Garcia-Lopez House

The Garcia-Lopez House is a well-preserved example of railroad-era residential construction in Barelas. The duplex plan, with symmetrically paired front doors and apartments, reflects the community’s working-class economy in the early twentieth century. Wood framing and stucco have replaced the earlier vernacular of adobe construction. The flat roof and typically closed exterior of a traditional New Mexican house has given way to a quadrangular structure that is set back from the street behind a front porch, opened with multiple double-hung windows, and capped by a hipped and gabled shingled roof that boasts even more windows, including dormer windows, in the attic. Like the contemporary, if often larger, middle-class houses in the Huning Highlands across the railroad tracks from Barelas to the east, this house incorporates materials and patterns brought by the railroad from the eastern United States to New Mexico. The building continues to house private residences.