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Era Essay 1: Albuquerque and the San, 1908–1952
What had been a Wild West town during the 1880s and 1890s had taken on the appearance of civilization as the twentieth century dawned. During the late nineteenth century, the city incorporated in 1885, more than a quarter-century before New Mexico became a state in 1912. Albuquerque was sometimes concerned with regulating and taxing the town’s brothels and bordellos, yet new sewers, clean water, and electric arc lights brought a veneer of urban modernity to the city in the closing years of the century. Schools, churches, banks, and a thriving business section in New Town made Albuquerque a commercial center for much of New Mexico Territory during the early 1900s. Albuquerque also began to develop a reputation for its healthy climate that boasted mild temperatures even during the winter, low humidity, and clear blue skies on a majority of days. The exotic Alvarado Hotel opened in 1902. Native Americans sold handmade pottery, jewelry, and rugs on the brick walk around the hotel, which beckoned to tourists from back East. As a result of the climate, victims of tuberculosis began arriving in the city as early as the 1890s and lived in boardinghouses and hotels, hoping that the salubrious climate would help cure their affliction. “Taking the cure” in rural areas far from the smoke-shrouded cities of the East and Midwest became a recommended course of treatment for tuberculosis patients. Albuquerque became a Mecca for those suffering from the white plague. In 1902, the Sisters of Charity opened St. Joseph, a three-story, $50,000 sanatorium in Albuquerque.2 The sisters came to Albuquerque in the early 1880s from their motherhouse in Cincinnati to revive Catholic education. When they saw the need for treating the city’s growing number of tuberculosis patients, they raised money and built St. Joseph. It would be the first of an estimated half-dozen sanatoria built in Albuquerque during the 1900s and 1910s to care for the growing number of tubercular visitors. Rev. Hugh A. Cooper moved to Albuquerque in 1903 as a tuberculosis patient, and the climate and rest gave him renewed vigor within a few months. Prior to moving to Albuquerque, the Pennsylvania-born pastor had been ministering to a church in Centerville, Iowa, just north of the Missouri border, when the congregation hosted a revival by the famed preacher Billy Sunday. Cooper served as a substitute pastor at Albuquerque’s First Presbyterian Church and, in 1904, was asked to become the congregation‘s pastor. He stepped in to finish a new building for First Presbyterian, dedicated in 1906, but Cooper could not ignore the squalor he saw among some of the tuberculosis victims he often visited since arriving in the city in 1903. In 1907, Cooper convinced the Presbyterian Synod of New Mexico to establish a Presbyterian Sanatorium for indigent visitors. Albuquerque residents looked outward to the world during the 1910s. In 1916, General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing’s unit passed through Albuquerque before encamping in El Paso, Texas, where he chased Pancho Villa across the border into
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