D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
May 2008
Brick-and-Mortar Memories
Growing up in Silver City in the Forties and Fifties, you remembered certain special buildings. Now memories are all that remain.
By Phillip Parotti
Recently, while out for what our Australian friends call "a walkabout," I was forced to realize that a number of "my" Silver City buildings — and, along with them, my youth — have utterly disappeared. I do not mean to imply that the buildings now missing were ever structures that I actually owned or in which I had the least financial interest. (In so far as I know, I have never owned anything other than a house, and judging from the cost of its upkeep, the house owns me). So physical possession is not my subject; what I refer to instead is the psychological or emotional investment one makes in a place by the mere accident of having been born into it and then grown to some degree of maturity within the environment. When one is young, by their very nature, things seem good, right and permanent. But then, like it or not, things change, and there are times, one finds, when the changes seem. . . well, almost . . . almost momentous.
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The Murray Hotel, another icon of
the author's youth, rises in downtown Silver City. |
When I was a lad, for example, James Stadium — the old James Stadium, the James Stadium surrounded by the quarried rock wall into which the Brancheau P.E. Complex now extends — marked the western edge of Silver City. Out behind it, one found country virtually open all the way to Cliff. Later, much later, the university built Muir Heights, Eckles Hall and Regent's Row, the Fine Arts Complex, the Juan Chacon Building and the Ben Altamirano Memorial Stadium on land immediately to the west.
But those investments, none of them going up before the late Sixties, seem almost brand-new because, following World War II and for two decades thereafter, the site was occupied by "The Campus Village." This assemblage of more than 20 war-surplus barracks had been trucked to Silver City and mildly renovated in order to provide married housing for veterans who came here on the GI Bill. Three more barracks were installed in what is now the parking lot behind Harlan Hall; above them, perched on the side of the hill, two more functioned as the college cafeteria. Four more were situated near what is now the east end of the Administration Building, and for a time, those housed the lion's share of the Art Department. At the north end of D Street, where Ada Brewer's home once stood, where the old Student Memorial Center now stands, the same block also contained the Drama Department and the Village Dorm. Enloe Hall was directly across the street in what is currently the parking lot behind the Administration Building. All three structures had been constructed by joining yet more barracks together into a variety of imaginative configurations. Clearly, someone had made a very good deal on war-surplus barracks. While the facts remain elusive, one imagines that a number of them were trucked up from Fort Bliss, the Lordsburg prison camp or Deming's WWII air base.
Looks aside, living in "The Campus Village" must really have been interesting. From what the students told us, walls and ceilings in those apartments were so thin that any discussion held at one end of one of a converted barracks automatically involved everyone else who lived in the building. All of those structures, all of them once vibrant with college life during the Forties, Fifties and early Sixties, are now gone, replaced by newer, better buildings, several of which are themselves beginning to age. But those were the temporary structures of my youth.
If one takes a second look at the campus, people of my generation also find a considerable amount of brick to be missing. Red brick, to be sure. Because originally — prior to the construction of the old Miller Library, the first building to use white brick (requiring all of the other buildings to be artificially coated with white paint) — all of the older buildings, Old Main, Ritch Hall, the Training School, the Infirmary, Light Hall, Fleming Hall, Bowden Hall, the heating plant (even Graham Gym and Western High School retained some of the color scheme), the whole campus was built of the same Silver City red brick that went into the buildings and houses in what we presently call "the Historic District."
Old Main (built 1896) was the first of those structures to go down. At the time, the building housed the Music Department. Because my father was the head of the Music Department, it was the one building on campus that I had directly associated with my family, so when the wrecking ball struck, I felt a little like my world had collapsed around me. The foundations in that building were so thick that it could have stood for centuries, but by the time it came down, pigeons had taken over most of the third floor, the site of New Mexico State Normal School's first library.
