What finally pushed Santa Fe into regulating architecture 50 years ago this week was the cutting of stately trees to make room for a modern motel near the heart of the downtown.

For most of the early 20th century, the Catron family rented cabins amid a grove of trees on the south side of the Santa Fe River called the Orchard Camp.

"It was historical in the sense it was certainly Santa Fe's first motel," said Tom Catron, whose aunt and uncle ran the camp. "But by the 1950s, it was derelict."

Catron does not recall any public outcry when his family leased the property long term to Clyde Tyler to build the Desert Inn in August 1956. "This was before people were really attuned to historic preservation," he said.

But people in town began to take notice after New Mexican columnist Calla Hay decried the cutting of the cottonwoods to make room for the motel. As it took shape, its modern style was seen by many residents as an additional affront to local tastes.

Local architecture

Of course, the Desert Inn, now remodeled in a faux-adobe style, hardly sparked the first local controversy over architectural style. Since early in the 20th century, newcomers awed by local architecture have been debating Santa Fe style.

In 1912, the city contracted with archaeologist Sylvanus Morley, between excavations in Mexico and Central America, to write a report on the local building styles.

Morley's report codified several local building styles but insisted these did not include the California Mission style — a reference to the style of the "Los Siete Burros" mansion being built on Old Santa Fe Trail that year for the new owner of The New Mexican, Bronson Cutting.

The Trinidad, Colo., architectural firm of Rapp, Rapp and Hendrickson was one of the first to specialize in the Santa Fe style of building. It modeled the 1915 New Mexico Building at the Panama-California Exhibition in San Diego, Calif., and the 1916 state Museum of Fine Arts just off the Plaza after Franciscan missions in Acoma, San Felipe and other pueblos.

But no one was more successful at adapting the Santa Fe style to residences than Carlos Vierra. A son of a Portuguese sailor, raised near Monterey, Calif., he had come to Santa Fe in 1904 for treatment of tuberculosis.

Vierra made his living as an artist at first, then began designing and building homes. In 1918, The New Mexican praised him as the originator of "the Santa Fe style of architecture — the kind that is so much admired by the artists and people of artistic temperament who come here."

Modernizing threat

Much of this early enthusiasm for traditional architecture waned after World War II, when there were a series of efforts to modernize Santa Fe.

"I heard discussions you would hardly believe," said Irene von Horvath, who began to write the historic-design ordinance after she was appointed to the city Planning Commission in 1956.

Von Horvath recalled in an interview last spring, before her death Sept. 6 at age 88, that a speaker at a City Council meeting once proposed building a new boulevard across the Santa Fe Plaza because the city already owned the land and wouldn't have to acquire the right of way.

An architect, von Horvath had been enraptured by Santa Fe's architecture from her first visit in 1943. After moving to Santa Fe, she said, she realized the city's architecture was a major reason people visited and moved here. Modernizing "would be killing the goose that lays the golden egg," she said.

But not everyone saw it that way. "Most of the commissioners didn't give a hoot," she said. "All they wanted was to make a buck. They didn't realize the buck was related to how the city looked."

Even John Gaw Meem, who had popularized the Santa Fe style of architecture in the 1920s, opposed the ordinance as it was initially drafted in 1957, von Horvath said.

Like other architects, Meem argued that the law would constrain creativity, although "he was not militant about it," von Horvath said. She said Meem changed his opinion after his wife, Faith, overheard von Horvath saying Meem needed "to stop sitting on the fence."

By the time the ordinance reached the City Council on Oct. 30, 1957, Meem had become a supporter of von Horvath's "golden goose" philosophy.

"Perhaps if design were left entirely in the hands of sensitive people it could be done, but we know from experience how improbable this would be, given present day economic pressures," Meem told the council. "Without restrictions, we would soon be overwhelmed, to our loss and that of countless visitors who enjoy our architectural differentness and on whom depends so much of our prosperity."

Ordinance support

Von Horvath's partner in writing the ordinance was Oliver La Farge, a son of a New York City architect, a Harvard-educated anthropologist and winner of the 1930 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel set among the Navajos, Laughing Boy.

In 1946, La Farge and his wife, Consuelo, moved to Santa Fe from the French Quarter of New Orleans, one of the few places where architecture already was regulated by municipal code. By 1956, he was writing a Sunday column for The New Mexican and encouraging its new owner, Robert McKinney, to support an architectural code in Santa Fe.

Von Horvath said La Farge — "one of the most intelligent men I have ever met" — would walk through different neighborhoods, taking notes on their unique buildings. She hit the library to read up on historic architecture and preservation. The two met weekly at La Farge's house to draft the ordinance.

