ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 6, 1997 TAG: 9704040079
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SANTA FE, N.M.
SOURCE: GERRI KOBREN THE BALTIMORE SUN
In 1877, in the city of Holy Faith - Santa Fe - capital of the U.S. territory of New Mexico, the Sisters of Loretto unveiled a miracle.
They had come here some 20 years before at the behest of the energetic young Bishop Jean Baptist Lamy to establish a school for girls; and they had done so. But when their school's chapel was near completion, a flaw in the design became evident: There was no space for a staircase to the choir loft.
So the nuns prayed to St. Joseph, patron saint of carpenters, in a nine-day novena. In the answer to their prayer - the ``miraculous staircase'' of Loretto - lies one of the attractions of Santa Fe, a city of 62,000 people and 4,500 hotel and motel rooms, where tourism and state government are the primary industries.
Named by readers of Conde Nast Traveler magazine their favorite destination in the world in 1992, Santa Fe is today host to more than 1 million visitors a year.
The Sisters of Loretto needed just one. And on the last day of their novena, he appeared - an old man, carrying carpenter's tools.
Working for the next six months, with wood from heaven only knows where (which he bent, as needed, in a bucket of water and joined without metal connections), the unnamed stranger fashioned a spiral staircase of 33 steps that doubles twice upon itself and, unsupported, rises 231/2 feet to the loft, while occupying only the floor space of the lowest tread.
And then, the story goes, he disappeared.
History, legend and literature come together in Santa Fe, and in the little chapel on the famous Santa Fe Trail. The staircase (with an admittedly nonmiraculous railing added in 1888) is a fact; the identity of the carpenter is a matter of faith - or family pride: On exhibit at Baltimore's American Visionary Art Museum is a mixed-woods and varnish structure, about 15 inches high, called ``Miraculous Stairs of Loretto Chapel.'' It was made in 1975 by Oscar E. Hadwiger, grandson of a German woodworker named Yohon Hadwiger, who was, according to museum information, credited with the design and construction of the Loretto Chapel stairs.
About Jean Baptist Lamy there's fact and fiction too. Bishop and later archbishop, he did indeed live and labor here. And then he passed into literature as the model for Jean Marie Latour in Willa Cather's 1927 novel ``Death Comes for the Archbishop.''
He's part of an odd little factoid as well: The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway never stopped in Santa Fe itself; the terminal is 15 miles away, in Lamy, a town named for the indefatigable churchman. One of the attractions of Santa Fe is its proximity to other scenic, tourist-friendly cities - Taos to the northeast, Albuquerque to the southwest, Los Alamos to the northwest.
Within Santa Fe itself, tourist-attracting shops rim a one-square-block plaza where high-priced galleries rub shoulders with inexpensive gift stores. On the north side is the old Palace of the Governors, now a state-history museum; in front of the palace, American Indians sell hand-made jewelry, tax-free. On the south side, Woolworth's displays beads and silver of its own.
East of the bustling plaza is St. Francis Cathedral, another of Lamy's projects, and his final resting place. Its French-Romanesque design would be an architectural oddity in this adobe town were it not for the fact that so much else here is also different in some way.
The Loretto Chapel, for instance, is Gothic. The state Capitol is in the round, recalling a Zia sun symbol. Territorial-style buildings with big windows and wood trim recall the period after the United States wrested New Mexico from the Spanish in 1846, when the railroad brought construction materials and designs more common on the East Coast.
We toured the city on an open-air bus. Our jitney, driven by an amiable Marlboro Man (sans cigarette, but tan and ruggedly handsome in bead-trimmed cowboy hat), chugs past St. Francis, the Loretto chapel (owned and maintained by the Best Western Inn at Loretto next door), the San Miguel Mission (the oldest church in the United States, built in 1626), and the Bataan Memorial, a museum dedicated to the two battalions of New Mexicans who were the primary prisoners on the infamous Philippine ``death march'' of World War II.
The bus climbs up Canyon Road, where art galleries string out, one after the other, in the middle of an old, and still very desirable, residential area. ``California prices'' for local real estate, the driver says proudly, citing $200,000 to $300,000 sales.
We wind on up the Sangre de Christos, and he points out a trio of museums devoted to folk and American Indian art.
The art colony, according to the driver, developed because of the climate: Lung patients came here to clear their airways - and stayed to paint.
Half an hour to the northwest, Los Alamos tells a similar story: Young Robert Oppenheimer came out West twice for his health, and when the time came to choose a place to create the atomic bomb, he picked the site of the Los Alamos Ranch School for sickly boys, on a plateau in the Jemez range.
Los Alamos is today a pleasant little city of 18,000 with the look of a college town, where a goodly portion of the populace seems to be jogging, biking or power-walking on lung-bursting mountain roads. A museum there presents the history of the bomb and the town built to build it, and scientific secrecy is still apparent: When we get lost on the way to our next stop, a kind-looking man emerging from an ominously nondescript building behind a chain-link fence carefully removes his ID badge before telling us how to find the main road.
Southwest of Los Alamos, we visit the Anasazi ruins preserved and maintained by the U.S. Park Service at Bandelier National Monument; it's named not for an ammunition belt but for historian-ethnologist Adolf Bandelier, who first explored the area in 1880.
We climb ladders up the cliffs to squat in the south-facing caves where the Anasazi, ancestors of the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest, lived in the 12th to the 16th centuries, and look down on the outlines of the apartment communities where others of their group dwelt. There is something reverential in the air here, something that makes us feel a link to the ``ancient ones'' who preceded not just European-background pioneers, but the Navajo and Apache as well.
On another day, we visit Taos, an hour or two away (depending on whether you drive the highway or the mountain road); taken together, the two cities are said to have more art galleries than Paris. When shopping palled, scenery called: the Great Gorge of the Rio Grande River west of the city is a stunning canyon easily viewed from the bridge that spans it.
We go to Albuquerque, too, where we ride on the aerial tram that takes us 2.7 miles up to the top of Sandia Peak and a visit to Sky City, an Acoma pueblo on a 357-foot mesa west of town. It lacks heat, electricity and running water, but it is still year-round home to about 50 hardy American Indians.
We visited in October, but we might have chosen a better time - in the summer, perhaps, when the famous Santa Fe Opera is performing. Or in the winter, when mountain snows call out to skiers. At the various pueblos - sovereign Indian communities surrounding the cities - there are major festivals scheduled throughout the year; we seem to have missed all of them.
But, we decide, there is no better time after all. The scenery never fails. The shops and museums are always there. The pueblos are open to tourists, even though they're not celebrating. Jeep and horseback tours and wilderness adventures are advertised in brochures in every hotel/motel lobby.
The locals know what they've got here. Real estate companies put out tabloid- and magazine-sized booklets filled with ads for houses in the $200,000 to more than $1 million range. Many have guest houses: If you live here, you know you're going to have visitors.
LENGTH: Long : 136 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: THOMAS GRAVES/THE BALTIMORE SUN. 1. The church of Sanby CNBFrancisco de Asissi Mission on the outskirts of Taos, N.M., is a
marvel of simplicity and grandeur. It has been photographed and
painted by hundreds of artists including Ansel Adams and Georgia O'
Keefe. 2. The ceremonial kiva at Bandelier National Monument in Los
Alamos, N.M., is nestled in a cave several hundred feet up a cliff.