Monte Vista in Albuquerque, NM

Monte Vista is a historic residential addition on the north side of Central Avenue in Albuquerque, sitting inside the larger Nob Hill area. Developer William Leverett platted it in 1926, and its streets bend around two intersecting diagonal boulevards, Campus and Monte Vista, laid out that way for the slope of the mesa and its drainage rather than on a grid. Most of the housing went up before World War II, and much of it has never been heavily remodeled. Monte Vista Elementary School anchors the crossing of the two boulevards. The neighborhood runs roughly from Girard Boulevard east to Morningside Drive, and from Lomas Boulevard south to Copper Avenue, with the University of New Mexico just beyond its western edge.

The Monte Vista and College View additions were nominated together as a single historic district, entering the New Mexico Register of Cultural Properties in September 1998 and the National Register of Historic Places in August 2001. That status is honorary where individual owners are concerned: it places no restriction on how a house may be altered. A New Mexico Register listing does open the door to a 50 percent state tax credit on qualifying rehabilitation work, and the Nob Hill Neighborhood Association tracks the area's historic overlay zone mapping.

The Monte Vista Fire Station, built in 1936 to a Pueblo Revival design by Albuquerque architect Ernst H. Blumenthal, remains one of the district's landmarks from its first decade. Bataan Memorial Park stretches along Lomas Boulevard at the northern boundary, named for the New Mexicans who died during and after the Bataan Death March.