Huning Highlands Historic District

The significance of the Huning Highlands neighborhood to the city lies chiefly in its historical background, architectural character, and location within the city. Its homes, lawns, trees, and its proximity to the downtown center set this neighborhood apart from the rest of the city's residential Suburbs.

When the railroad first arrived in the Rio Grande Valley in 1880, the tracks were laid 2 miles east of the small Hispanic villa of Albuquerque, and a "new town" was built, reflecting in its architecture, platting, scale and tempo, the tastes and life styles of the "Anglo" midwesterners that came with it.

Unlike the villa, a small, quiet village of adobe houses, New Town was an expanding center whose brick, wood, and stone buildings reflected the new technologies imported by the railroad. Local building traditions were ignored in favor of the new sources which the railroad made available.

Huning Highlands gets its name from one of Albuquerque's early and most important pioneers, Franz Huning, a German immigrant who made New Mexico his home, establishing mercantile businesses first in Las Vegas, and then in Santa Fe, and finally in Albuquerque in the mid-1860's. By 1880 he was a prominent citizen with land holdings east of the town. Along with William Hazeldine and Elias Stover, he was instrumental in getting the railroad to establish their regional headquarters and shops at Albuquerque, by selling them the land for those purposes for one dollar. This assured the future of Albuquerque as an important commercial center for the surrounding region, and made Huning's name ever-significant in the city's growth and livelihood. Lands that Huning owned east of the railroad, he platted and sold as building lots; this was the beginning of the Huning Highlands subdivision, which continued to grow and develop up until about 1925. The subdivision, being east of the railroad tracks and separated by them from the commercial center of the new town and its other more closely related residential sections, became the early home for Albuquerque's more prominent business and professional citizens. It was the up-and-coming neighborhood; the place to live. Bankers, merchants, lawyers, doctors - and the town's first architect - built homes there.

The architectural environment of the Huning Highlands, including its streetscape and landscaping, is significant not only in its 19th and early 20th century styles of building, but also in its variety of scale. It is not a neighborhood of large mansions, overpowering in their monumentality, but one of a variety of substantial homes and modest cottages. Sizes vary from large to small; however, the overall scale of the community has a unity that no modern development seems able to achieve with monotonous repetition. Huning Highlands is rich in its variety and simplicity without being plain. Styles range from the early Victorian, Italianate, and Queen Anne styles of the 1880's and '90's, to the more modest period revival cottage styles of the early part of this century. During the 1920's the California bungalow became prominent, bringing with it a more horizontal quality to soften the verticality of earlier styles. Also, traditional southwestern cultural heritages such as Spanish (Mexican) and Pueblo Indian architecture became influential; these styles, with their unique qualities added further to the richness of the environment.

Many of the structures are of wood frame, horizontal siding with corner trim boards. In addition to wood, other structures are constructed with brick, windows graced with segmental arches, corners decorated with vertical dentals, adding the soft red color of brick to the streetscape. Cast stone also adds its own color and large textured scale to the variety of materials. To all these basic building materials add various roof pitches and styles, dormers, leaded windows, broad front porches with Doric columns, tall brick chimneys with a variety of capping patterns, warm stucco with Spanish tiles, and an array of decorative frieze boards, gable wall patterns and brick bracketry -- most of which came to the area over the railroad from eastern mail order houses -- and the result is a cultural and historical resource of great value to any city and worth conserving.

As the greater city of Albuquerque struggles to restore and conserve its historical and cultural heritage and to establish its present identity, the Huning Highlands district becomes very significant due to its great contribution to that heritage. As "Old Town" is recognized as the root community of Spanish origin and for its many contributions to the Spanish heritage, so Huning Highlands is recognized as Albuquerque's last remaining neighborhood that still shows clearly the heritage and culture contributed by the railroad to this region, being largely intact and minimally touched by modern development. If this period of Albuquerque's history is to be protected and sensitively developed, it will be best achieved within a Huning Highlands historic district.