When you walk down the street where I live, there is always the danger of being forced onto the narrow footpath that now exists between the acequia (irrigation ditch) and the concrete curb installed for the safety of the traffic that whizzes by. This, however, seems to prevent no one from taking advantage of the luxury of strolling down a country lane in the midst of town.

At the walker’s pace, Santa Fe comes alive in a simple and profound way that makes you want to be a charter member of the “Shoot Your Car” club.

While many cities struggle to define their centers and attractive pedestrian areas, Santa Fe glides along, somehow surviving the pernicious effects of car culture. For this we must give thanks to Santa Fe’s founding fathers and mothers, who built with reckless disregard for the needs of Detroit. The town planners wanted to meet two basic criteria. First, they had to do it right for God and King; and second, they wanted to get where they were going without having to kill themselves in the process.

As a consequence, they eschewed, whenever possible, modern-day practices such as crossing rivers and streams multiple times, going over or through mountains and deserts, and building dumb things like overpasses, exit ramps, and four-lane highways. Once they’d set down the Church and the Palace of the Governors on the Plaza—buildings that served as the old time equivalent of anchor stores at the mall—they allowed other streets and pathways to form by pointing the burro’s nose towards a destination. The resulting roads earned names that told exactly where you were headed—like Pecos and Galisteo. The other byways that formed had much to do with the everyday business of business, and that had everything to do with food.

The earliest map of Santa Fe, created by one José de Urrutia in 1766, clearly reveals how the town was to grow and what was important to the locals. Except for the Plaza and the destination roads, the most prominent features on the map had nothing to do with streets or buildings. The largest is the natural feature of the Rio de Santa Fe, and the two other most prominent solid lines on the map stand for the manmade constructions boldly labeled Acequia Para Regadio, “canal for irrigated land.”

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