bus
Lunch on your own
Dinner

We will board the buses at the La Fonda Hotel for a day trip south through the Rio Grande Valley bordered by the Sandia Mountains to the Village of Corrales and Albuquerque. Bus 1 will stop at the Village of Corrales to tour Casa San Ysidro, the Gutierrez/Minge House, on the State Register of cultural properties. Casa San Ysidro is a restored Spanish Colonial placita-style hacienda (farm) of the 18th Century furnished with authentic artifacts showing daily life during the 18th and 19th Centuries.

We will be stopping at the fabulous 1927 Pueblo Deco style KiMo Theatre, on the National Register of Historic Places. Carl Boller, of the firm of Boller Brothers, was the architect. The Boller Brothers had previously designed a Wild West-Rococco-style theatre in San Antonio and a Spanish cathedral cum Greco-Babylonian interior in St. Joseph, Missouri, but Pueblo Deco was a flamboyant, short-lived architectural style that fused the spirit of the Indian cultures of the Southwest with the exuberance of America during the roaring twenties. It appeared at a time when movie-mad communities were constructing film palaces loosely based on such exotic foreign models as Moorish mosques and Chinese pavilions. Indian motifs
appeared in only a handful of movie theatres; of those few, the KiMo was the undisputed king. Restored in 1977, the interior includes 7 murals painted by Carl von Hassler.

We will meet at the Plaza in Old Town for lunch on your own as you browse through the many shops on the square. There are many restaurants with a varying price range available. The architecture of Old Town varies from Pueblo-Spanish and adobe to Victorian and Contemporary. After lunch both buses will tour San Felipe Neri Church, started in 1706. Most of the current building dates from 1853-1861 with additions in 1878 and 1890. The sacristy dates from 1793.

We will then depart for a tour of restored private homes in Huning’s Highland (National Register) District of Albuquerque with historian Ann Carson as our guide and lecturer. These residences date from the 1890s during the massive influx of merchants and workers as Albuquerque became accessible by train, an era when consumption sufferers also flocked to Albuquerque to ‘take the cure’.

Our final stop in Albuquerque is the University of New Mexico. In 1892 the University’s first building, Hodgin Hall (National Historic Register), Jesse Wheelock, architect, was built in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. Remodeled in 1908 to the Pueblo style, President Tight and E. B. Christy, architects, you can still see the remnants of the Romanesque building on the inside. The building includes an impressive collection of Stickley furniture and a Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington. Venturing on to the 1915-1916
Old Chemistry Building (National Historic Register) by architects Walter Burley Griffin & Francis Barry Byrne, we will view this interpretation of Pueblo revival architecture by Chicago architects. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the massive bronze doors. This building is considered by some to be the first modern architecture building in the United States. Joe McKinney, preservationist and university planner at the University of New Mexio, will be our guide.

We will then proceed to the Scottish Rite Temple in Santa Fe. This temple, often called the pink church or the Pepto Bismol building, was built in 1911. We will tour the Temple, lavishly furnished with stained glass, embroidered curtains, paintings and murals, and the Temple’s costume room.

7:15 - 9:30 pm
From there we will board the buses for an evening at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Dinner will be served in the courtyard of the O’Keeffe Cafe next to the museum. After dinner we will enjoy a private opening of the museum. Georgia O’Keeffe was a leading member of one of the avant-garde movements in New York in the 1910s-20s. The museum houses more than 120 O’Keeffe paintings, drawings and sculptures and is the largest collection of her works in the world. A changing exhibit of more than fifty O’Keeffe works and
special exhibits devoted entirely to her or which combine her art with that of her contemporaries are on display.

We will return to the La Fonda by way of a 3-block stroll.

Friday

April 30, 2004

8:00 am - 4:30 pm

5.45 pm - until

Las Vegas, NM

Continental Breakfast on the bus
Lunch
Lecture
Hearty hors d’oeuvres
Cash Bar

Off we go again, as the bus departs from the La Fonda at 8:00 am bound east for the Victorian town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, situated in the San de Cristo Mountains. Las Vegas is the most traditionally Victorian city in New Mexico. Its heyday dates from the U.S. annexation of New Mexico in 1846. There are over 900 houses in Las Vegas listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the buildings around the square were erected more than a century ago. The elegant Queen Anne and Eastlake architecture, built by Easterners ready to cash in on the boomtown (they thought Las Vegas would be the main terminus of the AT&SF Railroad), remained untouched when the main line of the train bypassed Las Vegas in favor of Sante Fe and the town died. Today, Las Vegas is a treasure trove of restored landmarks.

(buses will rotate for the morning tours)

Montezuma Castle, now home of The Armand Hammer United World College of the American West, is one of the highlights of the Annual Meeting. Originally built in 1882 as the Montezuma Hotel, it soon became known as ‘the castle’. Developed by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, the Victorian baths at the hotel were fed by natural hot springs where fashionable Victorians came ‘to take the waters’. This National Trust Historic Site features 200 rooms; 90,000
square feet; carved ash ceilings and fireplaces, as well as towers and
spiral staircases. Truly a Victorian masterpiece!

