The 400-year-old Palace of the Governors site in downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico, soon will be closed for six months for remodeling.
The Albuquerque Journal reported:
The renovations beginning Aug. 1 will include the installation of a heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC) system as well as fire safety construction. No information on the cost of the project was available Monday.
According to Wulf, the temporary closure for this installation also requires the complete deinstallation of all of the palace exhibits and will allow the History Museum’s curators and educators to rethink the palace’s interpretive plan, which has not been updated for at least 10 years, with some exhibits dating back to the 1970s.
The Palace of the Governors will reopen in the spring. The nearby New Mexico History Museum, the Palace Press, the History Library and Photo Archives remain open during the project.
The remodeling project began in 2016-2017 with new exterior stucco and plaster.
This historically significant moment happened at the Palace in the 19th century, according to Wikipedia:
Lew Wallace wrote the final parts of his book Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ in this building while serving as territorial governor in the late 1870s. He remembered later in life that it was at night, during a severe thunderstorm in the spring of 1879, after returning from a tense meeting with Billy the Kid in Lincoln County, when he wrote the climactic Crucifixion scenes of the novel. Wallace worked by the light of a shaded lamp in the shuttered governor’s study, fearing a bullet from outside over the tensions surrounding the Lincoln County War.
The Palace of the Governors was built in 1610 as Spain’s seat of government for territory that now is a large swath of the American Southwest. It remains the oldest continuously occupied public building in the United States. The adobe structure was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960.
The Palace of the Governors sits only a few blocks from the 1926-1937 alignment of Route 66, also known as the Santa Fe Loop.
(Image of Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico, by Los Alamos National Laboratory via Flickr)