Inn on the Alameda

This is the shortest entry in hotels and resorts, and the brevity is the finding.

The Man Who Built Several of These

Joe Schepps came to Santa Fe in 1971 and moved out of construction into lodging. Over the following two decades he developed the Santa Fe Motel, the Inn on the Alameda, and the Fechin Inn in Taos, and in 1986 he opened Sanbusco Market Center on the edge of the Railyard, years before the city bought the yard and began promoting development there. He was also one of the four outside partners in Hotel Santa Fe, the Picuris Pueblo hotel on Paseo de Peralta, where he served as investor and supervised the design and construction.

He sold nearly all of it. He kept this one. That is the argument, and it is a better one than the brochure language makes.

Alameda

An alameda is a public walk lined with trees, and Santa Fe’s runs along the Santa Fe River. The street is not an accident of address. The Acequia Madre, the mother ditch that has carried river water to the east side since the early Spanish period and was already in use at the time of the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, takes its water from the river just east of the East Alameda bridge. Everything on the historic east side and everything up Canyon Road is downstream of that headgate. The lanes bend the way they do because the water went first and the walls followed it.

The inn is at 303 East Alameda, on that street, facing the river and the park along it. Two blocks to the Plaza one way, the galleries a shorter walk the other, with Geronimo partway up. That position gets sold as convenience. It is more accurately the oldest working infrastructure in the city, and the reason there is a town here at all.

Ten Buildings

The inn is seventy-two rooms in the last published count, spread across roughly ten low buildings on private grounds rather than stacked along corridors, which is why it reads as a compound. Rooms have piñon fireplaces, adobe and wood surfaces, and private patios or balconies. Breakfast and the evening bar share one space, now called Joe’s Tequila Bar after the founder. Schepps still held the property at the last public accounting we can find, which in an industry this consolidated is itself worth reporting.

What It Is, and What It Is Not

The honest reckoning. This is not an architecturally significant building. No architect is named in the record, and none of the guides names one. It did not invent a style, house a religious order, or sit on a corner with four centuries under it. La Fonda decided what downtown looks like. The Inn of the Five Graces was assembled out of a landmark district one address at a time. This was built in the 1980s, in the local vocabulary, competently, by a man who knew what he was doing and then stayed to run it.

That is a real thing to be, and there are not many of them left. Of the nine properties in hotels and resorts, this is the one whose case rests on continuity of ownership and a good address rather than on a story, and we would rather say so than invent one.

Common Questions

Where is the Inn on the Alameda?

At 303 East Alameda Street, on the Santa Fe River between the Plaza and Canyon Road, about two blocks from the Plaza.

When did the Inn on the Alameda open?

Joe Schepps bought the site in the early 1980s and built the inn there. Published accounts give the decade rather than a firm year, so we have left the year out.