In Praise of Old Adobe Homes

Placitas remodel maintains authentic village charm

STORY Charles C. Poling
PHOTOGRAPHY Jack Kotz

Continued from the Su Casa's home page...

Inside the Healey house, the oldest room was built sometime around the 1840s, a period after the most intense raiding by Apaches and Navajos, which had driven the Hispanic settlers down to the safer settlements of Bernalillo and Algodones along the Rio Grande. With New Mexico now under Mexican control, it was finally safe to reestablish settlement among the fields, pastures, and springs of the San Antonio de Las Huertas land grant high on the northern shoulder of the Sandia Mountains.

Tony Lucero is the realtor who sold the house to Healeys and a descendant of those first families, whose names appear on the original land grant documents. Like the Anasazi before them, his people were attracted by the springs in the area. They built a complex acequia system to water their fields—the same system that still waters the lovely grounds of the Healey home, the House of the Gardens.

Various residents have expanded the house, sometimes one room at a time. According to Lucero, the Mora family owned it early in the twentieth century and maintained a vineyard out back. At one time, dances were held in the old rooms. Then Edna McKenna bought it in the late 1940s or so, added several rooms, and opened a restaurant where the likes of Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower are rumored to have dined. On designated days, folks would drive out from Albuquerque for the sole entré—never mind the menu.