109 East Palace Avenue, Santa Fe: Gateway to the Secret City

Visitors to Santa Fe, New Mexico, often spend time on the historic plaza, browsing shops, museums and galleries and the work of Native American artists selling in front of the Palace of the Governors. Walk a little east on Palace Avenue and you may step into a small courtyard full of colorful crafts, with a sign pointing to a Los Alamos National Laboratory historical marker on the back wall.

The marker is a modest bronze plaque reading "109 East Palace, 1943 Santa Fe Office 1963, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, University of California." It says that all the men and women who made the first atomic bomb passed through this doorway on their way to their secret mission at Los Alamos, and calls their creation, in 27 months, of the weapons that ended World War II one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time.

The bronze plaque at 109 East Palace in Santa Fe. NPS photo by Judson.

Hiring a gatekeeper

The land was first granted in the very early 1700s to Captain Diego Arias de Quiros, a Spanish army officer. In March 1943 the University of California leased the small offices on the property; the owner, Martha Field, knew only that they would be used for the war effort.

On the evening of March 25, 1943, Dorothy McKibbin, a Santa Fe resident, met Duane Muncy of the University of California and an old friend, Joe Stephenson, in the lobby of the La Fonda hotel on the plaza to talk about a job. Widowed, she had moved to Santa Fe with her young son, Kevin, in 1932, and she knew the town and its colorful residents well. The men introduced her to Robert Oppenheimer, who offered her a job in one of the offices at 109 East Palace without saying what it was. She accepted at once. She later wrote that she had never met anyone whose magnetism struck so quickly and completely, and that she would gladly have joined him even to dig trenches for a new road, just to be part of the work of someone with such vitality and force.

The front door to Los Alamos

The next day she started work alongside University of California administrative staff and learned that their employer was the secret Los Alamos Laboratory in the nearby mountains, part of the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer, the laboratory's director, and his secretary, Priscilla Greene, worked there at first but soon moved up to Los Alamos.

McKibbin became known as the "gatekeeper" to Los Alamos, because all civilian employees and many military personnel checked in through her office. She issued temporary passes, gave directions or arranged transportation, and encouraged newcomers worn out and bewildered by long journeys. Every day she and her assistants sent more than 65 people up to the secret city, known as "The Hill," issued dozens of passes and handled scores of phone calls. When strangers wandered Santa Fe looking lost, residents called her, since they were usually searching for her office.

She became friends with many people on the Hill, who stopped by on shopping trips to visit and trade news. Her adobe home hosted more than a dozen weddings, sometimes with Oppenheimer giving away the bride because families could not come to the secret site.

After the war

For weeks after August 6, 1945, when news of the Hiroshima mission spread, the office was flooded with people from Santa Fe and far beyond who wanted passes to see Los Alamos. After Oppenheimer resigned as director in October 1945, his successor, Norris Bradbury, asked McKibbin to stay. The little office went on handling new employees, requests for information and curious visitors until it closed when she retired in 1963.

Sources

• National Park Service, Manhattan Project National Historical Park, "109 East Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, NM." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/109-east-palace.htm
• The Park Service's article draws on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus (2006); Jennet Conant, 109 East Palace (2005); John Ruminer, 109 East Palace Avenue (Los Alamos Historical Society, 2013); and Nancy Cook Steeper, Gatekeeper to Los Alamos: Dorothy Scarritt McKibbin (2015). McKibbin's own words and the plaque's dedication are paraphrased here.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.