Roque Tudesqui House - Historic Santa Fe Foundation

Anne: Each individual pane of glass comes out for cleaning.
There's a little crawl space between the ceiling and the roof On the plaza,
there are a number of buildings that have the same kind of external skylight.
This room has no light except through the dining room. It has no
windows and part of what makes this room is the skylight.
HSFF: What are those nails for all around the edge of the ceiling?
Anne: All those nails are evenly spaced and they all protrude
evenly. This was done so that one can hang anything easily and anywhere
in the room. They were made part ofthe design, but they are extremely
practical. I assume this room must have been Gustave Baumann's gallery.
HSFF: Have people who have visited the house told you stories
about coming here?
Anne: One of my coworkers told me she had lived across the
street at one time. She and the other little kids in the neighborhood would
come here for the puppet shows. Gustave Baumann made most of his
puppets and wrote all his own scripts. When I first came here, there were
little staples all around the exterior of the house. That's where Chinese
lanterns were hung when the Baumanns had their parties. They aren't
there any more because the house has been replastered. The lanterns
must have evoked such a marvelous sense ofleisurely life, and the pleasures
that the artists had when they weren't working. Somehow, this seems
to be the whole notion of old Santa Fe. During the 1930s, people like
Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant came to visit across the street from
time to time. It was just a very neighborly situation. No cars. No walls. I
don't know if Jane Baumann had a maid, but she had a liquor cabinet that
was locked with a key.
Ann Baumann, the daughter, wrote me a note some time ago telling
me that I was improperly identifying the hooks on the ceiling in the
living room as hooks for marionettes. In fact, they were for the backdrops
for the marionette plays. Then, a year or two later, she wrote me another
note acknowledging that I had changed the story about the hooks and
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