ART OF SPACE.

Byline: PAUL WEIDEMAN

All nearly aboard in Railyard Park

The Santa Fe Railyard district is undoubtedly the most ambitious, wide-ranging development in Santa Fe's history -- especially since it's all been done in about two years. The concentration of new structures -- Railyard Galleries, Warehouse 21, Santa Fe Farmers Market, Market Station, and the ArtYard live-work building, boasting architect-designed exteriors of steel, brick, glass, and red stucco -- is amazing.

Equally impressive is the 12-acre Railyard Park and Plaza. The scope of work on the main park west of Guadalupe Street, between Paseo de Peralta and Cerrillos Road, has been fascinating to observe. It does look

a bit chaotic, especially at the north end, which has been a primary staging area for all the landscaping materials for the rest of the park and will be the last area to be completed. And what about all those poles poking up in straight lines and circles?

The straight pathways relate to the site's historic railroad-track

alignments. "What you're seeing now is the bone structure of the park, which is most evident at the beginning," said the project's landscape architect, Ken Smith of New York City. "We went to state archives and got historic photos of the railyard and actually mapped out the railroads. So the main pathway through the park is on the alignment of the

New Mexico Central Railway, and the Railyard Gardens to be built at

the corner of Paseo and Guadalupe are where the old sidings were."

Those gardens will have xeric plants and crabapple trees, with crushed-stone walkways bordered by old steel rails. Nearby will be the Circular Ramada, a rose garden that will have a dozen porch swings hanging from its surrounding circle of posts. It sounds weird, and it looks weird now, but it will probably be a fun place to spend your easy time when it's done.

"The Circular Ramada on that corner will have a front-porch aspect, with those hanging benches," Smith said. "To me, it's a very social space where you can hang out with your neighbors in the evening and shoot the breeze and watch the traffic go by. It's an unusual thing for a public park, but I think people ... will love it."

The park is being developed by the Trust for Public Land for the city of Santa Fe, which owns the 50-acre Railyard. During a site visit on July 30, Brian Drypolcher, the trust's program director for Railyard Park, said the appearance of the park will "take on a more human scale" in a few years, when all the new plants have grown.

The twin lines of poles spiking upward from Paseo de Peralta next to SITE Santa Fe and into the park make up the Entry Ramada, a brick-lined walkway that Smith called the "ceremonial entrance to the park." Trumpet vines are planted at the poles and are expected to grow up and onto wires strung on steel frames toward the top of the pole colonnade, forming a living canopy.

The park's plantings include 400 cottonwood, oak, ponderosa pine, Austrian pine, hybrid American elm, and black walnut trees. Before planting the trees, as well as hundreds of shrubs and native grasses and perennials, work crews augered more than 900 holes, 1 foot in diameter and 6 feet deep, in a grid on 20-foot centers in the park to facilitate drainage through the impermeable caliche layer.

"This was once agricultural land with acequias," Drypolcher said. "Then, in the railroad days, there were warehouses. We had lots of foundations we had to deal with here. Now it's transforming into a social space."

Past agricultural uses are reflected in the numerous gardens, the highlighting of the Acequia Madre running through the park, and an apple and apricot orchard along Cerrillos Road. Addressing past railroad uses, in one place in the park the Acequia Madre passes through a timber-box culvert that's at least a century old. In another, a newly constructed head wall is made of native limestone salvaged from a historic railroad turntable. And, of course, the Santa Fe Southern Railway and Rail Runner Express trains will soon be cruising through the park on regular schedules.

Water reclamation was of utmost importance to the park's designers.

"We graded the whole park as a big dish so all precipitation stays in

the park," Drypolcher said. Rainwater from the land and rooftops throughout the railyard is directed to five 15,000-gallon cisterns and to

the 35,000-gallon water tower in the new plaza. Plants will be nurtured with stored water pumped into a bubbler-irrigation system.

