'Make 'em walk' Guided tours reveal secret history of Albuquerque's oldest neighborhoods

As cars whir by on Interstate 25 just out of sight, the Huning Highland neighborhood east of Downtown, with its tuberculosis cottages and Victorian homes, harks back to a time before the automobile.

With artifacts of the railroad industry, the Old West and, even, the atom bomb, the neighborhood tells its story brick by brick for those who choose to leave their car behind and walk it.

The first weekend of May, people can explore Huning Highland, along with five other historic neighborhoods in Albuquerque, on free guided tours named for activist Jane Jacobs. Known for saving Washington Square Park in New York’s Greenwich Village from being destroyed and turned into a highway, Jacobs became a prominent figure in the fight against what she called “the death” of American cities by car-centric infrastructure.

Jane’s Walks are held annually in 200 cities across the world, which for the past five years, has included Albuquerque, said David Ryan, one of the event organizers. The walk encourages people to leave the suburbs behind and explore some of the inner-city neighborhoods that many people just drive past, Ryan said.

Much of modern infrastructure prioritizes cars over people, Ryan said, which is making people increasingly isolated.

“Make ’em get out of their cars. Make ’em walk,” said another organizer, Robert Elwood, about the proposed construction of a parking lot for nearby restaurants in the Huning Highland neighborhood.

Elwood has lived in the neighborhood for eight years, is an active member of the Huning Highland Neighborhood Association, and is a keeper of the district’s storied history.

To him, Huning Highland is thriving precisely because people walk and maintain “an interest in each other.” Elwood came to Albuquerque from Maryland to be near his grandchildren and, he said jokingly, to flee from the humidity of the East. And he’s far from the first to do so.

Just like the transcontinental railroad introduced an industrial fervor to the small frontier town that was Albuquerque in the 1880s, Ryan said, the dry climate of New Mexico brought a different kind of customer — tuberculosis patients.

Hoping that the dry air would cure their ails, people of all walks of life flocked from East Coast cities to the high desert of the Duke City, Ryan said. You can see this history creaking onward in still-intact, open-air porches on many homes originally constructed for tuberculosis patients and the narrow shotgun-style cottages built to fill the demand for space.

Decades later and a hundred miles away in Los Alamos, while scientists toiled on the top-secret Manhattan Project that would produce the atom bomb, a man in Huning Highland kept watch for spies trying to interfere in the clandestine operations, Ryan said. Harry Hill, who lived on High Street, made sure no one took too much interest in nearby rail shipments transporting materials and personnel up north.

Those are just a few anecdotes from the Huning Highland guided tour. If you’re interested in slowing down for a moment, and understanding more about your own neighborhood or exploring another, Jane’s Walk is also offering tours in Nob Hill, Parkland Hills Addition, Raynolds Addition, and Highland neighborhoods on May 3 and 4.