Raton, New Mexico
RATON, NEW MEXICO
The decorative streetlights, the hanging planters, the Chamber of Commercial-style tourist banners, the antique stores, the nascent brew pub scene. The old motels, with their seen-better-days charm. The newer motels (but still old), out by the interstate, with U-Hauls in the parking lot and their seen-better-days lack of charm.
The abandoned buildings, always.
The KOA campground looked nice.
There is a pattern to these old western towns, emerging as a railroad stop, evolving into a highway stop, abandoned, saved the interchanges, when the interstate highways rendered them irrelevant, but still totally relevant to their people. We can see the traces still visible of each successive layer of transportation infrastructure’s shaping and reshaping the town. What interests me is the way people continue to improvise, trying to build something new atop the old.
The practice, or praxis
I ride my bike through Raton, slowly, looking. I take pictures. I start with a plan based on looking at the map (“Oh look, there’s the train station!”) which I abandon. From the start I anticipate that I will abandon it, after seeing and thinking something I didn’t expect. This is, in fact, the plan. Part of the “praxis“, the mindful practice of inquiry, is looking for the point of abandonment of the plan, the place where immediate curiosity takes over. This, mindfully following curiosity, is key to the praxis.
I avoid the bike lane the kind people of Raton built for me in favor of the neighborhood behind the main corridor. This is where the people live.
The T-Town: Rail Era, 1879-1945
From Towns of the Western Railroads, John C. Hudson, 1982
Raton, New Mexico, is an example of a western urban design form historian John C. Hudson calls the “T-town.”
Dependent in its current existence on transportation networks, Raton sits at the southern mouth of Raton Pass, a funnel for humanity from time immemorial. The wagons of the Santa Fe Trail passed here, and the railroad tore through in its landscape-changing frenzy in the late 1800s. The classic T-town (and most other railroad towns) bear early markings of what James Scott calls “high modernism” and Henri LeFebvre calls “conceived space” – a grid of streets lined out on paper and transferred onto the land, rather than the vernacular of ambling streets springing up on old twisting footpaths. It is an intention placed on the land, enabling or directing or constraining the stuff the people then do here.
Raton, June 2025
The station bears the Moorish arches of the Spanish-Revival style of architecture, which is a trip. I think it was originally built in 1903, I do not know if the building now on the site is that same building. (Further Research Needed – FRN.) The station “welcomes thousands of Boy Scouts each summer as they head for the Philmont Ranch” (quoting Amtrak) and has no wi-fi.
First street parallels the tracks. It is where freight once would have been loaded and uploaded. Marchiando’s Dry Goods is closed, though I am left with the uneasy uncertainty of whether it was really Marchiando’s Dry goods or was left that way by movie set painters. FRN. In the classic urban form of the T-Town, the main street parallels the tracks one block away. This is the classic urban western town downtown, with all the accoutrements I have come to expect in my 60-plus years of wandering through these towns – lovely old two-story buildings, often brick, often in disrepair, often with energetic signs of entrepreneurial effort as communities try to make the best of their inherited assets: decorative street lamps, boutique hotels (or not), craft beer (or not), recreational rentals suitable to the surrounding countryside, home cooking-style diners.
In an hour of wandering, I see no trains other than empty rail cars, parked. I see no obvious tourists other than myself.
The Motels: Highway Era, 1920s to 1960s
Motel Row, Raton, New Mexico, June 2025
One layer out, the motels begin. US-85/87 followed the rail lines over Raton Pass (which had followed the wagon trail), and brought with it the other distinctive characteristic of these western towns: motel row. One can find places where old motel rows dazzle (Boulder City, Nevada, is my favorite – not a railroad town but full of pep and modern energy, catering to the Las Vegas visitor who wants to escape the smoke and the noise, which sometimes includes me). Such dazzle, though, is rare.
This was where I abandoned the plan, drawn by an establishment whose sign suggested it was a combination motel and car wash. As an old journalist colleague once observed, you can’t make up shit that good.
The richness of the observations trails off here. Part of the praxis is being on the bike. The motel row’s urban infrastructure involved cracked sidewalks and ducking in and out of parking lots. This is a great deal of fun, but reflects a shift from deep observation to rascally kid on a bike.
The Freeway Era: 1960s-now
The Interstate found its way past Raton sometime around 1960s (confused on exact date, FRN). It did what the Interstates always did – diverted traffic from the old through town routes, beginning the decay. Long before Walmarts, we began hollowing out these little western islands of urbanity when Interstates removed our need to drive through them. The result are little clusters of motels around the major exit complexes. The Holiday Inn Express where I stayed is out at the south end of town, down the old highway from the old Robin Hood Motel.
Scott and LeFebvre
The point of the trip is a lingering drive to Boulder, Colorado, for this week’s Getches-Wilkinson Center Colorado River conference. I left early to get a few days of R&R, with the Space Ghost (bike) in the car and some books to read that have nothing to do with water. (I’ll have time for the water thinking soon enough.)
I’m returning to James Scott’s Thinking Like a State. His insights about the high modernist desire for legibility, the imposition by the state and capitalism of simplifying frameworks necessary for modern state/capitalism function, the clean square grid of lines drawn by the AT&SF town planners in Raton, the streamlines of the Interstates, is super useful. I’ve also got a pdf of Henri LeFebvre’s The Production of Space. Scott is lucid and clear, LeFebvre is tough going, but together they provide a framework for the sort of thinking about the nature of cities that remains an ongoing (if less blogged about) project for me.
LeFebvre seems to be making a useful distinction between “conceived space,” what the planners and architects and builders inhabited by Scott’s “high modernist” ethos intend, and “lived space” – what you and I actually do with and in it.
Left to our own devices, without the grids of Scott’s high modernists, we’re more likely to build twisty streets where the old footpath once ran, its location defined by a simple logic of where we are, where we want to go, and what’s the best way to get there. The twisting paths of Albuquerque’s old but still-used irrigation ditches are my favorite lived example.
But then – and this is the part that interests me right now, the part I’m looking for LeFebvre’s help with – we actually use the things that are there, often in different ways than their builders intended. My path to the supermarket cuts through the parking lot because the high modernist planners’ simplification in service of legibility designated the market as a place people would drive to in cars. They didn’t consider people walking to the store from the adjacent neighborhood. I ride my bike down the ditchbanks because it is safer and more pleasant than the streets.
We repurpose to meet our needs.
