PARKS
for PEOPLE
A
Central Park
for Santa Fe
More than a decade in the making,
the Santa Fe Railyard Park and Plaza
bears witness to the city’s past
and signals its future.
By Stanley Crawford
P
hil and Eleanor Bové are the memory keepers of
the Acequia Madre, a seven-mile irrigation ditch
off the Santa Fe River in what is now metropolitan
Santa Fe. The “Mother Ditch” was presumably dug
during the Spanish settlement of Santa Fe, around
1610—the largest ditch (as its name implies) bringing
precious water to the city. “But nobody really knows,”
Phil says, “because the records were destroyed during
the Pueblo uprising of 1680.”
