¡Colores!; 1401; Albuquerque’s Historic Neighborhoods; AHN Interview, Diane Terry 1

Therefore, a long time trying to, you know, get food cheaper if you worked over there, you know, so- Yeah, you have to be a member right now. And put in some hours, you know, helping working. I don't know if they still do that or not. I don't know they may, because it's a co-op, but I know that while those are hideously expensive, it's always, I thought at last night, the whole food is just as expensive since you're real quick. Now I want to, we're going to talk about this neighborhood because I want Prince of Gene. But I want to ask you some questions about neighborhoods in general. That's just shows about historical neighborhoods of Albuquerque. So having said that, what do you think a neighborhood is? Well, to me, a neighborhood is someplace where people feel at home, where they belong, where they have something that is an attachment, and they like where they live, and they feel good about where they live.

Good. So do you think that you live in a neighborhood? And if so, why? And if so, if not, why not? Well, I think I live in a neighborhood that microphone is very sensitive, we'll pick up all the... Oh, the siren. Yeah. What's the white shot, Chris? What's the white as you want to get on this? Before I was like this when we first part, I think just right where you were. Okay. Yeah. Let's go with that right now. Okay. Just let me know. Okay. Yeah. That's good. That looks nice. Yeah. It looks really nice. It was a bad hair day, so I hope it looks okay. No, everything's great. It looks really great. Okay. I don't hear any sirens anymore. So again, having said that what do you think a neighborhood, or excuse me, do you think you live in a neighborhood? And if so, why not? I think I live in a neighborhood for a few reasons. One thing about living in a neighborhood is an internal thing.

But if you feel like you belong, and there's an atmosphere of a neighborhood like facilities, and not just people you know, but the way that the buildings are set up, then that helps to create it. But it's the people who live there that really make it be a neighborhood. But there are, you can be a perfect stranger and live in a neighborhood, a so-called neighborhood, and it doesn't mean anything to you. I think there's like an internal thing about whether you, an idea that you have about a neighborhood that makes a difference to how people think about a neighborhood. Do you live in a neighborhood? I think this is a neighborhood. I think I feel like I live in a neighborhood. So, what's it like living here? And tell me about the history here, you know, when did you come to this neighborhood?

What did you like about it? Why do you like it as a change? Tell me this whole story. We came to this neighborhood about 25 years ago, and it was basically financial is why we came here. We really didn't know the history of the neighborhood when we moved here. We came here because we could afford it. And with the children that we had, we wanted to have room. And some of the other places we looked, it just wasn't adequate. The rooms weren't the right size, having boy and girl, and it wasn't a livable place. We wanted yard, and they said nice yards. And so it was the surprise that it was something more special when we did actually start learning about some of the people that were here.

And it wasn't actually a number of years later. Did we shut the door? I think the door shut, it's just the windows are open. This is what I mean about, pretty soon the kids are going to get out from school too. And so they'll be walking down the street, yelling from the mid-school, you know, and then well, exactly. I forget where I was or what I said. Well, let me just ask you this again. So do you feel that you, or this neighborhood has a change line, I mean, what's it like living here? Talk to me about the first time, or the time when you moved in, what it was like, it was like, you're not here or your kids growing up here, how it's changed. When we came, our children were very little. And there weren't a lot of other children, young children, around at that time. They were all older, mid-school, high school age. And there weren't too many younger kids.

We actually took some walks around the blocks trying to find kids. And then we met a few people and we had a few friends and the kids would play with each other. And so we had a little by little started knowing people. And when they went to school, of course, it was another story. They met a lot of children, and they were just further than the immediate blocks than we had. But there weren't a lot of little children at that time, because it seems as though there were groups as generations go that had grown up. And we began learning about the school. We were lucky enough to have a school right up the street with a nice playground. Of course, at that time, it was mostly dirt. But as years went on, some other projects came along where we could do something about helping the school get a playground equipment and then get it landscaped and move on to

