Homes in Santa Fe NM, Real Estate in Santa Fe NM, Desmond Bolton» Historic Homes

Annual Santa Fe Historic Home Tour Set For Mother’s Day

Desmond Bolton Team — Sat, 08 May 2010 11:21:07 +0000

Join the Historic Santa Fe Foundation this Sunday to tour 4 historic Santa Fe homes. Each home steeped in character and rich in history, this annual tour offers a glimpse into Santa Fe’s storied past and unique architecture. The following article from the New Mexican describes significance of each of this year’s tour homes.

Santa Fe New Mexican Article:

By: Dennis J. Carroll

Four historic homes associated with the city’s artistic and creative past will highlight Sunday’s annual Mother’s Day Historic House Tour.

One was once occupied by a Santa Fe Trail merchant, another by an architect and preservation activist, another by one of the founding members of city’s vibrant arts community, and the fourth was the home of a master wood-print artist and marionette maker.

All the homes have been through various incarnations depending upon the vocations and idiosyncrasies of the owners or renters at a particular time, said Elaine Bergman, director of the Historic Santa Fe Foundation, which is conducting the tours.

Another reason the four particular homes were selected, Bergman said, is because, “the artists who lived there maybe 70 years ago could walk through the front door today and still recognize the building as their home” because of the special care given to their preservation.

The organization has been conducting the tours on a Sunday in May for more than 40 years. In 2003, the group initiated the event as a Mother’s Day tradition. “There were generations of mothers, daughters and granddaughters who were coming through the homes, so we thought it would be a fitting Mother’s Day event,” Bergman said.

Sunday’s tour homes include: the James L. Johnson house, also known as El Zaguan, a collection of artists’ apartments and studios at 545 Canyon Road; the Gustave and Jane Baumann house and studio at 409 Camino de Las Animas; the Irene von Horvath house and studio at 728 Canyon Road; and the Sheldon Parsons House and studio at 3 and 5 Cerro Gordo Road.

Bergman said the Parsons home is of particular interest because the public has not been allowed inside for at least 20 years.

Sheldon Parsons was a successful New York portrait painter whose work included studies of President William McKinley and suffragette Susan B. Anthony.

According to the Historic Santa Fe Foundation, he moved to Santa Fe seeking relief from tuberculosis in 1913 after the death of his wife, photographer Caroline Reed Harris. In New Mexico, his creative endeavors turned toward landscapes.

He was a founding participant in the creation of Santa Fe as an artist community, and his presence drew other artists to Northern New Mexico.

When Parsons and his daughter, Sara Parsons Higgins, bought the property in the mid-1920s, the site consisted of three adobe buildings on three parcels, Bergman said.

Parsons connected the buildings and built a second story where his studio was located. The property is in the Pueblo-Revival style, identified by its thick adobe walls, narrow, roughly hewed vigas, long portals and narrow interior doors.

The 3,000-square-foot home, which has an adjacent guest house, was most recently purchased in 2000 by John and Linda Dressman, owners of the Santa Fe Indian Trading Co. and Dressman’s Gifts on the Santa Fe Plaza.

The James Johnson home is named after the Santa Fe Trail merchant who bought the Canyon Road property, which included a house and a corral, in the mid-1850s.

The house at 729 Canyon Road, built between 1839 and 1856, was home to Irene von Horvath, an architect and water colorist who purchased the property in 1954 and lived there for 30 years.

Von Horvath is credited with conceiving the idea of the “ring road” that became Paseo de Peralta.

As did the other artists, Von Horvath did much of the carpentry and brickwork for additions to the home.

Gustave Baumann designed his home in 1923 to serve as his studio, home and gallery, according to the foundation. He was known to entertain other artists and family friends at the house with plays he produced for his delicately crafted marionettes.

The foundation acquired the Baumann home in 2008 and has been restoring it for the past year.

Foundation docents will conduct tours of the four homes from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at any of the houses for $5.

