Roque Tudesqui House - Historic Santa Fe Foundation

Historic Neighborhood
Association
John Pen LaFarge
Pen LaFarge, son ofnovelist Oliver LaFarge, is a l(le-long
resident of Santa Fe, current Board member of the Historic
Neighborhood Association and past Board member of the Historic
Santa Fe Foundation. He is a historian, presently working on a
book of oral histories covering the early days of the 20'" century in
Santa Fe. He brings his own inimitable style to his writings.
The Historic Neighborhood Association was formed in the late
1970s as the result of an unexpected attack on the area's integrity, look
and character. It seems in the early Sixties the Santa Fe City Council
decided the City Different had need of a coherent set of zoning ordinances.
To create such an entity the city hired a Denver firm, which came
down from Colorado to study the local situation. This completed zoning
plan included the aesthetic implication that one day our Santa Fe would
want to grow up to become a big city with proper buildings and housing.
At that point, we would, among other things, get rid of the mud huts which
characterized so much of our architecture. These would be replaced with
real buildings of presence and solidity, such as one finds in real cities, such
as Denver or Chicago. As a consequence, the plan called for the Eastside
to be zoned for 21 three-story dwelling/units per acre. Typical for old
Santa Fe, no one paid any attention to all this genius and in time it was
almost forgotten.
However, over a decade later, an extremely dense development
ofthree-story buildings on the Eastside was proposed. The surrounding
neighborhood was shocked, and told the city such density simply would
not be tolerated. It was at this point the underlying zoning ordinance (Arts
and Crafts, and Residential zoning regulations) was re-discovered.
The Eastside neighborhood alerted itself, quickly recovered and
formed the city's first neighborhood association. Naturally, its initial order
of business was to block the proposed development and then to re-zone
the entire neighborhood.
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