Central Albuquerque in Albuquerque, NM

Central Albuquerque is the band of older neighborhoods strung along Central Avenue, the stretch of Route 66 running from Old Town east past the University of New Mexico into Nob Hill. The city began at the Old Town plaza in 1706. The residential additions came much later: Franz Huning's 700-acre estate, which sat midway between Old Town and downtown, the Huning Highland district on the east edge of downtown, and the 1920s plats D.K.B. Sellers and William Leverett laid out near the university. Several of these areas carry city historic protection, and the streets run on a public grid rather than behind gates.

The region collects neighborhoods with separate histories. Old Town holds the 1706 plaza and the museums and galleries around it. Barelas, south of downtown, follows the pre-1937 Route 66 alignment along Fourth Street. Huning Highland sits on the east edge of downtown, Huning Castle to the west, both named for the same 19th-century merchant. Nob Hill, University Heights, Parkland Hills, Ridgecrest, Spruce Park and Netherwood Park fan out from the university; University Heights was platted in 1906 and built out from the late 1920s. Sawmill District and La Mesa hold the northern and eastern edges. Six smaller neighborhoods complete the list.

City Historic Protection Overlay zones cover parts of the area, among them Old Town, Huning Highland and East Downtown, Fourth Ward, Silver Hill, Eighth and Forrester, and East End Addition; the city created them to protect places of historical, architectural or cultural significance. Barelas carries a separate National Register district along South Fourth Street, made up of automobile-era commercial buildings put up between 1925 and 1956, and Huning Highland was designated a national historic district in 1979.

Dues are the exception here. Voluntary neighborhood associations do the organizing instead, and the greater downtown area alone lists fourteen of them. Sawmill and Wells Park also sit inside a city Metropolitan Redevelopment Area plan adopted in 2005, which sets out to keep a permanent mix of affordable and market-rate homes in place.

Central Avenue explains the pattern. The corridor became U.S. Route 66 in 1937, and the shopping strips along it grew from that traffic, the one at Central and Carlisle among them. The University of New Mexico sits in the middle of the region, while the Albuquerque Country Club, Tingley Beach and the zoo line the western edge near the river.