A third fire since May broke out Saturday night at the now-closed Desert Sands Motel along Route 66 Albuquerque.
According KQRE-TV, firefighters said homeless people started the blaze on a ground floor at the motel. They extinguished the blaze quickly, with no injuries.
The first fire in May destroyed two-thirds of the structure, which was being used as long-term housing. A week later, a 37-year-old woman was charged with arson in the case.
A second fire caused by a homeless squatter occurred in July, despite the motel being boarded up and a chain-link fence erected around the property.
The Desert Sands was used in a scene in the Academy Award-winning film “No Country for Old Men.” More about the scene may be found here.
The motel, particularly Room 109, also reputedly was haunted.
According to online accounts, the Desert Sands was built in 1957, during the golden age of Route 66. But it had declined into a ramshackle place — another victim of an oversupply of old motels along Central Avenue.
The city likely will bulldoze what’s left of the motel if the owner doesn’t rebuild. Albuquerque has torn down several closed motels that used by homeless squatters and drug dealers.
(Image of the Desert Sands Motel in Albuquerque in 2013 by Thomas Hawk via Flickr)
Is this the image that the antiART groups are trying to preserve? I’m confused or misinformed or both.
From the article:
“According to online accounts, the Desert Sands was built in 1957, during the golden age of Route 66. But it had declined into a ramshackle place — another victim of an oversupply of old motels along Central Avenue.
The city likely will bulldoze what’s left of the motel if the owner doesn’t rebuild. Albuquerque has torn down several closed motels that used by homeless squatters and drug dealers.”
Another what one might call “typical ordinary ” building in an ordinary town destroyed. And so the character of this ordinary town will change when a new building is constructed on the site.
For a whole variety of reasons, bit by bit towns change, until there is nothing left of the original buildings. The number of unoccupied buildings that are victims of fires is endless.
The number of causes for such fires is a lot more limited: accidents, carelessness and deliberate arson being three. The reasons for arson can be subdivided into a mentally deranged person setting the fire, often for the pleasure of seeing a building alight – and an owner setting the fire or having the fire set so as to be able to claim on insurance or to sell the land at profit for the construction of a much more valuable property.
To read that “Albuquerque has torn down several closed motels that [were] used by homeless squatters and drug dealers” means all these ordinary buldings have been lost to posterity..
Just how many storeys high will the new building on the site of the Albuquerque Desert Sands Motel be? And will it have any “character”?