By the time New Mexico finally attained statehood in 1912, it was clear to Santa Fe’s leaders that the vision of a thriving Anglo-American city remained unrealized.  While other cities in the state prospered as a result of the railway, Santa Fe’s economy languished.  The city’s population, which had stood at 6,600 in 1880, actually fell to 5,600 by 1900.

In response, an imaginative group of city leaders including merchants, and civic and cultural leaders, worked to redefine Santa Fe.  They were motivated, in part, by the efforts of Edgar Lee Hewett, an archaeologist who had succeeded in bringing the School of American Archaeology to Santa Fe in 1907 and, subsequently, obtaining the Palace of the Governors as its headquarters.

Hewett and photographer Jesse Nusbaum undertook a remodeling of the Palace, stripping away the Territorial-Period ornamentation added to its exterior in an attempt to restore the building to the Spanish-Colonial appearance.  By 1912, the impulse to preserve the “ancient” Santa Fe and its potential for promoting tourism had emerged as the path for economic growth in the city.  This interest prompted city leaders to pursue a City Beautiful program in Santa Fe based not on the conventional definition of the Beaux-Arts-inspired City Beautiful movement, but upon the retention of the city’s historic appearance including its narrow winding streets and historic architectural style.  This decision to pursue a City Beautiful plan based upon valuing a past that was unique among American cities gave rise to the phrase, “the City Different.”

With General Stephan Watts Kearny and the American army’s occupation of Santa Fe in 1846 the army established its headquarters on the grounds of the old presidio.  By 1848, the Mexican government had ceded what is now California, Arizona, and the New Mexico to the United States.  During the early years of US occupation, carpenters continued to work with timber and adobe but added classically-inspired decorative details around entries and windows and along porches, or portales.  The Palace Governors, which continued to serve as the seat of the Territorial  Government, was one of the first buildings remodeled with this classically-inspired woodwork.  The combination of traditional adobe and timber building materials with milled decorative details such as pedimented lintels, classically detailed square porch posts and small-windowed sidelights and, later, brick coping along parapets is today referred to as Territorial-Period architecture.

With the 1851 appointment of French-born Jean Baptiste Lamy as the Bishop of Santa Fe, came changes to the cultural and built environment of the town.  Lamy introduced European masons to the area who constructed the Romanesque-Revival Cathedral of Saint Francis and the Gothic-Revival Loretto Chapel.  Landscape details such as wrought iron fences with masonry piers and a gazebo that housed military band concerts in the middle of a then fenced Plaza similarly suggested the influence of current Anglo-American cultural values.

In 1879, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway was constructed through New Mexico bypassing its namesake city of Santa Fe.  By 1881, Bishop Lamy had managed to influence the construction of a spur line to Santa Fe.  The construction of the spur line (and a narrow gauge rail line from the north in 1887) resulted in a period of city boosterism based on the vision of Santa Fe becoming a thoroughly modern Anglo-American city.  A domed territorial capitol was completed in 1892, and brick commercial bulidings with fashionable Italianate details began to crop up around the Plaza.  Evidence of this period of “Americanization” in Santa Fe is still apparent west of downtown in the rail-yard area and in small enclaves surrounding the city’s center where Queen Anne and Mansard-inspired residences and hipped-roof cottages still stand.

Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821 and ended the ban against foreign trade that Spain had placed on its colonies.  That same year William Becknell and then others began to make the 700 mile journey along the Santa Fe Trail from Missouri bringing manufactured goods and returning with mules, hides and precious metals.  Many who arrived to town via Santa Fe Trail were struck by the town’s earthen architecture.

La Villa Real de Santa Fe, (the royal town of the Holy Faith) was settled as the new capital of the Spanish Colony of Nuevo Mexico.  Pedro de Peralta, the governor who oversaw its settlement, based his plan for the town on the Ordinances of 1573, later known as the Laws of the Indies.  These regulations prescribed how streets and plazas were to be organized and provided Santa Fe with a town plan that shapes much of the downtown nearly four centuries later.  The plaza is central to Santa Fe.  Those buildings housing the main institutions (the church, government and military offices) of Spanish colonial society originally faced the plaza.  The Casas Reales, or royal houses, now known as the Palace of the Governors, is located on the plaza’s north side.  At the Palace’s rear was located the walled presidio during the Spanish and Mexican periods.

Some of the streets entering the plaza were really the ends of trails leading to and from the capital city.  From the south came El Camino Real, or the royal road, that connected the remote colony with Mexico.  Similarly, Old Pecos Trail, Old Santa Fe Trail, Galisteo and Agua Fria Streets, follow centuries’ old alignments.

The Spanish settlers developed the fertile agricultural lands that surrounded the plaza and flanked the Rio Santa Fe.  Continuing the traditional practices of Spain, they shaped fields irrigated by a series of ditches, or acequias, that drew water from the small river.  The Urrutia map of 1766 shows field systems on both sides of the river, and some of the narrow winding streets such as Acequia Madre and Agua Fria follow sections of some of the old acequias.

For over two centuries the Spanish colony of Nuevo Mexico struggled against geographic and economic isolation.  It survived the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in which the colonists fled south of El Paso and then returned in 1692.  Like their pueblo indian neighbors, the Spanish settlers relied on earth and wood to construct their buildings.  Substituting sun-dried earthen bricks, or adobes, in place of the puddled mud construction used by the pueblos, they developed a flat-roofed earth and timber architecture.  In other instances, members of an extended family sometimes built homes nearby, giving rise to family compounds.  The vernacular building that resulted from using these materials, technologies and plans is today referred to as the “Pueblo-Spanish” Style of architecture.

By 1790, the population of the town was about 2,500 with the majority of residents listed as Spanish, but with a sizeable minority of mixed, or mestizo residents, as well as a number of Indians.  Among the Indians were Tlaxacan Indians from Mexico, who had accompanied the Spaniards northward then settled in the Barrio de Analco along the south side of the river near the (still extant) parish church of San Miguel.