The park project involved a great deal of earth-moving, although Smith said the reshaping was "largely an enhancement of what was there." The open field at the center was pushed down to aid in water retention, and some berms were built along the Cerrillos Road border to help reduce vehicle noise in the park.

In the center of the park will be a jewel of a playground. Instead of standard commercial slides -- Drypolcher said the developers couldn't find any that weren't ugly -- there will be seven Corian slides of different sizes built into an embankment. Nearby will be a walled storytelling area, a climbing wall, grassy play areas, a grid of posts with climbing nets hanging on them like big hammocks, and a split-level sand-play area.

(A safety suggestion: the city should do something about the sharp points on the twists of fastening wire at some edges of the rock-filled gabion retaining walls that architecturally define the edge of the park.)

Most of the nonplanted surfaces in the park are laid with crusher fines (small particles of crushed rock), brick, pervious concrete, and, on some terraces, StaLok pathway mix made of crushed stone and polymer. The park benches are large blocks of laminated wood with perforated-steel backs and armrests.

The Trust for Public Land's responsibility extends north of Paseo, where the organization has developed the paved and planted Railyard Plaza and a walkway, adjacent to the railroad tracks, that extends all the way to a pocket park at Montezuma Avenue. That location will become the urban trailhead for the 18-mile Rail Trail. The missing links -- a pedestrian overpass at St. Francis Drive and the Acequia Trail behind the New Mexico School for the Deaf, which will connect the north Railyard and the Baca Street section -- have yet to be developed by the city.

"We're hoping to start construction on the trail behind the School for the Deaf in the next couple of months," said Bob Siqueiros, project administrator in the Engineering Division of the Santa Fe Public Works Department. "It will be a multiuse, paved bike and pedestrian trail." Eric Martinez, the department's section manager for roadway development, added that the city has the overpass "back on the table, on somewhat of a fast track." The city will look at the cost and design of the structure with engineering consultants from the Louis Berger Group in the coming weeks.

A central feature of the Railyard Plaza is the wooden water tower, modeled after a historic water tower at Embudo Station. It stands in stylistic contrast to several elegant new light columns designed to illuminate the plaza. All lighting in the park and plaza is dark-sky, down-directed lighting, according to Smith, the landscape architect who designed the park. "Santa Fe is a little dark, so the trick is to light it to a level that will feel safe but not have it stand out too much from the rest of the town," he said. The lighting designer is Jim Conti from New York.

Smith, who has been at the park site weekly of late, said the Santa Fe

Railyard Park is "a contemporary park that deals with the contemporary issues of Santa Fe. It's no longer really centered on the old Plaza downtown. The center of town is moving south, and there's a real vitality to the Railyard, with the museum and galleries and restaurants.

"This park is also really rooted in the history of Santa Fe," Smith said. "I can't imagine it being anywhere else but this very specific site in Santa Fe."

Drypolcher, responding to the observation that some parts of the park look "busy," said, "I think there's a lot going on with the different ramadas and all the different features, but is it too much, or is it just enough? We wanted to have a great children's play area so it would become a destination, and we wanted to have the capacity for large festival gatherings, so hopefully every other year there's 4,000 people out here for All Species Day and every year there's 2,000 people here for Peace Day in the Park, or whatever."

The opportunities are limitless. The best hope is that the greatest possible spectrum of Santa Fe's residents will enjoy using the new park in all kinds of ways.

The Trust for Public Land, in partnership with the city of Santa Fe, has raised almost $13.5 million to develop the Railyard Park and Plaza. The trust's state director, Jenny Parks, said the organization must raise $650,000 to accomplish everything that is planned for the park.

A free grand opening of the Santa Fe Railyard is planned for Sept. 13

and 14. Music, food, and family activities are among the events planned, and the Rail Runner Express train will visit from Albuquerque --

an advance appearance using the long route via Lamy. Daily service

on the new Rail Runner tracks is expected to begin in December. <

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