Pearce, John, House

The Pearce House is significant as a good example of the architectural style prevalent in Albuquerque in the first decade of the 19th century; as a particularly fine house from that period, it is notable for its exterior half-timbered and clinker brick surfaces, both unusual in Albuquerque. Currently, it is most important as the sole remaining example of residential construction in the downtown portion of Albuquerque's Central Avenue, a street otherwise given over to modest-scale commercial buildings constructed between 1880 and 1940. As a residence that was once at the fringes of downtown, it serves as a reminder of the small scale of early Albuquerque and f the urban variety that once flourished on the edges of downtown.

The Pearce House was built for Dr. John F. Pearce, who purchased the lots from the First National Bank of Albuquerque in May 1904, and had built his house by 1907, when it appears on a City Abstract map. Dr. Pearce, who was born in Maryland, came to Albuquerque after his graduation from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1883 and became one of the first physicians in the new city born of the railroad boom. Pearce played a major role in city life, serving as a physician both for the city and for Bernalillo County. He was elected a city Alderman in 1901 and served on the City and Territorial Boards of Health. His offices in a downtown building a few blocks away must have been conveniently close to his home, where he lived until 1933.

Between 1933 and 1944, when the Pearce House became the Downtown Hotel, the structure passed through a number of uses. It served as a boarding house, the Brooks Inn, until 1940 when a group of chiropractors established a clinic and hospital there. Their short-lived enterprise lasted only a year, and the building stood vacant for a time until it became the Downtown Hotel, a boarding house that Mrs. Bessie Jackson was to run for the next 30 years. Mrs. Jackson never owned the building, and it passed through several hands in her time, but during her long tenure, it served a very useful function as a home for many of the city's elderly and poor people.

In 1976, the Pearce House was acquired from the Central Land Company in New York by the City of Albuquerque as part of a Municipal Redevelopment program in the Alvarado Renewal Area at the southwest corner of the Central Business District. The City has recently completed the sale of the property to Downtown Equities a small development corporation that plans its rehabilitation and reuses for office space. Their plans promise to save this fine residential structure as a reminder of downtown Albuquerque's past and a contribution to its future architectural variety and interest.