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

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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

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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

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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.

El Delirio and School for Advanced Research Register Plaque

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photo by Paul Lewis

photo by Paul Lewis

 

by Pete Warzel

On Friday, August 6, I attended a gathering of the School for Advanced Research Board of Directors, and members of the SAR President’s Circle. It was enjoyable time meeting with some old friends and comparing notes on the progress of the two organizations during the trying times of the past year.

During those times, El Delirio, the former estate of Martha and Amelia Elizabeth White, and now the SAR campus, was added to the HSFF Register of Properties Worthy of Preservation, in this case the “Estate Worthy of Preservation.” At the Friday gathering I presented a brief history of our Register and why it was started almost immediately upon formation of HSFF in 1961. In fact, at the first Board meeting the Foundation, the idea of marking or plaquing important buildings in the history of Santa Fe was discussed, at John Meem’s insistence.

Nancy Owen Lewis, Board Director at HSFF and longtime scholar at SAR, gave an overview of the nomination she and Jean Schaumburg wrote so elegantly, to add the property to our Register. Ken Stilwell, Board Director at HSFF and our former Chair, had donated the plaque(s) designating the Register addition to SAR. (Photo below).

An enjoyable evening, and a very worthy addition to our Register. Bravo.

Touring Register Property Sites for Old Santa Fe Today, Fifth Edition

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Hesch House, photo by Melanie McWhorter

Hesch House, photo by Melanie McWhorter

 

Historic Santa Fe Foundation is ramping up the efforts in publishing the fifth edition of its classic publication Old Santa Fe Today. The essays by architect John Gaw Meem’s daughter and HSFF member Nancy Wirth, writer Paul Weideman, HSFF’s staff Pete Warzel and Mara Saxer, as wll as the manuscript with 96 Register Property citations written by Dr. Audra Bellmore of University of New Mexico, Albuquerque is currently being copyedited with the Museum of New Mexico Press. The Publication Subcommittee has approved MNMP’s initial concept designs by David Skolkin; mapmaker Deborah Reade has submitted the initial map pieces; staff are meeting with a potential app designer for touring in August 2021; and finally, the project manager Melanie McWhorter is testing the touring routes for all the neighborhoods along with help from Board Director Ken Stilwell.

This piece offers a few of Melanie’s photographs from the testing of the tour routes in the neighborhoods of Barrio de Analco, Barrio de Guadalupe, Don Gaspar/Old Santa Fe Trail, Rosario/Northwest, and Upper Canyon Road. Melanie will be touring Canyon Road/Camino del Monte Sol and the Plaza/Downtown sections in the next week. The photographs in the book are historic images from local sources and contemporary images by Simone Frances shot in 2020.

We will send our regular weekly emails containing information about the publication date and pre-sell online as soon as we have more details. In the meantime, you can email melanie@historicsantafe.org to be on the notification list for announcements.

Finally, we are delighted to say that the funding for the book is complete, but we are still taking funding for the app on the Old Santa Fe Today website. Please consider a donation to the book or to Historic Santa Fe Foundation on the Join & Give page for donations or memberships, and the Old Santa Fe Today page for the application. Read more about Old Santa Fe Today, fifth edition.

(Note that the properties are listed below by their Register names. Some are private residences and others are public spaces. Please view the private residences from street view.)

Fred Friedman on Lamy Railroad - Salon on YouTube

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SALON EL ZAGUAN with Fred Friedman on YouTube
The Lamy Branch Line, A Microcosm of New Mexico State & Territorial History

WATCH THE TALK ONLINE

ABOUT THE SALON TALK
Established in 1880 only as an afterthought, this eighteen-mile branch line continues to re-invent itself through periods of national expansion, wars, depressions and economic turbulence. The line has even has outlasted it’s famous creator, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Company. Recently purchased by local entrepreneurs, the Lamy Branch Line is about to re-invent itself once more.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Fred Friedman served for thirty years as head of the New Mexico Transportation Department’s Railroad Bureau, addressing all facets of freight and passenger railroad activities within the state. Upon retirement, he worked as a railroad accident investigator and expert witness in related cases for various law firms throughout the country. Friedman is presently a board member of the Historical Society of New Mexico. He writes and lectures on the subject of territorial and state railroads in the Land of Enchantment.

WATCH THE TALK ONLINE