what you see now. It was a gradual process of what you see now. But Dale Bellema was fortunate, I mean, we were fortunate that Dale Bellema planned the neighborhood to have schools with playgrounds. And then parks, we had parks, not too far from the neighborhood. A little outdoors park is a different situation because that's a government patent to the city. And that park wasn't too far from us either, which is a wonderful park for lots of facilities. But Dale Bellema planned other facilities right in the neighborhood. We had Princess Jean Park and each of his neighborhoods, well, I'm getting out of our neighborhood. But he planned that specifically, so neighborhoods could be neighborhoods and children could play and people could meet and they could have this kind of grouping of people that made

them happy. It was something for people to share. And all the people that were very from different groups of people could then get together at the parks because a lot of times that's what they did. The mothers were home and they took the children to the parks. Even my kids were little, we didn't, I didn't have to work. And so we, you know, we could go meet other people and the children could be children and play outside. Wonderful. Thank you. It's quite a stop to a per second. I want to ask you about, okay, we're rolling up. Okay. Later, when the opportunity came up to learn more about the history of the neighborhood, I found out that we all, actually, everybody always wondered about the way streets are named. Well, maybe not everybody.

Those things interest me. And you'll see the different names around the city and you just wonder. But in our neighborhood, the streets were named after people that Dale Bellamannu and my street was named after City Engineer, E.O. Betts, and Love Street was named after Oscar Love. He owned the land before Dale Bellamannu got the land from him. So it's all a lot of relatives of Dale Bellamannu, people that he knew friends, a lot of women's names. They must have been part of his wife's family. I'm not too sure about all of them, but I know they were family and friends who he named the streets after. Wonderful. It's one stop paper. It's a neighborhood. It looks like we've got four, five, or six, or a can, or more, plans, I see recurring architectural designs. Talk to me about what that is, because I think that's something new in the city.

Good, I'm getting on the street, this is very important, because this is one of the first of its kind in this city. So I see all these different styles of houses, where they're made different kinds of styles of houses, or are they all original, what's going on there? Dale Bellamannu had an idea, and he had, I suppose it was more of a unique idea we found up from this Smithsonian, to make a neighborhood where all the houses weren't the same, like Levittown. They were varied on the street, and you got to pick your house. But there was, on certain streets, he built certain kinds of houses. If you go, and according to the year, you can pretty much look at the plans and know

what, you know, what section of the neighborhood was built by what year. But if you go up and down Constitution, you'll see some of the model homes. That's why there's so many different houses on Constitution, because a lot of them were model homes, and then people could pick from there. There were other sections that were different, and each section, I think there was a model of some areas, and he had, some of the houses he sold with the furniture, he sold the model with the furniture, and there's some people that still have that model furniture. This is, I understand, quite different, because not only you got to pick, but he had a lot of different choices for you. Wonderful. Great. So I'll take a minute. So describe the neighborhood as best I imagine when you came here and love his life. It's been pretty exciting.

And talk to me about work right now. If you go back to the beginning of the neighborhood, and you kind of look on a timeline from then until now, you see a lot of variation in what's happened to this neighborhood. But I think it's still pretty much state of neighborhood, and we're hoping that we can keep it a neighborhood. We had a lot of people that moved in here in the beginning from all over the United States, and some from outside the United States who came with the military. We had Dale Bellema made sure that blacks were not denied, that Indians were not denied. Everybody was accepted. I mean, there may have been tests between the Army, the Navy, you know, in between when they worked at the base, and when they came and retired here from the military. But there was, it was more an upscale neighborhood, even though it was built on what they called

the sand dunes, and there was way out there, it certainly was an upscale neighborhood. From the features that he put into the houses, the fact that there was a swimming pool for the residents of the neighborhood, and all the parks, it had a lot of special features that other neighborhoods did not have, and I don't think that some people even thought of putting into their houses or their neighborhoods. But as those children grew, and as those people got transferred, or as they got older, there were some people sold their houses. And there was some people that bought, and then some people in the next generation, when they would move, they got turned over to real estate agents as rentals. And some people moved out of town and kept the house as a rental.

