CASTLES, RUINS & MYSTERIES

Unlocking repurposed and ignored history

BY JULIE ANN GRIMM, SIENA SOFIA BERGT, ANDY LYMAN + ANDREW OXFORD editor@sfreporter.com

The fifth edition of SFR’s “Castles, Ruins and Mysteries” flings readers into the outer realms of the region to the north and south of Santa Fe, opens the doors to a repurposed government building toward the edge of the city limits and strikes into the heart of downtown with

Montezuma Castle Conjures New Mexico’s Hogwarts United World College

a last look at an old grocery store. The structures in this collection don’t show up in day-trip guides to the region. In keeping with our tradition, we’ve featured intriguing locations with relatively untold stories.

First, the four-story Montezuma Castle remained untouched by last year’s massive Northern New Mexico wildfire even as students evacuated their dorm rooms inside. Then, don’t blink, or you’ll miss what’s left of Waldo. Once a thriving railroad outpost, the ruins are all that remain. Next, Santa Fe County’s 6-acre lot might one day be housing, but today it’s home to a private business. And finally, downtown’s grocery stores have been long gone, but the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum plans to soon raze the old Safeway building for a new wing.

Read more: sfreporter.com/castles

High school students whose academic lives revolve around the Montezuma Castle know their circumstances read like a Harry Potter novel. Not only do they sleep in dormitories on the upper floors of the castle, but they dine in a lavish hall with stained glass windows and artful chandeliers and climb stairways with grand banisters to get to classrooms. The building even features a tower and a mysterious fourth floor.

The castle is just one of several historic buildings that comprise the campus of United World CollegeUSA, a boarding school for international baccalaureate students from across the globe, located in the village of Montezuma.

Fred Harvey dreamed up the edifice as a hotel, part of his company’s first major resort within easy access of the main railroad line via a spur line. Fire gutted the structure just a few months after its initial construction in 1885, but the rapidly rebuilt version has stood on a hill outside of Las Vegas ever since—surviving a near-miss last year when a wildfire burned the forest and homes nearby.

The Chicago firm of Burnham and Root designed the building in the Queen Anne style, characterized by its corner turret, a round room with a pointed top, and for its wide porches.

Though backers hoped its proximity to hot springs and location in fresh mountain air would spell commercial success, the hotel closed in 1904. It served as a Baptist college between 1922 and 1929, then as a seminary for Jesuits until 1972. United World College opened at the site in 1981 when oil magnate Armand Hammer bought the property. Though administrators had planned to use the castle building, they realized it would require too much work.

It wasn’t until 1999 that UWC began restoration intended to bring back to life the 1885 feel of the building. The school got as far as the third floor, leaving the top floor off limits to students and “basically in the condition it was in during the 1920s,” explains Carl-Martin Nelson, the school’s director of communications.

The restoration created stunning effects when combined with the school’s own touches. Many of the colorful original windows in the dining hall survived, complimented now by the distinctive swirls of a set of glass chandeliers by Dale Chihuly. The original hotel lobby today serves as the main entrance, covered floor-to-ceiling in warm wood paneling and replete with the reservation desk and its backdrop of dozens of compartments for mail and keys. The “women’s room” on the ground floor of the turret features a restored fireplace, which school officials say is never used and won’t be again.

They’re touchy about fire, Nelson reveals. Students evacuated the campus in the path of the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire last spring.

“We had sort of some very unprecedented wind days and that made the fire come much faster than anybody expected, and we thought that we would be able to still be back within a couple of days,” he tells SFR. “So, we evacuated the students to [New Mexico] Highlands [University]. And as soon as we got there and we were seeing these pictures, and we saw how close the fire was, we realized that it was going to be much longer. The students left in some cases with flip-flops and one change of clothes.”

Though the fire went on to become the largest in the state’s history and photos post-