The Doña Ana County Building is a haven of calm.
Whether you’re there to pay your property taxes or register to vote, you’re in and out within 15 minutes. Helpful, often smiling clerks, initiate eye contact with you saying, “May I help you?, “Yes, Ma’am,” and “No, Ma’am.”
It’s small enough that you can go into the Bureau of Elections and actually talk to the Elections Coordinator.
Back in Brooklyn, you’d spend more than 15 minutes standing on one line just to have a clerk tell you where the Board of Elections office was located.
So you could go there and stand on another line.
And neither clerk would be smiling.
That’s why seeing the beaded horse in the County Building’s main lobby is such a treat. The Caballo de Las Cruces (Horse of Las Cruces) is covered with more than 2 million colored glass beads and surprises you with color.
How the Las Cruces Beaded Horse Came to Be
The fact that more than 100 people volunteered their time and energies to create this horse just FLOORS ME. That, and the fact that another group of people ~ the Doña Ana Arts Council ~ thought enough about us, the public, to propose the project in the first place.
“People wanna look at something pretty when they’re here,” someone said.
And BAM! It was done.
Isn’t that the way ~ so much of what we like (or don’t) like about the place we call home is in the details?
WHAT NOW
- Learn more about the Caballo de Las Cruces and Julienne Hadfield, the local artist who designed it.
- Coming through the area soon? See the Caballo de Las Cruces for yourself at the Doña Ana County Building, located at 845 North Motel Boulevard. (From the I-10, take the Motel Blvd. exit.)
- Leave a comment to share . . .
