Now Entering Oppenheimer Land
If Oppie only knew that Los Alamos would end up a creepy strip mall
Last month, I paid a visit to Taos, New Mexico, where I started my writing career as a cub reporter for The Taos News in 2017. The paper invited me to write a reflection about the gangbuster changes to Taos since I lived there (i.e., it’s super bougie now), which you can read here.
During my visit to the Land of Enchantment, I also visited the modern community of Los Alamos, the historic site of the “Project Y” division of the Manhattan Project—still home to Los Alamos National Laboratory—and featuring several filming locations used in the 2023 film Oppenheimer.
If J. Robert Oppenheimer knew that the Manhattan Project would result in transforming his beloved Los Alamos into a creepy strip mall, maybe he would’ve thought twice about building the bomb?
Immediately upon entering modern Los Alamos, you are struck with the absolute, incontrovertible realization that a town built exclusively by military people, scientists, and engineers, would have no character whatsoever.
Modern Los Alamos is defined by pristine asphalt streets lined with banks and other corporate services precariously perched on the mesa more than 40 minutes away from Santa Fe. Ghostly strip malls with cafés and seemingly vacant brewpubs, as well as a company called, um, SpaceNukes, which is ostensibly developing nuclear-powered rocket ships to colonize Mars. (Whatever, good luck with that. I guess.)
On occasion you’ll run into a building dating back to the Manhattan Project days, and you’ll be amazed by the character of the log cabin-architecture from when this was the Los Alamos Ranch School, or the intriguing exteriors of Oppenheimer’s own house during the project, used for interiors during the movie. (Most of the Oscar-winning film was shot on a set built in the relatively-nearby Abiquiu, more famous for Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch, an area which still has a rural character.)
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