Our next stop is the Historic Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Depot and the La Castaneda Hotel, built in 1898 for the guests headed for Montezuma Castle or for those settling in rapidly growing East Las Vegas. With the arrival of the train on July 4, 1879, Las Vegas became one of the largest towns in the Rocky Mountain West, rivaling Denver, Tucson and El Paso. This Mission Revival style hotel was one of the jewels in the chain of Fred Harvey’s (‘the Harvey girls’) railroad hotels.

Both buses will meet at yet another hotel, the Plaza Hotel on the Old Town Plaza, a gathering place since 1882. Today, the restored rooms again pay court to travelers. We will lunch and hear a lecture on historic Las Vegas in the Hotel¹s Conservatory, host to guests for over a hundred years.

Our next destination is a walking tour of the National Register District of Lincoln Park and tours of some of the private homes. The Lincoln Park District was developed in the 1880s-90s when the AT&SF Railroad came to Las Vegas. The railroad brought a contractor, James H. Ward, to Las Vegas with the purpose of building residences for the influx of professionals that the train was bringing to this boomtown. The brownstone Italianate Villas and the Queen Anne style houses appealed to the Easterners.

Lincoln Park and Carnegie Park were designed in the French Beaux Arts style. Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders of the Spanish American War camped in Lincoln Park on June 23, 1899 for their first reunion. The North New Town District is our next stop. These 1880s-1910s mansions housed the wealthy new mercantile class. We will walk along streets lined with Queen Anne, Jacobean Revival, Colonial Revival and Eastlake style houses and visit several. This National Register District is one of the most pristine Victorian neighborhoods in New Mexico.

Bus returns to La Fonda, 4:30 pm

5:45 pm - Board buses

6:00 - 8:00 pm
Buses depart from the La Fonda for a Reception at the Nedra Matteucci Galleries, one of the finest art galleries in Santa Fe. The gallery features paintings, sculpture and drawings of internationally known artists, as well as recognized local New Mexico artists. The elegant outdoor sculpture garden and lagoon will be the site of our hors d’oeuvres reception.

Buses return to the La Fonda

Saturday

May 1, 2004

7:00 am Optional Summer School Alumni Hot Breakfast Buffet – La Fonda Hotel Coronado Room

8:30 am - 5:30 pm

7.30 pm - until

Santa Fe

Breakfast on your own
Optional Summer School Alumni Breakfast
Lunch
Dinner

Exploring Santa Fe is the order of the day. What is Santa Fe? It is history, it is Native American culture, it is Spanish, it is the Santa Fe Trail, it is an Art Center, it is desert and mountains, it is all of these and more. Come explore this city of dreams, dreams of many peoples for hundreds of years.

Our day starts with a visit to Loretto Chapel, fashioned after
Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Build in the 1870s, it is believed to be the first
Gothic Revival structure west of the Mississippi. Its ‘miraculous staircase’ contains 33 steps in two full 360 degree turns without center or side supports.

A short walk to The Cathedral Church of St. Francis of Assisi is next. The first church on this site was built in 1610 and the present church in 1886. La Conquistadora Chapel dates from 1714, the pipe organ from 1895, the statue of St. Francis from the 1700s and the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary was brought to Santa Fe in 1626. The stained-glass rose window and the lateral nave windows are from Clermont-Ferrand, France and were installed in 1884. Archbishop Lamy (Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather) is buried in the Crypt below the Cathedral floor.

Here we will board the bus for the ride to Museum Hill. Four museums are clustered together on Museum Hill: The Museum of Indian Arts & Culture; The Museum of Spanish Colonial Art; The Museum of International Folk Art and The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian. You can tour these 4 museums on your own with sufficient time to browse and explore. We will meet at the Museum of International Folk Art for a box lunch and the 38th Annual Meeting of the Victorian Society in America.

We will again board the bus for a short ride to Canyon Road home of Santa Fe’s art galleries. You will be free to wander among the many excellent art galleries, antique stores, Native American craft shops and coffee houses. A stop at the El Zaguan, James L. Johnson House, a territorial-style residence built in the 1850s, is a must. The house is open to the public and now houses The Historic Santa Fe Foundation. The garden is restored to its 1900 appearance, the plants representative of those used during that period.

We will venture on to the Museum of Fine Arts, the state’s oldest art
museum. This masterpiece of Pueblo Revival architecture was built in 1917. The collection spans the historic art colonies of Taos and Santa Fe, as well as art from around the region and the world.

We will return to the La Fonda Hotel via a very short stroll ca. 5:00 pm

7:00 pm – Closing Banquet

La Terraza’s Banquet Room of the La Fonda hotel is the magnificent setting for our final banquet. The room and the terraces afford a spectacular view of the mountains and historic Santa Fe. The Cathedral is illuminated at night giving the scene an ethereal aura - a most fitting climax to our Southwest adventure.