As I remember it, the next building to go was the Training School. In those days, the university owned and operated a public, nine-year grade school. I had done five happy years in the Training School until, one early September morning, all eight grades and the kindergarten were forced to pack up school supplies and march over the hill to the new school (now Sechler Hall on 12th Street), to something the authorities tried to call The Elementary Laboratory School. No kid in his right mind was going to fall victim to a euphemism like that; those of us who went there called the new place the Training School and will continue to do so until the day we go into the ground. The old Training School (built 1904), with its magnificent front window, its grand staircases, its educational odor of discipline and well-oiled wood, and its wonderful circular fire escape, became for a time the "Department of Commerce" (euphemism was much in vogue) and was eventually torn down to become the parking lot behind Bowden Hall.
The Infirmary was the next building to be destroyed, a quantity of skunks that had been living in the steam trunks being displaced during the work. And the last of those buildings to go was Western High School. As I remember, it took almost as long to remove the WPA-constructed Western High School building as it recently took to dispatch the WPA-constructed Hillcrest General Hospital. The college dormitory that replaced the high school, Centennial Hall, put much less than its best front forward to face the community. When the time finally arrives for Centennial Hall to come down, one can only hope that the Board of Regents then reigning will consider the aesthetics of whatever they put in its place. Frankly, a little red brick wouldn't be a bad substitute — with, I can only hope, the front of the building facing West Street and the town.
A newcomer to Silver City might wonder why the WNMU college campus should figure so prominently in a piece about some of the changes around town, and I admit that the question has validity. But a part of this recollection also concerns the natural passage of youth, and if one grew up in Silver City, sooner or later, one grew up on the WNMU campus. Back in the Thirties, the Forties, the Fifties and on into the early Sixties, Western High School, the only high school in town, was operated by the university, so every high-school student in Silver City lived a part of his or her life on the WNMU campus. In those days, we knew the college students, usually by their first names, and they knew us, usually by our first names; we were all a part of the same campus community and the same organization. Not infrequently, we used college buildings for high-school classes or activities, and we even shared the same mascot — they were the Mustangs, we were the Colts. In its day, it was a good arrangement; in retrospect, it seems to have been a solidifying factor in the relationship between town and gown.
But if I drift from the campus and return to the subject of my buildings that have gone missing — well, there are a lot more missing.
Before The Campus Village went in, locals had trucked in yet another war-surplus barracks, placed it at the southwest corner of D Street and College Avenue, and called it the Boy Scout House. The Boy Scout House was rough going; it had hard cement floors and very bare walls. But it offered ready access to "the outback," where there was open country without restrictions, so we were invariably late for Cub Scout meetings because after school but before scout meetings, most of us were out there amidst the yucca and junipers playing war rather than cowboys and Indians. Fairly quickly, about the time I graduated from Cub to Boy Scouts, the Public Library took over the building. Today, much refurbished, the structure houses the WNMU branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
If one travels east down College Avenue, the changes become even more apparent. The Public Library, a building that has been twice expanded since it was built and is presently bursting at the seams for space, did not exist before I left home for college. In its place, one found an open, well-fenced field, the side yard of what was once the location of the C.C. Shoemaker house, the present location of Smith Real Estate. In my time, Dr. Cone, a Texas-trained physician, used the house for his clinic, and I believe that Doctors Cobb, Walsh and Willie followed him into the premises before erecting a newer clinic on the corner of Grant and 11th Street. After that, the building became the location of the Rest Haven Retirement Home — before that facility moved to new quarters on Hudson Street, adjacent to Madam Millie's famous house.
The Grinder Mill and the Veterans Center in the 400 block of College Avenue are both products of the Fifties. In the Forties, when we used to walk to town every day, the tall, two-story Victorian red brick C.P. Crawford House (which can still be seen in Susan Berry and Sharman Apt Russell's Built to Last, page 23) remained standing amidst an entire block of trees, grass and flowers. As a small boy, I was much enchanted with the fish pond, which I used to be allowed to visit, and with the many veterans who frequented the house. By that time and, I would imagine, throughout World War II, the house had served as Silver City's Veteran's Center, and when one was a very small boy, one found that veterans and men in military uniform were usually the best guys in the world. They actually paid attention to what one said, and they were apt to carry treats like Hershey bars and Dentine gum, treats that, during the war, were hard for small boys to find. Later, when the old Veteran's Center came down, Carl Hansen, the father of a classmate, was the contractor for the new building, which, although very well built, was no architectural substitute for that grand Victorian red brick. Finally the Ranchburger (good burgers, good root beer, no architecture whatsoever) went in beside it and was eventually expanded into the Grinder Mill.
