Eighteen buildings raised between 1915 and 1925 still stand at downtown's southern edge, in the Barelas neighborhood you're walking through now. This complex, bounded by Second Street, Hazeldine Avenue, Commercial Street, and Pacific Avenue, once belonged to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and was one of four major maintenance facilities the railroad built — the others in Topeka, Kansas, Cleburne, Texas, and San Bernardino, California. You can almost feel the scale: these shops were the largest employer in the city during the railroad's heyday.
The site's roots go back to the 1880s, when railroad shops and a roundhouse were first erected after Albuquerque became the division point between the AT&SF and the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. In 1902 the Santa Fe bought out the A&P, then in 1912 began expanding and modernizing the old A&P shops; the first buildings completed included a roundhouse, storehouse, power station, and freight car shops located just south of the surviving complex. Today the structures have been empty for years, and a variety of plans have been proposed for the historic complex.
Second Street, Hazeldine, Commercial and Pacific still box in these long empty rows, waiting on whatever plan comes next.