Old Town Pizza Parlor – Albuquerque, New Mexico
Although it seems Albuquerque’s population experiences an unprecedented population growth every decade, perhaps the ten-year period which most transformed the Duke City from an expansive frontier cow town to a modern metropolitan city was the 1950s. At the start of the decade, the city’s population was 96,815, but bolstered by a post-World War II boom, the population more than doubled to 201,189 by 1960. No successive decade has seen such growth. With J.C. Penney’s, Sears and Montgomery Wards (as well as Woolworth’s) all located on Route 66, downtown was the the economic heart of the community. Consumers reveled in the availability of products and clothing heretofore available only through catalogs. To show off the high fashion available at those department stores and…