7/9/09
Within moments of first seeing the abandoned Jose Martinez Mercantile Building behind the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse 10 years ago, Paul Namkung knew he would move in there.
“It’s one of the oldest buildings around here,” Namkung said. “It had been condemned by (Rio Arriba) County, the roof was leaky, and I just fell in love with it. It’s a magnificent, Northern New Mexico-style building — simple design, tall with high ceilings, and large.”
So 10 years ago Namkung moved to the town of less than 1,000 residents and began a renovation project that is just reaching fruition.
Namkung received Rio Arriba County Commission’s approval May 20 to rezone the restored building for mixed use, allowing him to open a coffee shop in the building’s northern wing. He’s putting the finishing touches on the shop this month.
“This will be one of the first new businesses to open back up in a long time,” Namkung said of his Three Ravens Coffee House.
Namkung has also led a mini-migration and building boom in Tierra Amarilla by recruiting two fellow artisans to town.
Fifty-four-year-old Boston cabinetmaker Dylan Lomon moved to Tierra Amarilla two years ago and is living in the kitchen of the old Jose Martinez family house next to the mercantile, while he fixes up the rest of the eight-bedroom, three-story home. And just up State Road 531, next to the Chama School District administrative offices, Tennessee-born furniture-maker John Bauer has been renovating a 13-room former hotel for the last four years.
It is not unusual for artists from around the country to be drawn to one of Rio Arriba’s small towns. El Rito, Abiquiú, Dixon, Truchas and others have sizeable populations of migrant artists. Namkung fits snugly in this tradition.
Namkung was born in Korea and lived in China and Japan before coming to the United States in 1957. He worked as a social worker throughout California for 35 years before turning to drum-making in the early 1990s.
He said he sells them at art fairs across the country. But he always comes back to Tierra Amarilla.
“Driving back, as I get close, my heart just pounds,” Namkung said. “I love it up here.”
Tierra Amarilla used to be a bustling community, but that changed in the mid-20th century and especially in the 1960s and early 1970s, when the government relocated Highway 84, which once skirted the front yard of Lomon’s house, further from town, Namkung and Lomon said. An Air Force radar station near El Vado Lake closed around the same time, and the town is now home to several vacant buildings.
Built in 1885, the mercantile on the corner of State Road 531 and County Road 347 has also served over the years as Tierra Amarilla’s post office, a bar, a newspaper and printing shop and a Catholic school, Namkung said.
“Old-timers tell me it was run by mean nuns,” Namkung, now 70, chuckled. “This building has a long, wonderful history.”
Friends told Namkung he was crazy to try to restore the building, but he persevered.
“For the first two years I had no heat, no water, no electricity,” he said. “I showered at the County pool.”
When he had to replace windows or doors, Namkung custom-tailored the new woodwork to match the original.
He made his own tongue-and-groove flooring to replace any portions of the original floor that could not be sanded down and salvaged.
“For 124 years, people have walked these floors,” Namkung said. “I wanted to honor that.”
Whenever possible, Namkung salvaged the building’s original woodwork and learned from the region’s adobe-building traditions.
“I used traditional mudding for the adobe,” Namkung said. “Cement stucco has destroyed many buildings in Northern New Mexico. People thought they’d cement the building and that’s it, it would last forever.”
But in reality, the cement tends to form small cracks that trap water between the walls and make them crumble, Namkung said.
Lomon also lamented the use of cement with adobe. The Martinez family house’s cement porch allowed water to wick into the base of the building’s north wall over the years, causing the adobe to erode and the wall to lean outward and cracking interior walls.
Unlike Namkung and Lomon, Bauer declares with soft-spoken Tennessee twang that he’s less interested in restoring his adobe to its original condition than making it a livable home.
Bauer’s house began as a single-room adobe in the 1880s, he said.
“It grew organically,” he said.
Bauer was able to date some of the rooms of his house using newspapers he found on and within the walls. Some dated to the early 1900s, and another to 1972, he said.
Bauer has converted a first-floor room into a wood shop, where he builds benches and chairs by meticulously laying down one-eighth-inch layers of hardwood molded to showcase the wood’s natural grain.
Bauer’s chairs have become simpler in the four years he’s lived in Tierra Amarilla, evolving from elaborately carved thrones to simple benches with rough-bark edges, made from walnut trees. But the change has not been a deliberate nod to traditional New Mexico styles, Bauer said.
“It’s just fun to try new things,” Bauer, 70, said.