Around 1950 and one block to the west, the Methodists contracted with Frank Tatsch to build their new edifice on the corner of College Avenue and Santa Rita Street. Originally, that lot had been vacant. The students from Western High School, heading for downtown, beat a hard-packed diagonal path from the front door of the high school to the southeast corner where Santa Rita Street meets College Avenue. When the Methodists moved from Broadway to their new church, not much time passed before additional parking was sought, and at that time, medians like the lavender-filled space in the middle of 10th Street were removed from the centers of both Santa Rita and Grant Street.
In the meantime, Cox Mortuary, managed and later owned by Sid Curtis, had built a new building (now Bright Funeral Home) across the street from the Grinder Mill. In time, with the need for additional parking, Curtis acquired the old house at the corner where Grant meets College Avenue. The mortuary was then expanded along the rear of the new parking lot, which subsequently lent more open space to the corner.
As a small boy, a daily shopping trip from our house on West Street to downtown Silver City seemed obligatory because, as I remember it, the freezers in our refrigerators were about 10 inches square; they could hold barely enough meat for two or three days. We walked in those days because the war was on. Few people had cars, and those who did often had placed them on blocks because gasoline and tires were rationed and spare parts difficult to find. So we walked, and with all of that exercise, we were healthy, but we were also tired. When we went for groceries, I had my chance to see the fish at the Veteran's Center, find out if any kind veteran was going to come across with a treat, and talk with a soldier or sailor in uniform.
The next stop was to visit the fountain at the Phoenix Apartments. In the Forties, the Phoenix Apartments were about the nicest apartments in town, or at least, so I thought. In those days, they were painted pale yellow, and the fountain was still working, flowing with water. In the Fifties and the Sixties, both the apartments and the fountain went into decline. They were then bought, partially refurbished, and named the Milna Apartments in honor of the combined names of the owners' wives (Mildred and Erna). A new building was erected at 307 College Ave., enclosing the defunct fountain and the courtyard, which had once been fronted by a low, stuccoed wall and ornamental junipers. My father had drawn the plans for the new building, and once it was completed, the Forest Service headquartered in the new facility. Recently, Bruce McKinney has refurbished the entire building into space for a variety of offices.
During the Forties, what is currently the Life Quest building was one of our standard destinations because, in those days, the building housed Safeway and a fine butcher shop. When one entered the building, the aroma of freshly ground coffee always filled the air. Frequently, my mother stopped at the butcher's to pick up our "chicken." In fact, as I was later to discover, we murdered and field-stripped our own chickens in those days. (Boy, you should have heard the howl when I finally reached the back window one morning, just in time to see my father happily wringing the neck of my last Easter's rooster, its only remaining purple feather notwithstanding). During the war, the Parottis and a lot of other people in town were raising both chickens and rabbits. As I look back, I think we must have been feeding about 20 rabbits in the hutches out behind our house. I had favorites, and I also had names for several of them, but from time to time, I discovered that one or another of my rabbits had disappeared. They had gone, I was told, to help the Easter Bunny in his deliveries. I was very small, you will understand, so I had no trouble suckering to that one, and then, on the following day, we usually stopped by Safeway to pick up a few groceries and our "chicken." Well, if the war was hell, so — to hear my parents tell it — was rationing, the probable cause for my eternal attempt to avoid eating chicken.
Moving on north up Pope Street, on the very edge of the Big Ditch, where the Life Quest parking lot and the small municipal park are now located, we used to eat fine meals inside The Spanish Inn. When the old narrow Pope Street Bridge was finally replaced by a newer, wider structure (itself now rebuilt and widened again), The Spanish Inn — its high, maroon wooden front living in my memory like a storefront in a movie Western — was simply pushed over to make room for bridge and park construction. Chicken-fried steaks, even when one allows for variety, have never been the same, and seeing that building on its side was a bit of a shock.
Immediately across the bridge, on the location where Ridgewood Motors now stands, one found the Silver Auto Court and, in the next block, where Med Square now rises, Jack Hill's Court and Store. Both "auto courts" had seen their best days before I was born, but both filled a genuine need, catering to occasional tourists and people who were on temporary work assignments in Silver City.
