National Register Listing

Monte Vista Fire Station

a.k.a. Fire Station No. 3

3201 Centra Ave. NE, Albuqerque, NM

The Monte Vista Fire Station, designed by Albuquerque city architect E. H. Blumenthal, was built with Works Progress Administration Funds in 1936. It meets National Register Criterion A as a prominent reminder of the role of federal public works funding during the 1930s in providing the infrastructure and public services which allowed the development of new suburbs to the east of the established parts of Albuquerque. The Fire Station also meets Criterion C as a good example of the Spanish Pueblo Revival style. The use of this distinctively New Mexican style typifies the prevailing artistic regionalism and the use of traditional styles for many federally funded projects across the country during the period.

After the First World War, Albuquerque began to spread from its historic location in the Rio Grande valley up onto the sand hills to the east, known as the Heights. Throughout the 1920s, the city and public schools struggled to provide services for the future growth of the Heights. The city water works and sewage treatment plants were expanded; sidewalks, water, and sewer lines were extended to the area; arterial streets from the old downtown to the Heights were improved, and Roosevelt Park and the Heights Community Center were constructed. The Monte Vista Grade School was expanded, and Jefferson Junior High and Bandelier Grade School were built with the help of federal funds. A new state fairground and city airport were also added in the Heights. When residential construction began to boom again in 1938, it was fueled largely by loans from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).

The Monte Vista Fire Station was an important improvement in this campaign to prepare for future growth in the Heights. Like the other projects, the station's construction depended largely on federal funding --of the total construction cost of approximately $24,000, $14,300 was a grant from the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Constructed in five months, from June to November 1936, the Fire Station caused an immediate 43% reduction in residential fire insurance rates for the surrounding areas.

Across the country, federally funded building projects during the 1930s were about evenly divided between those employing traditional styles and those in modern styles. In New Mexico, however, the vast majority adopted traditional styles. (The only notable exceptions are a few Art Deco county courthouses in the southeastern part of the state which is a cultural extension of Texas). In Albuquerque, while a few public buildings employed the Spanish Colonial Revival or the Territorial Revival (based on the state's provincial Greek Revival architecture), the majority employed the Spanish Pueblo Revival style. Three WPA projects at the University of New Mexico, designed by John Gaw Meem--a student union (1934), an administration and classroom building (1934) and a library (1937-38)--are among the finest structures ever built in this regional style. The Fire Station compares favorably to other local depression-era examples of the Spanish Pueblo style, including the state fair exhibition buildings (1936-40), the Heights Community Center (1938), and the Albuquerque Airport (1939). While these buildings are not quite on par with Meem's University of New Mexico work, they, nevertheless, are well designed and reflect the development of a professional architectural community in Albuquerque between the World Wars. Most of the residences built in the surrounding areas during the late 1930s and some commercial buildings are more modest applications of the Spanish Pueblo Revival.

The station's architect, E. H. Blumenthal, fused two of the style's most important historic prototypes in his facade design-the terraced pueblo and the Spanish mission church. The building's irregular masses, which step up and away from the corner, clearly evoke the communal dwellings of the Pueblos while also expressing the station's several functions: the one-story entry office to the left, the two-story center section housing the apparatus room on the ground floor and living quarters above, and the three-story hose drying and stair tower to the right. Two rough-timber ladders, similar to those used at the Pueblos, accentuate these level changes. The design's debt to Spanish Mission churches is, at first, less apparent. The large double doors topped by a row of windows resemble a church entry topped by a second-story balustrade. The projecting one-story office and three-story tower suggest a two-tower church facade with one tower left unfinished, which is sometimes the case in Spanish Colonial churches. A church-like formality is reinforced by the symmetrically placed vigas and curvilinear parapet capping the central bay. Blumenthal reworked many of these same details and compositional devices in his other important work, the 1939 Albuquerque Airport.

Blumenthal designed the fire station and the airport while he was the city architect, a position he held during the late 1930s. He had trained as a draftsman in St. Louis and first came to Albuquerque for his health in 1912; during this period he worked with the local office of Trost and Trost. He and his family later returned to St. Louis, but the onset of the Great Depression put Blumenthal out of work so he came to Albuquerque to direct construction on the federally funded El Vado Dam. After his service as city architect (terminated after a dispute with Governor Tingley), he designed and drafted for several local architects.

As with all WPA projects the station was built with local labor and local material. The hollow tile blocks in the original structure were manufactured by Kinney Brick of Albuquerque and all the original timber was cut by local labor in the Sandia Mountains and milled in the city.

The station was originally at the city's eastern extremity. Within 15 years post-World-War-II properties filled in on Central around the station and housing covered the mesa to the east. The building was extended at the rear in 1952 to house the Fire Department's longer ladder trucks, and the station's crew rose to ten men including the direct chief's office. Kept in immaculate condition over the years by the Fire Department, the station went through very few alterations. In 1972, it was put up for sale when the newer and wider trucks could no longer negotiate the Monte Vista's old doors. It has been used as an art gallery, a lithographic studio, and most recently as a film production facility. It was recently (1982) pictured in The American Firehouse: An Architectural and Social History by Rebecca Zurier.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1987.