Main Street folly

In the years after World War II, the population of Las Cruces exploded, thanks to the growth of nearby White Sands Proving Grounds.

The new people needed homes and convenient shopping and, for the first time, nearly everyone owned a car.

The suburbs, with their accompanying shopping malls, began spreading like a fungus out from the edges of the city.

Suburbs provided low risk and high profits for investors and, at least initially, for the city. Large tracts of land were annexed, creating a new tax base that offset the cost of city services. The side effect of this rapid outward growth was to draw commerce away from the city center.

As commerce on Main Street declined, some stores moved to the more profitable shopping centers and to the new indoor malls that were becoming social hubs as well as shopping destinations.

Downtown property values fell, empty buildings became more common, exteriors were not maintained, visitation fell, and crime increased.

By the late 1960s, after several studies, the Las Cruces Urban Renewal Agency (LCURA) determined that downtown needed to eliminate everything that appeared shabby and create a sleek, modern city center. The first casualty was St. Genevieve Catholic Church, the architectural focal point of the city and the spiritual and community center for many residents.

By then the building and grounds were in disrepair, and the building had been condemned in 1965.

The property was sold to the Merchants and Farmers Bank, which paid for the land only—the building was considered worthless. Even if the church building was lost, the grounds, spacious, with its many mature trees, could have made a city park to the envy of other small cities.

Once St. Genevieve was gone, wholesale “slum clearance”, as LCURA termed it, began. Removal of the “blighted core” would save the city, many believed at the time.

Using federal funding, 94 acres--33 city blocks--were bought up and historic buildings began to come down.

Residents and shop owners were displaced but the expected offices and magnet department stores that were supposed to flood in showed no interest. Even the bank that bought the St. Genevieve property was never built.

Some at the city suggested creating a pedestrian shopping mall like the ones doing so well in the suburbs.

Seven blocks of Main Street were closed to traffic. The empty lots behind the remaining buildings became parking lots. The streets on either side were reconfigured into a one-way roundabout nicknamed “the racetrack.” Roofing the whole thing was impractical, so the semblance of a roof was constructed; supports resembling airplane tailfins, holding up metal canopies, were set at intervals along either side.

The Downtown Mall opened in 1972. A winding yellow brick pathway snaked down the middle of the former Main Street. Between the curves were concrete planters, water features, benches, and statuary. At the north end an imitation Spanish-style entrance, a faux adobe wall with arched doorways and imitation clay shingles, replaced the genuine architecture.

By 1975 there were ten vacant lots and 21 vacant buildings. Except on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, when the Farmers and Crafters Market, established in 1971, set up its booths, the Mall was virtually empty. A rich architectural and cultural heritage had been largely lost.

Las Cruces was not the only city to try this. Around 100 American cities tried to make their downtown a shopping mall. But by the 1980s saw it fail. By this time heritage tourism was proving to be a viable option for towns and cities who had retained their historic character. But, as a 1970 Las Cruces Sun-News editorial stated, “We have destroyed a part of the old charm of Las Cruces for a possible new ugliness.”

In 2002 renovations began again. The canopies were removed and the street opened once more to two-way traffic with on-street parking. This took several years and millions of dollars more, but eventually small specialty stores, bars, restaurants, and other venues of modest ambition began attracting residents, tourists, and college students. The street, although changed, is viable again. But, oh, what it could have been! And, although too much of the real Las Cruces has been lost on Main Street, on either side of it, in the Mesquite Original Townsite and in the Alameda-Depot Historic Districts, the heart still beats.