Beyond them, at the southwest corner of 12th and Pope Street, the immense galvanized sides of Pennington Brothers warehouse extended all the way back to Grant Street, from where the Medicine Shoppe Pharmacy now stands to where the car wash ends across 12th Street from the Snappy Mart. The Snappy Mart and Wells Fargo Bank had not been built in those days. Indeed, that entire city block where they now stand was dusty open space, a huge empty lot where boys my age later played baseball. Eventually, when Heaston-Langendorf Ford moved out of the building on Bullard that now houses the Army-Navy Store, they moved into a huge, new, block-length building that ran parallel to 13th Street with the showroom facing Gough Park. Later, when that business sold, Safeway moved into the front of the building while the bowling alley took up the rear. Eventually, the building was dismantled in order to make room for the American National Bank (now Wells Fargo).
Gough Park did not exist while I was growing up. Instead, the land upon which it was built contained the Welfare Office, immense cottonwoods and a huge metal garage for housing Grant County road equipment. One often also found wide mounds of gravel and asphalt that were to be used for the repair of Grant County's roads. Several of the blocks behind Gough Park, fronting what is now Hudson Street, were also vacant, gathering places for pick-up baseball games, occasional carnivals, traveling shows and other unusual activities. Dust devils ran riot on those empty lots, and tumbling tumbleweeds were a fact of life.
Other fixtures from the Forties and Fifties have also disappeared. Near the head of Bullard, immediately south of Morning Star, Maggie Banks' un-plastered adobe home, the house in which young Johnny Banks grew up, has disappeared in order to become the Morning Star parking lot. A mite farther to the south, the Western Stationers parking lot once housed two immense brick boarding houses where, for about $2 a head, one could eat delicious, filling meals served "boarding house" style around a table that seated approximately 14 people. Western Stationers itself was, in those days, the home of Clifton Chevrolet, and the lots immediately across 8th Street to the south were partially filled by a fine, three-story yellow-and-white brick home that was attractively surrounded by a yard filled with flowers and enclosed by an expensive wrought-iron fence. Eventually, Newt Clifton purchased the property, and the house was replaced by Clifton Chevrolet's new headquarters, the large building built by Dick Tatsch that now houses The Hub, Alotta Gelato and several other businesses.
Across Bullard, what is presently Domino's Pizza gave space to the office and showroom of Foxworth-Galbraith Lumber. Farther down Bullard, Bear Creek Herbs and Shevek's housed, respectively, Bingaman & Snyder Insurance and the Railway Express offices. The Food Co-Op building was devoted to the Studebaker agency and, later, to an auto parts store.
Aside from the Training School, St. Mary's Academy and St. Vincent's, most of the public education in Silver City was conducted on Sixth Street in the Sixth Street and Washington Public School buildings, now gone, and in Stout Junior High, now transformed. The Lincoln Street Public School on Cooper Street was also in full operation, but North Silver Elementary (now Jose Barrios) only went up around 1949; at the time, of course, it was considered to represent the height of modern construction. La Plata, Silver High and the Gila Regional Medical Center are located on what were formerly the extremities of Silver City's very primitive golf course and adjacent ranch land.
The "Mom and Pop" grocery stores — Y. Toy's, Tackett's, Bow's Market, Hing Lee's, Little's and Gene Hall's Grocery — another fixture of the old days, have also disappeared into memory. I had a special attachment to Gene Hall's grocery; I worked there for four years, on Saturday mornings only. I started when I was 10 years old; child-labor laws were more flexible in those days, and I wanted to earn some money, so Mr. Hall gave me a job. It was a fairly simple job: I swept the store, put soft drinks in the cooler, sacked groceries, placed cans on the shelves, and made a few deliveries with my wagon. At 25 cents an hour, I was rolling in dough. Movies in those days cost only 20 cents, but if one took in a Saturday-afternoon Western at the El Sol, one paid less than a dime. Hall's, of course, is gone; by my reckoning, the foundations may be discovered directly beneath the pavement where Hwy. 180 on its way to Cliff intersects with Virginia Street.
