224 West Gold: How Downtown’s oldest building flew under the radar for 140 years
In January 1886, a man named Augustus Koch arrived in Albuquerque. 1 Koch (1840-1899) was an itinerant lithographer who traveled from town to town producing "bird's eye view" maps of the places he visited. It seems like a rather quaint occupation today, but Koch's services were clearly in high demand as he completed over 100 of these illustrations during his career. 2 His drawing of Albuquerque captured a community in the midst of a rapid transition. Six years earlier, the arrival of the railroad had sparked massive development, creating what was essentially an entirely new town on the outskirts of the existing settlement. Albuquerque was on its way from sleepy agricultural village to booming commercial center. Koch's map is fascinating because of both the incredible level of detail and the fact that most of what he drew is not there anymore. Not everything, true—you might be able to pick out some surviving houses here and there, or some of the buildings in Ol...