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9: Water, Power, Progress
- University of New Mexico Press
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150 | Seven hundred feet below streamed what was left of the original river, the greenish waters that emerged, through intake, penstock, turbine and tunnel , from the powerhouse at the base of the dam. Thickets of power cables, each strand as big around as a man’s arm, climbed the canyon walls on steel towers, merged in a haze of transformer stations, then splayed out toward the south and west—toward Albuquerque, Babylon, Phoenix, Gomorrah, Los Angeles, Sodom, Las Vegas, Nineveh, Tucson, and the cities of the plain. —edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) It was money and politics for Dominic. He was aiming to be governor, but he wanted to be mayor first. He wanted to bring in casino gambling and build a Venice on the Rio Grande. . . . Dominic had cooked up a big urban enhancement project. Canals full of Rio Grande water. Casinos. A Disneyland on the river. —Rudolfo Anaya, Alburquerque (1992) Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Alburquerque imagines a political contest in a city divided between a disgruntled old guard and a dynamic Hispanic incumbent popular in the neighborhoods. Frank Dominic tries to capture the mayoral election with a bold scheme to “rebrand” Albuquerque as a destination resort. He wants to promise jobs for the Hispanic barrio, cachet for the north Valley yuppies in their adobe-style houses, development opportunities for CHAPter nine Water, Power, Progress WAter, PoWer, ProGress | 151 the real estate industry, and attractions for tourists. the solution: Acquire rural water rights and divert the Rio Grande through downtown in a series of canals and lagoons to create scores of waterside building lots for condos, office buildings, a casino, hotels, and a performing arts center. “the hell with the rest of the state,” thinks Dominic. Albuquerque can be Santa Fe and Las Vegas both. the meeting to roll out the scheme is well attended: Pete Lupkins, one of the most respected architects in the city. . . . removed the cover from the scale model at the front of the room. the audience leaned forward, and what they saw made them gasp. the pattern of the city was clear, but there were new buildings rising where none now existed. throughout the city ran the canal system, paths of blue. the Albuquerque of the year 2000. A desert Venice with beltways of green, ponds, and small lakes, all interconnected by waterways that crisscrossed the downtown area.1 if it were reality rather than fiction, the “el Dorado” plan for Albuquerque would not stand alone. tucson in the 1990s considered refilling the dry bed of the Santa Cruz River to revitalize downtown. other Arizonans have successfully promoted development of the amazingly named Scottsdale Waterfront, where flats, shops, and the Fiesta Bowl Museum will hug the bank of the Arizona Canal as it channels irrigation water along the north side of the Valley of the Sun. in Las Vegas, of course, tourists at the Venetian can enjoy $15 gondola rides “beneath bridges, beside cafes, under balconies and through the vibrant Venetian streetscape.”2 Fair enough, but Anaya’s inspiration was likely the San Antonio River Walk. A Works Progress Administration project at its inception in 1939, the original goal was to combine canalization and flood control with the development of a park that could host festivals (“Venetian night” was one of the first!) and offer cool relief from the South texas climate. the initial project has been extended several times, and hotels and restaurants started to open basementlevel entrances and terraces onto the riverfront sidewalks in the 1960s. taking cues from new orleans and Carmel, investors and city leaders transformed River Walk into an early theme park with tacos, tourist barges, mariachi bands, and, since 1988, the built-from-scratch festival marketplace Rivercenter. three hundred miles away, an artificial canal wends through the commercial center of the carefully planned town the Woodlands (outside Houston) and passes under a bridge copied from San Antonio. And then there are echoes too of Venice Beach, built on marshy California dunes south of Santa Monica. Abbot Kinney, an eastern industrialist turned southern California conservationist and investor, carved out ocean-side canals and lagoons, put up commercial buildings in Venetian Renaissance style, imported gondolas, opened an amusement pier, and put thousands of [54.196.114.118] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:51 GMT) | CHAPter nine 152 building lots on the market on Fourth of July weekend, 1905. ten thousand Venetians by 1920 lived along the canals and back streets, while tourists and weekendersflockedtotheoceanfrontamusements.Withinadecade,however, the...