Las Cruces Chamber closer to new home in historic Armijo House

By Steve Ramirez

sramirez@lcsun-news.com @SteveRamirez6 on Twitter

LAS CRUCES >> Some things were just built to last. The old Armijo House, the future home of the Greater Las Cruces Chamber of Commerce, is testament to that.

Today, scaffolding surrounds three sides of the two-story adobe house on Lohman Avenue, just off South Main Street. A crew with Pat Taylor Inc. a Mesilla company that specializes in historic preservation, is doing painstaking work to make the building's old adobe walls new again. Specialized carpenters are refurbishing the old wooden porch around the front and east side of the house. In simple terms, it's called stabilization work, but there are a lot of meticulous tasks now underway at the house that historians believe that Nestor Armijo originally built in the 1860s.

Robin Zielinski Sunj-News Marcos Talache, right, and Eric Calbert, Pat Taylor Inc. construction workers, continue restoration work at the Nestor Armijo House. More than 700,000 in renovations and restoration will be done to the building that is now owned by the Greater Las Cruces Chamber of Commerce. The building will become the chamber's new offices.

The Chamber of Commerce, which has been deeded the historic house, will spend more than $700,000 to bring the Las Cruces icon back to life.

"Without a doubt, there was a lot of craftsmanship that went into building this house," Taylor said.

Indeed, the Amador Hotel is a Las Cruces icon. It, too, was built about the same time as the Armijo House. Southern New Mexico historians agree both buildings are clearly links to the city's rich history.

"It's our sense of place," said Eric Liefeld, executive director of Mesilla Valley Preservation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the architectural legacy of buildings in Las Cruces and nearby Doa Ana County communities. "It's good to see some things have survived."

Liefeld has been directly,and indirectly involved in restoration of the Armijo House. Several years ago, when city employees were cleaning out a storage facility, they came across remnants of a window. Not knowing where the window came from, and impressed with its design, Liefeld quickly agreed to take pieces of the old window off the city's hands.

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Las Cruces Chamber closer to new home in historic Armijo House