Hoffmantown in Albuquerque, NM

Hoffmantown sits in Albuquerque's Northeast Heights, north of Menaul and east of Wyoming, on ground that marked the eastern edge of the city when Phoenix builder Sam Hoffman began it in 1950. Hoffman sold a finished package rather than a set of lots: brick houses for the postwar middle class, a large park, and the Hoffmantown Shopping Center at the corner. Ralph Haver drew the plans, and his signatures still read from the street — wrap-around corner windows, wide glass, white roll-up garage doors. The subdivision became the template other Northeast Heights builders followed.

Hoffman was one of four builders who shaped midcentury Albuquerque, working the same boom as Mossman-Gladden, Dale Bellamah and Edward H. Snow. The houses he raised here are red and buff brick veneer over block, the construction he had already used on his Phoenix tracts. No homeowners association governs the subdivision, so repainting, additions and yard choices rest with individual owners.

Hoffmantown keeps turning up in local history work. One Albuquerque Media devoted an episode of its Neighborhoods at a Crossroads series to it, and the Albuquerque Historical Society built a public program around the same material, both following the arc from a tract at the city limits to a settled part of the Heights. Aztec Park sits a few blocks north.