Link to Original Article Here

Contact Matt Desmond and Ryan Bolton

More Santa Fe History for sale

Desmond Bolton Team — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:14:46 +0000

The 1,960-square-foot home of former state Supreme Court Justice John T. Watson is on the auction block, promising rooms full of history.
        The home, being sold to help raise money for The Trust for Public Lands in a deal designed to block earlier planned development on Sun Mountain, has an opening bid of $536,000 — but there are a few caveats.
        The good news: If Sun Mountain were a bell-curve, the house, on its 1.2 acres, sits in front of the highest part. It’s surrounded by piñons and juniper — and privacy.
        The home is part of a 23-acre parcel, with 10.5 acres going into private ownership with no more than two houses allowed on the land, and the rest going to the city of Santa Fe as open space.
        The bad news? Well, that depends on one’s tastes. The two-story house is virtually unchanged since its 1937 construction. It’s had one owner, the judge, who lived in the house for 70 years, until 2007, when he moved to an assisted living facility before his death.
        One of Watson’s two sons, Alan “Mac” Watson, who lives in Santa Fe, said a consultant with a background in historic preservation surveyed the house and told him it ought to be on the National Register. “The house is about as unchanged as it could be from 1937,” he said.
        But that means the kitchen hasn’t been updated and the bedrooms are small. “The size of the house and the size of the rooms is pretty typical of a 1930s house in Santa Fe,” said Mac Watson, who grew up there and works in the field of historic preservation. “The living room is a bit grander than you would see in most houses of that time period, say in the Don Gaspar area.”
        Sharon Woods, chairwoman of the city’s Historic Design Review Board, said the property is in the Historic Review District but not in the more restrictive Historic East Side or the West Side Guadalupe districts. “We don’t have designations for historic buildings outside those districts,” she said, although there are still rules for certain aspects, like height.
        As far as city rules go, Woods said, the house could be demolished by a new owner. “I think it would be too bad if someone tore it down,” she said.
        The house has been appraised at about $325,000, while the dwelling and acreage together have been appraised at about $625,000.
        Early days
        In 1937, the property the judge bought was rural. “Hardly any other people lived there,” said Mac Watson. The judge’s father, John C. Watson, who had also been a state Supreme Court judge, told his son he couldn’t believe “anyone was stupid enough to move out there,” Mac Watson recalled.
        The judge loved to carve and he carved most of the lintels inside the house, which was built by a local contractor. At one point, he carved a wooden sign that said “Watson,” which hung by the road to mark the house — there were no street numbers then — but the sign kept getting stolen.
        “He went out to his mechanic in Pecos and had him make one out of rebar and steel and buried it in the ground with a concrete base,” said Mac Watson. “That was in the ’50s and nobody stole it again until I had it removed.” There’s a small sauna in the house — “he was a small man,” said his son — and a cedar chest that extends some six feet down, so that clothes would hang from a rack inside it and extend below the floor level.
        Upstairs, there are touches of the judge’s personality, including outdoor tiles of Don Quixote and his sidekick, Sancho Panza, and eight small stone faces embedded in a stucco wall.
        “Those stone faces are part of his adventuresome spirit,” said Mac Watson. “He married my mother in about 1935 and for their honeymoon they drove from Santa Fe to Mexico City … in a Model A Ford. The roads were almost all dirt roads with no maps. It was quite a bold thing to do, and those little heads are prehistoric artifacts he brought back from Mexico. ”
        Mac Watson recalled that his father was suspended from the University of New Mexico twice, once when he was editor of the student newspaper, the Lobo.
        “He printed a story that was written by another student and the word ‘osculation,’ the word for kissing, was in the story,” said Watson. “Back in the 1920s, that was considered to be a dirty word…. He had to get his father to come down and meet with the president of the university.”
        Development plans
        After the judge died, Mac Watson was one of nine family members who decided jointly to sell the property to developer Doug McDowell. McDowell announced plans last year to build 13 single-family homes on the 23 acres and call the subdivision Mirasol. But members of a coalition called “Save Sun Mountain,” along with the Trust for Public Land and others, raised money to purchase the property from McDowell.
        According to Parks, Mirasol opponents first approached the nonprofit in early 2009 to work out an agreement with McDowell to buy the 23 acres for $3.2 million.
        A single $1 million donation by an anonymous source made a significant impact. And a “conservation buyer” — actually Old Santa Fe Trail homeowners Steve Lipscomb and Miranda Viscoli — paid $1.4 million for 10.5 acres. Lipscomb is the president and chief executive officer of the World Poker Tour.
        Parks said the conservation buyer has no plans to build on the property but is reserving the right to build two homes, and will allow the public to access already used trials on the property. “They could have had 8 to 10 homes on that property,” Parks said.
        Open House WHERE: 3823 Old Santa Fe Trail WHEN: will be held 1-3 p.m. today. BIDS: open at $536,000 and will be accepted from Jan. 19-22. NOTIFICATION: On Jan. 25, the top five bidders will be notified of the highest bid and given a chance to bid again. The Trust for Public Land is asking that the sale close by March 1.

By Polly Summar
Journal Staff Writer