When you have a lot of out-of-state landlords, the housing goes down, and the yards go down, and the appearance of the neighborhood goes down. We had, then, a new group of, about the time I moved in, a little bit later, you had a group of people who moved in, who then were buying, not renting, but buying. The people who had been renting the house had decided to sell them, just because of the real estate market, and there was a new group of people buying. You also had a lot of people who grew up here, who returned to the neighborhood, and bought homes here. They wanted to raise their children here, and this is what they could afford. And it had the rooms, the space, the money, and they wanted the schools in the neighborhood for their kids. Then you also have the fact that there are still a lot of rentals, and the rentals haven't

gotten any better, and it seems like there's getting to be a few more rentals, and the neighborhood does have kind of a shabby look right now, so we're getting concerned about that. What are your hopes for this neighborhood in all, let's say, a decade or two decades? What are your hopes for the future? I'm just talking right there. Think about it this way. If you would leave our neighborhood, oh, that's okay, no, I don't worry about anything on this house and this floor right now, I don't worry, okay, I'm going to burp, oh, we're going to get a good one, we're all going to get a good one.

If you look to the future as far as how much concern we have to the neighborhood, I really am concerned that it may not be here if my children wanted to come back and buy a house and raise their kids here in the same sense that it's a neighborhood in which they grew up. It is a concern and we are, oh, okay, the future. I hope that still in 10 to 20 years that this neighborhood will still be considered a neighborhood that we can really maintain that feeling and that function, it shouldn't get lost. The setup is here, it just has to be reborn in the people, it has to be a willingness to,

I guess, socialize to keep the whole concept going. I think people are really yearning, just as the kids that belong to gangs are yearning for someone to belong to, I mean, people are yearning for a neighborhood and they really do want to have some place that they call home, not live in a strange place. Okay, let me ask you about this, tell me, tell me about that. Dale Balema had a little bit of help, it was mostly his dream. The neighborhood is called Princess Jean, his wife was Jean, he considered her princess,

he wanted to build nice homes, homes for Princess, the woman of the house and he had something special here, he had some nice features like the garbage disposal that I don't think other homes had at that time. We had a den, or what we call a den, besides the living room, you can make it a dining room, you can make it a den, it was a family room, though. So this all helped to create the family in the neighborhood, but it was this convenience and this upscaleness to his neighborhood that made it special. There's also utility alleys behind some of the houses where you put your trash out and the trucks came up and down, the alleys, not on the front street. The homes all had garages that were part of the house and some of the earlier neighborhoods

there was a separate building which I guess had some advantages, but this I guess was a more modern idea, so you can walk right from your garage into your house. There was a lot of little things that he thought of when he decided to put the houses together. I'm going to ask you this question again, and so just forget I asked you this at all. So who was Delph on where to come from, what was his history and what was his dream? Oh, I can't remember, he's Lebanese, right? I think he's Lebanese, yes. I don't want to say something wrong. And he grew up here, pretty straight grew up here, he didn't come, he had his family, he had uncle on it, he had an uncle, he had a family, he had a family, he had an uncle. Del Belimov basically fulfilled a big need at the time of these houses were built, but he also had a dream and this neighborhood was more his dream.

The earlier homes he built were basically right after the war, all the soldiers were coming home. There was a great, great need, an immediate, urgent need for homes to be built. There was no housing for all the people who decided to come to Albuquerque. A lot of them had been in the military, had come through here, had a station here, and they really needed a place to live, they were married, they were having families, they needed a place to live. But our neighborhood was a little bit different than that than the homes he built in the earlier edition, like the Curtlyn edition and other groups of homes he built in Albuquerque. This was something special that he wanted to do. This was more his dream. After he understood better about making a home, not just putting up housing. And it was a different concept and I believe it was his own concept that he came up with.

