National Register Listing

Roosevelt Park

a.k.a. Terrace Park

Jct. of Coal and Spruce Aves., SE, Albuquerque, NM

Constructed between 1933 and 1935 under a series of projects funded first by the Civil Works Administration (CWA), then the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), and finally the WPA, Roosevelt Park is significant as one of the state's best preserved New Deal public landscapes. The project created work relief for hundreds of the unemployed in Albuquerque and resulted in what was then the city's largest and, to this day, most popular park. It is significant for its association with the effect the New Deal had on local social history and its contribution to the city's public leisure and recreation as well as exemplary as a park landscaped in the frontier pastoral style articulated by its designer, pioneer New Mexico landscape architect C.E. "Bud" Hollied.

As discussed in the historic context portion of the multiple property documentation, the idea of constructing a park in the vicinity of Albuquerque's growing eastern suburbs attracted the support of the mayor, Clyde Tingley, who had committed himself to bring 1,200 CWA jobs to Albuquerque. Tingley persuaded George Hammond, the developer of the Terrace Addition, to donate a block of his land for a park, tentatively named Terrace Park. Then Tingley secured a long-term lease from Albuquerque Public Schools to form a fourteen-acre parcel for the park. Located in the land which was difficult to develop, part of the parcel had been a dump and was vegetated with snakeweed and arid area grasses.

Within months crews of up to three hundred men using little more than shovels and wheelbarrows had moved tons of gravel and sand to reshape the terrain into a series of hollows and graded slopes. Supervised by Hollied, a tuberculosis sufferer who had moved to New Mexico from Cornell University where he had been superintendent of greenhouses, workers next added loads of topsoil and installed a sprinkling system. They then planted nursery stock, especially Siberian elms which Hollied had found thrived in the state's arid climate. So thorough was Hollied's planning and selection of plants that ninety-five percent of the stock survived.

The result of Hollied's efforts was a park that inspired numerous other landscaping projects undertaken by both the WPA and CCC. Lacking a central water feature, the park nevertheless embraced the frontier pastoral style of landscaping, a naturalistic composition emphasizing random groves of trees and undulating sweeps of lawn. In a state that had no park system until 1934 and towns whose parks were mostly limited to small, single-block sites or town plazas dating to Spanish landscape traditions, Roosevelt Park and other New Deal landscapes made a significant contribution toward popularizing large, shaded public parks.

Local significance of the site:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1996.