Editor’s word: The Journal continues “What’s in a Title?,” a as soon as a month column wherein author Elaine D. Briseño will give a brief historical past of how locations in New Mexico received their names.
Pat Hurley Park offers one of the vital beautiful, publicly-accessible views of Albuquerque, and whereas many have perched on its hilltop taking within the metropolis’s strip of forest by the river and melon-colored mountain vary, they in all probability don’t notice its title involves us from Oklahoma.
The park and surrounding neighborhood had been named for Oklahoma native Patrick Jay Hurley, an lawyer who served as secretary of warfare for President Herbert Hoover, the nation’s thirty first president elected to 1 time period in 1929. He retired to New Mexico on the finish of WWII after having served as U.S. ambassador to China below President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Whereas dwelling in New Mexico, he made three unsuccessful makes an attempt for the U.S. Senate between 1946 to 1952, however would stay out the remainder of his life right here.
Hurley was born in 1883 within the Choctaw Nation close to Coalgate, Oklahoma, to oldsters of Irish descent and went to work at an early age. In accordance with the Oklahoma Historic Society, he was working within the coal mines alongside his father by the point he was 11. His mom’s loss of life just a few years later in 1896 would change life as he knew it. He was the fourth of eight youngsters and when she died, the household fell aside.
He left for Texas in 1898 on the age of 15 with goals of becoming a member of the Tough Riders, a volunteer cavalry within the Spanish-American Warfare. They turned him away due to his age. That wasn’t the tip of his navy hopes. Later, he grew to become a member of the Oklahoma Nationwide Guard and served on the Mexican border and in 1917 went to France with the primary detachment of the American Artillery, in accordance with his obituary.
Though he was Anglo, he obtained a level from Bacone Faculty, an historic Indian college in Muskogee, Oklahoma, the place he labored to pay for his room and board, but additionally concerned himself in extra-curricular actions, together with soccer and the talk workforce, in accordance with the Oklahoma Historic Society. He earned a regulation diploma from the Nationwide College of Regulation College in Washington D.C. in 1908 and returned to his dwelling state to open his personal regulation apply.
One among his most important authorized triumphs was profitable a lawsuit that stored the Mississippi Choctaws from enrolling with the Oklahoma Choctaws, which in accordance with the historic society, protected the Oklahoma Choctaws oil and gasoline revenues from being diluted.
However it was actual property, oil and uranium that made him a rich man. He helped construct New Mexico’s first oil refineries within the late Twenties earlier than entering into the nationwide, political highlight. Throughout World Warfare II, Hurley was known as to lively responsibility and promoted to brigadier normal, getting wounded whereas operating the blockade of Bataan. He was appointed as ambassador to China in 1944, however solely served one yr, retiring in 1945 and transferring to New Mexico the place he grew to become a outstanding determine within the state’s Republican Social gathering.
There was a request in entrance of the Albuquerque Metropolis Council, then known as the Metropolis Fee, in June of 1950 to alter the title of Palisades Park to Pat Hurley Park, in accordance with a brief point out within the June 27 version of the Albuquerque Tribune. The park was on the nook of Palisades and La Bajada roads, which is the way it received its unique title however Hurley donated further land for the park and so it was rechristened along with his title.
Erosion is a continuing battle on the park, which is vulnerable to harsh winds due to its hillside placement close to the West Facet bluffs that oversee the river. Like New Orleans constantly pumping out water to maintain from going below, town constantly battles drifting sand as Mom Nature does her greatest to return the park to its pure state.
A March 26, 1954, article within the Journal talked concerning the metropolis’s ongoing battle to forestall the close by sand dunes from swallowing up the park.
“Town’s greater than $4,100 expenditure for beautifying Pat Hurley Park is gone with the wind,” the story stated. “Metropolis Fee Chairman Clyde Tingley, who not too long ago demanded figures on the price of bettering the Westside tract, stated windblown sand had coated the grass and the timber had died.”
Town’s park board declared shifting sand dunes made the park appropriate “just for its current use – dishpan sliding.”
These assertions had been refuted by the Pat Hurley Park Committee Chairman Joe Farber, who blamed the useless grass and timber on town’s lack of care in an Albuquerque Tribune article that printed the identical day. He urged making these “dishpan sliding” dunes a scenic function of the park.
Happily, the park didn’t stay only a pile of sand solely match for kitchen cookware. Town has gone to nice lengths to make it engaging and useful whereas working with, as a substitute of in opposition to, its sloping panorama.
In February, town instructed the Albuquerque Journal it’s always taking steps to mitigate erosion in addition to trying to find new methods to maintain it in test. Hardy shrubs unfold throughout the hill play a key function so serving to these germinate is essential. There are additionally man-made options, together with a collection of stairs and gabion partitions, that are manufactured from steel cages stuffed with volcanic rock, that catch water and assist mitigate sand drift.
The park is cut up into two ranges and encompasses a grass subject, strolling trails, benches, pavilions, a basketball court docket, a playground and mature timber that present ample shade. A group heart named after the late, longtime Pat Hurley Neighborhood Affiliation president Joan Jones sits within the decrease portion of the park.
The Pat Hurley Neighborhood Affiliation shaped in 1994 and went on hiatus however not too long ago grew to become lively once more in 2022. The encompassing neighborhood was truly as soon as a part of the village of Atrisco, a farming group based in 1700 earlier than town of Albuquerque existed. The village sat throughout the 82,000-acre Spanish land grant.
Its present boundaries are Yucca Drive to the west and increasing east to the Rio Grande. Its northern border is La Bajada Highway NW spanning south to Central. Just like the park, its title honors the one-time ambassador.
Hurley was not in a position to witness the complete growth of the park he helped set up however his son did. Wilson Hurley, one in all Southwest’s most outstanding panorama painters, frolicked in New Mexico as a boy and in addition lived and labored in Albuquerque as an grownup. In accordance with the Wilson Hurley web site established by his household the “great thing about New Mexico and its artwork traditions led to his early curiosity in portray.”
Pat Hurley died July 30, 1963, at his Santa Fe dwelling just some days after being chosen by the New Mexico Historic Society as one of many first individuals named to its Corridor of Fame. He was 80-years-old.
Interested in how a city, avenue or constructing received its title? Electronic mail author Elaine D. Briseño at [email protected] or 505-823-3965 as she continues the month-to-month journey in “What’s in a Title?”