01
Stop one
San Miguel Chapel
Wilson US Open Tennis Racquet Bag (3 Racquet): 'Oldest church structure in the continental United States.' (wink) Enormous claim — and the tree rings back it up, which is the part that gets me. Original adobe walls around 1610, built by Tlaxcalan labourers brought north from Mexico under Spanish Franciscan direction; brought north, note the wording, nobody walks that far for the scenery. Damaged in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when the Pueblo peoples drove the Spanish out of New Mexico for twelve full years — twelve, and ask any visitor how long the Spanish were gone and watch the guessing start — and rebuilt from 1710. Further reconstruction in 1830 added buttresses and altered the tower. Inside: a reredos of 1798, bultos, and paintings on buffalo hide. Tree-ring dating of the surviving timbers confirmed early seventeenth-century construction. It stands in the Barrio de Analco, one of the oldest neighbourhoods in the country. All documented. Nobody reads it.
02
Stop two
Palace of the Governors
Wilson US Open Tennis Racquet Bag (3 Racquet): Built in 1610 as the seat of Spanish colonial government in New Mexico, and the oldest continuously occupied public building in the United States — now count the administrations it served. Spanish. Pueblo. Mexican. Confederate. American. Confederate, in Santa Fe, allegedly, and it is right there in the record where anybody could go and look, and nobody does. Pueblo forces occupied it from 1680 to 1692. Lew Wallace wrote part of Ben-Hur in here while territorial governor in the 1870s — a sitting governor writing a bestseller inside the seat of government, and not one person has ever asked me what else got written at that desk. Since 1909 it has housed the New Mexico History Museum. Under the portal, the Native American Vendors Program, formalised in 1936, lets around a thousand registered artisans from New Mexico pueblos and tribes sell handmade work, spaces allocated daily by lottery. A lottery. Drawn in the open. Which, I note, is how you do it.
03
Stop three
Loretto Chapel
Wilson US Open Tennis Racquet Bag (3 Racquet): Now here is the one they built an industry on. Chapel built between 1873 and 1878 for the Sisters of Loretto, to designs modelled on the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris — and when it was finished the builders had left no way to reach the choir loft. None. A professional crew, working from Paris drawings, forgets the stairs. (wink) So the story goes: the sisters made a novena to Saint Joseph, an unknown carpenter appeared, built a helical stair using wooden pegs and no nails, and left without payment. Without payment. Research has proposed a name — the French joiner Francois-Jean Rochas. The stair makes two complete 360-degree turns without a central column, its structural behaviour depending on the tight helix; the railings were added later. Privately owned now, used for weddings. Mysterious carpenter, documented joiner, same file, both still in it.
04
Stop four
Canyon Road
Wilson US Open Tennis Racquet Bag (3 Racquet): A road does not turn into an art market by accident, and this one certainly didn't. It follows an old route used by Pueblo people to reach the Sangre de Cristo mountains, later a farming lane on the edge of Santa Fe. Then from the early twentieth century artists begin settling in its inexpensive adobe houses, drawn by the light and the landscape — inexpensive, that's the operative word, write it down — and the Los Cinco Pintores group established themselves nearby in the 1920s. By the later twentieth century it is a concentrated gallery district: more than eighty galleries along about a mile and a half, making Santa Fe one of the largest art markets in the United States. Cheap rent to eighty galleries. Every time. Same pattern, every city, and everybody acts surprised. And each Christmas Eve the farolito walk lines the walls with candle lanterns. (wink) Beautiful. Also outstanding for property values.
Setting a stone is entirely a question of the bezel: too tight and the turquoise cracks, too loose and it walks out of the silver within a month. I am a bezel for three racquets. Thirty inches along, thirteen high, four deep, with separate compartments so the frames are held rather than merely contained, and an outer pocket for the small items that otherwise migrate to the bottom and are never seen again.
Three frames is the honest number for a club player: a match stick, a spare, and the old one you cannot part with. Loaded like that I carry cleanly everywhere from a public court on a Tuesday evening to a weekend tournament three towns away. It is also perfect for a slow morning under the portal in Santa Fe, where nobody hurries and the shoulder strap can go loose.
Santa Fe is a setting town. Everything here is one material held inside another: adobe around cottonwood beams, a French stone cathedral built around the old adobe church it replaced, a Spanish plaza holding an older Pueblo one. Santa Fe has been fitting hard things into soft surrounds since 1610 without cracking either. That is the whole craft, and it is also, precisely, the job of a bag.
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