END OF ANNUAL MEETING

See below for Post-Tour itinerary

Sunday

May 2, 2004

8:00 am - 10:00 pm

OPTIONAL POST-CONFERENCE TOUR - Two days

Continental Breakfast on the bus
Lunch
Dinner

Bus departs from the La Fonda Hotel headed for another wonderful day in Las Vegas. We will walk Victorian neighborhoods and tour several of the buildings and houses.

The New Mexico Highland University sits in a National Register Historic District by the same name. We will visit the University¹s Ilfeld Auditorium, one of the finest examples of Romanesque Revival style in Northern New Mexico. Built in 1914-21, the early Christian basilica was the prototype for this purplish-sandstone building.

The National Register District, El District de Las Escuelas, is the oldest neighborhood in Las Vegas. Pacific Street was the last leg on the Santa Fe Trail and it was lined with houses one room deep with porches facing the street. The 14 rooms of La Casa Redonda (the Round House) were built around a central placita (courtyard) in 1870. It is one of the few surviving fully realized courtyard houses. The territorial style Lorenzo Valdez House (1870) is an example of the ‘Victorianization’ of New Mexico residences that occurred with the coming of the railroad. The 1880 Vicente Silva House, with its Palladian windows and alternating bands of red and tan limestone, is a New Mexican folksy interpretation of the Renaissance Revival.

Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church anchors the Old Town Residential District (National Register). Built in 1862-69, this French influenced Gothic Revival style church presents a most impressive facade. The red sandstone is set in random ashlar patterns with blocks finished in a variety of peaked surfaces.

After lunch we will visit The Las Vegas City Museum and Rough Riders Memorial Collection which chronicals the role of Las Vegas in the Spanish American War and the history of Las Vegas from its founding to the present day. The first reunion of Teddy Roosevelt’s Spanish American War Rough Riders was held in Lincoln Park on June 23,1899. The museum is housed in a 1940s WPA building.

The Carnegie Park National Register District is our next destination, where we will have a walking tour and visit private homes. The Queen Anne Louis Fort House (1895) and the Victorian Eclectic style of the Dr. H. F. Mueller House (1881), with its octagonal tower, stand out among the Tudor Queen Anne and Italianate residences. We will again visit the North New Town District with its brick, stone and clapboard mansions, touring several. Strolling among these Victorian homes is a rare experience.

We board the bus to return to Santa Fe and then on to the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to The Bishop’s Lodge, a resort and spa on the grounds of Father Jean Baptiste Lamy’s original retreat. We will tour the original 1854 Chapel and gardens. This is the chapel in Willa Cather’s novel Death Comes for the Archbishop. The bus will take us to the top of the mesa for an outdoor barbeque and a breath-taking view of the mountains and valley.

Monday

May 3, 2004

8:00 am - 10:30 pm

Continental Breakfast on the bus
Lunch
Dinner

The bus departs from the La Fonda hotel for the Federal Court House (National Register), begun in 1853 and finished in 1889. Designed in traditional Victorian court house style, the first floor remained unfinished for decades. It is decorated with murals by WPA artists.

Next we are headed for San Miguel Mission Church, one of the oldest churches in the U.S. The church¹s chapel was built in 1710 over the ruins of the original 1610 church and the bell was cast in 1356.

Pushing on toward our destination is the magnificent Lensic Theatre. The exterior and interior of this 1931 National Register film and vaudeville palace has been accurately restored and today is the Lensic Performing Arts Center. Conceived by the Boller Brothers architectural firm as an Arabian delight, the building is pseudo-Moorish, Spanish Renaissance in style, and recognized as one of the premier theaters in New Mexico.

We will then depart for El Rancho de las Golondrinas (ranch of the swallows), 1710-1880s. A special opening of this living history museum will allow us to tour the restored buildings and have a private lunch on the grounds. The ranch has 33 restored buildings, some original to the ranch, others brought to the site.

After lunch we board the bus for the Turquoise Trail, meandering through the small mining towns south of Santa Fe. Coal, silver and turquoise were mined thoughout this region. We will make a brief stop at the Mining Museum to study 19th Century mining methods.

Further on the Turquoise Trail brings us to the Sandia Mountains, where we will travel by bus to the Sandia Crest Observation Deck (10,678 feet above sea level), where you can see 100 miles in any direction, with Albuquerque spread out in the valley and the mountain ranges and the rugged desert which make up the varied landscape of New Mexico in the distance.

Heading down the mountain, we will stop at Bien Mur Indian Market Center, run by the Pueblo of Sandia. Bien Mur offers one of the finest selections of Native American arts and crafts.

On we go to Los Lunas, New Mexico and the Luna Mansion.
We will end our day with dinner and a tour of this spectacular antebellum style adobe mansion. The Luna family came to New Mexico in 1692 and prospered. In 1880 the Santa Fe Railroad wanted a right-of-way through the Luna property, in fact right through the hacienda. Reaching an agreement, the railroad promised to build a new home to the specifications of Don Antonio Jose and his family. Influenced by extensive travel in the South, southern colonial style was chosen, but its basic construction material is adobe.

Finally, we will board the bus for the return to the La Fonda and the end of the Post Tour.

END OF POST TOUR

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