Canyon Road

Water explains the street. Within a few decades of the founding of Santa Fe, colonists dug a ditch off the Santa Fe River and ran it along the high side of the valley. That ditch, the Acequia Madre, still carries water one block south of Canyon Road. Between the river below and the mother ditch above lay a narrow band of ground that could be irrigated, and the road is the track that ran along it. It bends because the water bent. It narrows where the ground narrowed. Most of what a visitor notices about the pace here, the way the street makes people wander rather than aim, follows from the fact that nobody designed it.

From Footpath to Farming Lane

Before the Spanish it was a footpath running east out of the river valley toward Pecos. After them it was farms, each house at the center of its own corn, wheat, and vegetables, watered off the acequia, and the oldest adobes still standing here date to the 1750s. Santa Feans walked burros up the Road of the Canyon to cut piñon in the mountains and brought them back down under loads of firewood, some of it sold on Burro Alley, where a restaurant still carries the name. After 1846 the army put a sawmill at the head of the canyon and hauled lumber down this road to build Fort Marcy.

The Ordinance That Made a Gallery Street

Painters came early in the twentieth century. Gerald Cassidy settled on the road in 1915, John Sloan and Randall Davey followed in 1919, and in 1920 Davey bought the army’s old mill and made it his house and studio, which is an Audubon sanctuary now. Five more, the group known as Los Cinco Pintores, built their own adobe houses in a row up Camino del Monte Sol, a lane running off the road, at the start of the twenties. But the gallery street is younger than the art colony, and it exists because of a zoning decision. In 1962 the city designated Canyon Road a residential arts and crafts zone, which let artists sell work out of the houses they lived in. Five galleries opened that year, five more the next, six the year after, and for the following fifteen years as many as seven a year.

That is why the art is not behind glass. It hangs in eighteenth and nineteenth century houses with low ceilings and deep window wells, on walls that are two feet of adobe, and it carries on out into gardens and under portals. The buildings were not so much converted as lent.

What Is in the Buildings

El Zaguán, at 545, belonged to James L. Johnson, a Santa Fe Trail merchant who bought a house and a corral here in the 1850s and never stopped adding to them. The Historic Santa Fe Foundation has owned it since 1979 and works from it, and the garden goes back to the 1890s. Geronimo occupies the Borrego House, eighteenth century, named for the family that bought it in 1839 and added the long columned portal across its front. The Compound was the center of a family compound until 1966, when Alexander Girard designed its interior; his suns and hearts are still on the walls, and his collection is the one that fills the Museum of International Folk Art on Museum Hill. At the top of the road, Cristo Rey is John Gaw Meem’s, finished in 1940, and it holds a stone altar screen carved in 1761 for a chapel on the Plaza.

How Far It Goes

The galleries are concentrated in the lower stretch, and walking from Paseo de Peralta to the top of them is comfortably under a mile. The road itself keeps going past the last gallery, up to Cristo Rey, and then becomes Upper Canyon Road and runs on into the foothills.

The residential half of that 1962 phrase is the half people forget. Santa Feans live here, in the houses between the galleries and along the lanes running off the road, on the oldest ground in the city, the Historic East Side. Come on an ordinary weekday, when the pace still belongs to the street. On Christmas Eve it belongs to the crowd instead, gladly, and The Santa Fe Year says what happens then.

Common Questions

How long is Canyon Road?

It depends what you are measuring. The galleries run up from Paseo de Peralta and thin out past the 800 block, comfortably under a mile. The road continues to Cristo Rey at 1120 and climbs into the foothills as Upper Canyon Road.

Why are there so many galleries on Canyon Road?

A 1962 zoning designation, the residential arts and crafts zone, let artists sell work from the houses they lived in.

Do people still live on Canyon Road?

Yes. The 1962 designation is residential first, and Canyon Road and its side lanes are still lived in.