They were assisted by City Attorney Sam Z. Montoya, who obtained architectural-style ordinances from New Orleans and Santa Barbara, Calif., to serve as models. Montoya, who later became chief justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, would later say the Santa Fe historic-design ordinance was the proudest accomplishment of his career. "You had that feeling when you were working with him," von Horvath said.

Charleston, S.C., became the first American town to pass a design-control ordinance in 1931, followed by Annapolis, Md., in 1935. By 1967, a decade after Santa Fe's law was enacted, 66 U.S. municipalities had laws regulating architecture.

During the initial discussions of the ordinance, opposition was led by architects like John Conron, whose Swiss chalet-like Centerline building on Lincoln Avenue had helped spur the push for traditional architecture. Instead of ensuring "the preservation of valued historical buildings," he said, the law would produce "mimicked copies of historical landmarks."

But by the time the ordinance reached the City Council on Oct. 30, 1957, the opposition had been drowned out. The reporter who covered the issue, Tony Hillerman, recently recalled nothing particularly controversial about the final hearing where the motion passed unanimously.

Hillerman, now known for his Navajo mystery novels, wrote that the poet Witter Bynner "drew the loudest guffaws of the evening, telling the crowd of coming here 35 years ago and buying his home. 'I had rebellious ideas when I bought my house. I did things to that little house that this law wouldn't have permitted me to do. I can only wish we had it then to put a restraining influence on me.' "

The New Mexico Supreme Court upheld the ordinance in 1964 after a challenge by the national retail chain Gamble-Skogmo, which wanted to build a new store downtown. "Municipalities have the authority, by zoning ordinance, to restrict and regulate buildings and structures in accordance with a master plan for the general welfare of the city and its people," said the court's majority opinion.

A lost battle

The original historic-styles ordinance regulated only the styles of new buildings. That began to change in 1960, when the city proposed to raze the Simon Nusbaum house at the southeast corner of Washington Avenue and Nusbaum Street (now the site of the Hotel Plaza Real) for a parking lot.

This time, Meem, president of the Old Santa Fe Association, led the effort to preserve the two-story, Territorial-style, Civil War-era building with a long portal and balcony, a large lawn with towering trees and spectacular lilac hedge.

But the only way the city could stop the destruction of a historic structure was to invoke its power of eminent domain by petitioning a court to let the city take over ownership. In this case, it wasn't a private developer that wanted to raze the house, but city government itself, which had a long-term lease on the lot from Nusbaum's widow.

Von Horvath said Meem thought he had won a reprieve when he found evidence that Theodore Roosevelt had once slept at the Nusbaum House. But the City Council was unimpressed.

In 1961, after the association lost its arguments in court, the house was razed. That led to a number of changes in the 1960s that gave the city more power to block the destruction of buildings that were at least 50 years old — pushing Santa Fe toward real historic preservation for the first time.

Flexing muscles

The power was first used in 1966 to stop the demolition of the Padre Gallegos House on Washington Avenue. The adobe house with its large courtyard had been built in 1857 for Jose Manuel Gallegos, a priest defrocked by Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy.

After the Planning Commission rejected the plan to tear down the old adobe and the City Council upheld the decision, the owner backed off plans to demolish the building and remodeled it instead. Since 1983, it has been home to the Santacaf & eacute; restaurant.

In the 1980s, the City Council again amended the law to provide for the regulation of the remodeling of historic buildings — so their architectural integrity is not slowly eroded by piecemeal changes.

In the 1990s, the law was amended again to classify all structures in the historic zone as significant, contributing or noncontributing, depending on whether the building is at least 50 years old and has some of its original architecture still intact.

Sharon Woods, a construction contractor who chaired the board in the early 1990s and recently was reappointed as chairwoman, said recently that she would like to see some changes in the 50-year rule — especially now that the ordinance itself is 50 years old.

"Fifty or older is one criteria, but not the only one," Woods said. "We have old Stamm houses that are 50 years old but don't deserve to be historic."

Woods said she would like to see the Historic Preservation Division give greater weight to other criteria that determine if a building is considered significant or contributing, so the historical status no longer is automatic at 50 years.

On the other hand, Mary Ragins, who worked for the Historic Preservation Division in the 1990s, said she would like to see 1950s architecture recognized and protected as a separate style.

Ragins, who now works at a historic-design consultant, said some historic-design rules prohibit some of the best of '50s style, such as windows built into corners.

"We have these pockets of really good intact '50s architecture," she said. "In my opinion, building new structures in vacant lots that are in these areas should be allowed to be more compatible with the '50s architecture."

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.