Eighth Street-Forrester District

The Eighth Street/Forrester District is most important for its architecture, its small, simple and attractive houses, scaled down versions of styles popular in the period between 1901 and 1925. It is also important for its unusual block platting, which has helped to preserve the district,and for its record of the history of a part of Albuquerque's working class.On the 1898 Albuquerque Abstract Company map of the city's subdivisions,the land that later became the Park Addition (Eighth Street) and Coronado Place Addition (Forrester) shows as two long rectangular tracts of land stretching south from Mountain Road to within a block of New York Avenue,now Lomas Boulevard. The east, or 8th Street, tract belonged at that time to Martin P. Stamm; the west, or Forrester, tract belonged to Henry Forrester.

Martin P. Stamm had acquired his property from Pedro Garcia on December22, 1890; the tract, bordered on the north by Carnuel Road (the earlier name of Mountain Road) measured 50 x 343 yards. Stamm, who had moved from Kansas to Albuquerque in 1882, began in business with a furniture store on the Old Town Plaza; by 1892, he was wholesaling produce and, obviously,investing in real estate. He subdivided the tract in 1901, registering it on February 9 as the Park Addition. The eastern half of the addition is divided into three blocks, connecting with already existing streets to the east, but the western half, as originally platted, is one long block.Stamm sold the lots in the Park Addition fairly slowly; records show three sales in 1901, five in 1902, twelve in 1903. Most sales were of one or two lots, which suggests that . the purchasers intended to build for themselves,rather than to construct rental houses or hold the land for speculation.In most cases houses were built soon after the lots were purchased; by1907, an Albuquerque Abstract Company map shows 11 buildings in the 18lots on the east side of Eighth Street and 20 buildings on the 21 lots on the west side .

The tract of land to the west of the Park Addition was purchased by Henry Forrester in 1881; a December 12 Warranty Deed records his purchase of a 138' by 1086' piece of land on the south side of Carnuel Road. Henry Forrester was in Santa Fe by 1876 and in Las Vegas by 1879; from 1881through 1892 he was the first rector of St. John's Episcopal Church, and must have supervised the building of the sandstone church of 1882,
parts of which are incorporated into the present St. John's Cathedral on the same site. In 1905, Forrester sold his 8.3 acres of land to Harriet Ackerman, wife of Frank Ackerman, a local attorney and developer. Shortly thereafter, Ackerman filed the plat of the Coronado Place Addition, two long blocks with 21 lots on each side. As with the Park Addition, most sales seem to have been of single lots, with the exception of a sale of eight lots sold in 1906 to Sarah Salter. By 1907 eleven houses had been built in the addition, and many others followed in the next three years.

Development of the land to the south of the two additions, in the single blocks between Slate and Lomas, is somewhat more complex. The half—block on Slate between 7th and the north-south alley just east of 8th Street is part of the Armijo Brothers Addition, platted in 1883, and has some of the earliest buildings in the district. Early simple Queen Anne cottages also appear on the west of side of Eighth south of Slate, an area which was also part of the 1883 Armijo Brothers Addition. The re­mainder of these southern blocks was developed in the second and third decades of the 20th century. Their platting history shows them to have been developed in response to the success of the additions to the north. They are similar to the earlier buildings in their modest size and similar setbacks.

The people who built and lived in the houses in the Eighth Street/Forrester district were mainly working-class families. Occupation list­ings in the early City Directories show a milliner, a driver, a clerk, a millwright, a cement worker, a cutter, a policeman, a carpenter, a bookkeeper and many laborers. Many of the homeowners worked at the nearby American Lumber Company, and the need for housing for company employees may have sparked development of the district. The skills of these car­penters, millwrights and laborers also undoubtedly contributed to the building of sound houses.

Because the district is physically isolated from other parts of the Downtown Neighborhoods area, and because it has continued to be, largely, a lower-middle class area, it has remained remarkably intact. The re­sult is one of the most unaltered districts of historic housing in Albuquerque. Though only a few of its small houses, set in isolation, would call for extraordinary attention, they combine to form a particularly fine example of what a historic district is: an area where the whole is considerably more than the sum of its parts.