The T & H Drive-In is also gone. Located on Silver Heights Boulevard, directly across from the Woman's Club, the T & H during the late Forties and early Fifties was one of the busiest restaurants in town. They served a very good hamburger and later a very good enchilada, and being the only drive-in in Silver City until the Hilltop (forerunner of the present China Gate Restaurant) was built in the mid-Fifties, they did a brisk business in fast food. Originally built by Frank Tatsch and his one-time partner, Harold Hammack (later, mayor of Silver City), the T & H building still stands, much remodeled, slightly to the east of J.D.'s Feed and Supply.
When Tatsch Construction was contracted to build the Gila Theatre in the late 1940s, three small gray-stucco office buildings — two-room houses, really — and several beautiful cottonwoods had to be removed. One of those offices belonged to my family doctor, Dr. Guthery, a frontier physician who had settled in Silver City in order to arrest his case of tuberculosis and who had formerly made his rounds by horse and buggy. Dr. Guthery's own house still stands at southwest corner of D and Market Streets and is now owned by the Hedges family. The new medical office he built to replace the one torn down is now a private residence on the northeast corner of the same block, across the street from the St. Joseph Apartments.
One could, perhaps, go on interminably with a piece like this because memory seems an almost infinite thing. But at some point, one must reach a limit, and it is with The Limit that I should close. Situated on precisely the spot where McDonald's now stands, The Limit Bar was one of a kind. The bar was named The Limit because, in the Forties, it was erected on a line that was thought to measure Silver City's northeastern limits. In fact, in high school, those of us who were thrifty (or cheap, if you like) used to drive to the dilapidated Texaco station just beyond The Limit, about where the Phillips 66 Station now stands, so that we could buy our gasoline for six cents a gallon rather than pay the hefty seven cents a gallon that was then the price in town. (In view of the current price I now find this truly painful to remember but nevertheless colorful.)
Whatever else may be said about Silver City, it has at least always been a colorful place in which to live, and The Limit was one of the most colorful places that anyone in my generation can remember. In the beginning, The Limit wasn't even a bar; it was merely the dream of one as the owner (I have no idea whom he might have been) began constructing a single low wall made from beer bottles held together by mortar. In those days, and there seems to have been data to prove it, Grant County was reputed to have had the highest liquor consumption per capita of any county in the United States. I am not kidding, so readers will see immediately what I mean, I'm sure, when I repeat that Silver City was a colorful place.
Given so much "color," The Limit seemed to go up with amazing speed. The one wall pretty quickly became four walls, and when a roof was added, The Limit went into operation, even as the owner began adding more and longer walls out behind the original, one-room structure in which the bar started. I do not pretend ever to have been inside The Limit; no one that I knew went anywhere near the inside of it. That was because, almost from the start, so much consumption inside so small a space tended to produce varying degrees of tension, the tension in its turn producing varying degrees of animosity . . . quite a lot of it, if one can believe the stories and the newspaper reports. Thereafter, as a general rule, the animosity tended to become physical. What a colorful place to have had at the edge of town! And so, in the Forties and early Fifties, in the absence of Geronimo, Chato, Mangus Colorado, the Wild Bunch, Billy the Kid and Blackjack Ketchum, The Limit fully recalled our link with the Old West. Like the Old West, it too finally died, edged out at last by the Yellow Front Store and, finally, the McDonald's Happy Meal.
In looking back, when The Limit finally went, something akin to a metaphorical school marm, something vaguely resembling a triumph of civilization, seemed to have arrived. Well, as I said in starting, things change. But if the "T" on "T-Mountain" (for State Teachers College) has now changed to a "W," and a few of the fine old buildings have gone the way that old buildings are destined to go, Silver City is still Silver City. As the Prince of Salina says in The Leopard: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. D'you understand?" Well, yes, and one stroll down Bullard or up Broadway on any given day should be enough to make any solid citizen understand that the town retains enough flavor, local color and downright individuality to satisfy even the most skeptical old timer who might live amongst us.
To the eye, certainly, much has changed, but deep down, heart and soul, everything has stayed the same.
Phillip "Pep" Parotti grew up in Silver City during the Forties and the Fifties and has recently retired and come home after a long teaching career at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas.