The City Different and The Palace

From the outside cover:

The year was 1909, and a youthful Jesse Nusbaum had resigned his teaching position at the Normal School at Las Vegas, New Mexico, and had ridden his ". . . four-horse-power, twin-cylinder, chain-belt-driven, two-speed Excelsior motorcycle over the rough and rocky Santa Fe Trail route, to enter on July 1 at the Old Palace of the Governors." He was the first employee of the newly-formed Museum of New Mexico and School of American Archaeology.

From that day, Jesse Nusbaum's life was inextricably bound to Santa Fe: it was he who undertook the remodeling of the Palace of the Governors into a museum; from 1909-1913, it was he who supervised the razing of the old Army barracks of the corner of Palace and Lincoln Avenue in 1916 and also supervised the construction of the Fine Arts Museum on that site; and he was one of the organizers of the Laboratory of Anthropology, Inc., and was its first director when the doors opened in 1930. Additionally, of course, Jesse was one of the foremost Southwestern archeologists, and he was a firstrank photographer, as many of the illustrations in this volume will attest.

For all his other accomplishments, however, Jesse Nusbaum is most closely associated with the Palace of the Governors. In this book, dedicated in memory of her late husband, Rosemary Nusbaum has delineated the history of the "Old Palace." Much has been written elsewhere about that historic structure, but only in this volume can the insight and experiences of Jesse Nusbaum be found.