A woman wanted to thank the Native people who had taken her family in, so she had a theatre built in their honour.
The KiMo stands on the northeast corner of Central Avenue and Fifth Street in Albuquerque, built in 1927 in Pueblo Deco: a blend of the rounded corners and edges of Pueblo Revival adobe style, decorative motifs drawn from indigenous cultures, and the soaring lines and linear repetition of American Art Deco.
It was conceived by the Italian-American entrepreneur Oreste Bachechi and his wife Maria Franceschi Bachechi, and the intent was hers: a tribute to the Native Americans who had embraced the Bachechi family as their own. After a good deal of travel and meetings with architects across New Mexico and California, they accepted a design from Carl Boller of the Boller Brothers, who first carried out an extensive investigation into the cultures and building styles of the Southwest.
What he produced is a three-storey stucco building with the stepped massing of a pueblo, carrying the recessed spandrels and strong vertical thrust of an Art Deco skyscraper. Both inside and out it is loaded with decorative work.
The survival is a civic story. In 1977 Albuquerque voters approved a bond of 324,000 dollars for the city to buy the KiMo, which was by then listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The city's cultural services department has run restoration work on it ever since and publishes the record of that work.
It is a rare building. Pueblo Deco was never a large movement, and the KiMo is the example everyone points to. Go and look up at the ceiling.
Commons photos · Atlas Obscura · US National Register · OpenStreetMap
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