And what was that concept? This concept to have a special area with nice homes that could be a neighborhood that wasn't just housing to live in. And tell me about that, I understand that there was a pool, there was a shopping center, there was all sort of self-contained, talking about that. The pool was another part of his idea, like the parks, to have a gathering place, to have something for the kids to do, for our families to get together. The shopping center came later. And it was, even though it was built on the side of the Princess Jean that was built first, it wasn't there initially, but it was built very early on. He wanted to have a complete neighborhood, not like today, where you have to drive to the mall, or you have to drive here and everywhere to get something. He had stores and shops that fulfilled indeed so that people could walk because in most

cases there were no cars. A lot of people here took public transportation, they walked. The car that they did have belonged to the husband who went to work. And so everyone else needed a way to get to do their shopping and to, you know, get out and do what they needed to do on foot, that's why everything was close. He built it right here so that you didn't have to wait till Saturday to do your errands or, you know, wait till your husband to do the errands. The woman and the children could go do what they needed to do at the shopping center. And it was a great concept and neighborhood should have stuck to that concept. It would be more different from the rest of the neighborhoods in Albuquerque. I think if you want to talk about the people in the neighborhood more so than just the

buildings, you had a special mix of people here. I understand that there were covenants actually written that black people could not live in certain neighborhoods. And that was never the case here. Black people who worked for Dale Belamo were given special help. They were his friends and there was no problem with them buying a house. They had a new financing trouble. Most of them were being paid a good salary anyway if they worked for Dale Belamo. There were, if you look at the census data from the time when the neighborhood began and even later, there's a mix of many races here and it was a good neighborhood because of that. It's good, thank you very much, that's exactly what I was hoping you were going to say. This is really a neat place.

I don't really think of any one instance. What we were getting is getting kids to the swimming pool or stuff. Oh, the swimming pool was gone before we moved here. Yeah, that was the sad part. It had just gone, you know. So how was your house holding up? Did it have some of the original appliances that still haven't now? You know what the president said, no, in 2002, 50 years after this has built this house is whatever.

Well, actually our house isn't exactly, the neighborhood is going to be 50 years old, but our house isn't exactly 50 years old, it's more like 45 or 40 years old. I don't know how I want to say this. If you were to move into this neighborhood today, you would still think that you were getting a good deal. You have a special floor plan, you have yards, you have good sized rooms, the garbage disposal still works, although it's not the original one, it still works. You had this floor plan that makes for livability. You can't find probably many better floor plans in the city. The appliances have had to be replaced, but light fixtures and outlets are all in the same

places. They're all very convenient, plenty of them, lots of interesting things like that that you would not think that would be carried over into this, you know, 40, 50 years later this time. And he had a variety of them. I mean, I'm happy with the floor plan that we have with the two bathrooms. That was very unusual, I think, for the time he built it more of an upscale feature too, to have the two bathrooms. We've had to replace the water heater, one, it's been replaced and it's the original. The refrigerator and the stove were different. And basically, we did have to have someone, an area of piping fixed under the hallway where the soldering came undone, but I think for 50 years, if 45 years, that's an amazing

feat for a house to hold up and be that well built. It's really amazing. And it's quite a testament to, it is important that these neighborhoods ultimately thrive and that they are unique and so far as making the city stronger. Like swimming around in my head, what do you say for a second third? Okay. We'll add some more onto it. I don't want to hem and haul and go on. Okay, if you have a city that is basically in a state where you have a lot of variations

and multicultural, basically unsure of itself where it's going, what it's doing. If you have neighborhoods to keep it together, that's going to help. The neighborhoods, yes, they can each have their own poll on what they want and what they don't want on the city, but they're the strength of the city really. You can't have any kind of forward motion if you have a lot of degradation, if you have people who don't have any input into the city, if you really have people who don't care,

who don't know each other, who don't participate. And there are things that happen to neighborhoods that are bad for them because there are, you have a lot of forces on one side that want one thing and another. So you have to keep up your position, hold up your position of what's good for your neighborhood. If your voice isn't heard, then you're left out and that's not a good thing. That's excellent. We're about to take a break down for a good year on the guarantee roll-in. Do you have a ballam I did a lot of extra? Okay.

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