Saturday, September 24, 2016

Plaza de Las Cruces: New corazon for City of Crosses

Sept. 11, 2016
LAS CRUCES – When I saw the Organ Mountains, I knew I was home. When I saw their mysterious, craggy peaks from the crumbling ruins of what was then the Downtown Mall, I wondered what I’d gotten into.
Even at high noon on a weekday, it could be a little scary to navigate the downtown urban blight. When I worked very early or very late, as I often did in the 1990s, I did my best to scoot in and out of the Sun-News parking lot as quickly as possible.
But even then, there were echoes of what was once the corazon of Las Cruces. Our heart, through broken, had potential. I loved the Las Cruces Farmers & Crafts Market and even spent a few months peddling my own strange creations there and getting to know the market venders and the Downtown Mall.
We shared ideas: painting the ugly arches adobe colors and festooning them with Mimbres or petroglyph designs, or painting all the old buildings adobe white to match the Branigan Cultural Center. Other exotic colors were discussed. Perhaps we could achieve fame as the only lapis blue or purple adobe mall in the world? We thought it would be cool with the yellow brick road, which most of us liked.
From my first Las Cruces Style column in 1994, I pitched renovation ideas. Several readers expressed enthusiasm for changes, and there were offers of government support. I heard from Steve Newby, the torch carrier through it all, and then-Mayor Rubén Smith suggested we meet with city planners. The Las Cruces Community Theatre offered a space for meetings. Artists, including the late, great Alice Peden, got involved.
It was tough going. There were studies and evaluations and blue ribbon committees. Things fizzled. Strides were made.
Street lights and architectural accents were added along with monuments: a skeletal homage to beloved St. Genevieve’s Church, Tony Pennock’s “La Entrada,” a beautiful historical piece with columns and murals. Both were eventually removed for the reconstruction of Main Street and the new plaza.
One of my Sun-News colleagues, whose name now escapes me, referred to our downtown as “the graveyard of high hopes.” Bob Diven came up with a design for a giant Billy the Kid downtown building, with a revolving restaurant in Billy’s sombrero and a kiva fireplace in the outlaw’s derriere.
Alice Peden kept sweetly but firmly bugging people about sprucing up our querencia. I wrote an April Fool’s Day fantasy column “reporting” that Ted Turner and his then-wife Jane Fonda had committed millions to transform the mall and Heather Pollard, who had left her post as head of the Doña Ana Arts Council, had decided to come out of retirement to save and beautify the mall. Ted and Jane never weighed in, but Heather did, in fact, decide to eschew retirement to lead the Las Cruces Downtown Partnership. Her efforts led to several transformative efforts, from renovation of the Rio Grande Theatre to several cooperative efforts like involvement in Project Main Street.
Rubén and subsequent mayors Bill Mattiace and Ken Miyagishima kept plugging. The street reopened. We drove down it and cheered. The farmers market got bigger and better and was named tops in the state and then the nation in online polls. The Downtown Ramble the first Friday of each month demonstrated what our city could be: a delight.
It dawned on us that we had pretty streets, three theaters staging entertaining productions, two lovely new museums, some fun galleries and restaurants, one of the best bookstores in the west, (in those early years, Coas was one of the few reasons many of us came downtown on non-market days) and other promising activities and enterprises.
And now, finally, we have what so many of us had been missing for so long, that central corazon that we loved in so many New Mexico communities from Taos and Santa Fe to Tularosa and Mesilla: Our very own plaza.

S. Derrickson Moore may be reached at 575-541-5450, dmoore@lcsun-news.com or @derricksonmoore on Twitter.

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