Walk the corner of Old Santa Fe Trail and Paseo de Peralta on any weekday morning and you will see the same thing you have seen for years: cars circling for a spot outside Kaune's, a couple of dog walkers cutting through on their way toward Cordova Road, the low adobe wall that has marked this corner since Kaune's moved here in 1950. What you will not see, no matter how many neighborhood guides tell you to look for it, is Ohori's Coffee.
That detail keeps showing up anyway. Search for South Capitol and you will find version after version of the same line, some variation of "grab a cup of coffee at Ohori's on the edge of the neighborhood." It reads like local knowledge. It is actually copy that nobody has touched since before the shop moved.
What Actually Happened to Ohori's
Susan Ohori opened her first roastery on Old Santa Fe Trail in 1984, training in the tradition of Alfred Peet and becoming, by most accounts, the first specialty coffee roaster in the state. Three years later the shop that generations of South Capitol residents think of as "the Ohori's" opened a few doors down, and for a couple of decades it ran on foot traffic from state employees crossing over from the Capitol on their coffee breaks.
Larry and Pema Ayers bought the business in 2001. By 2012, the lease economics on Old Santa Fe Trail had stopped making sense. Government jobs near the Capitol had declined, the 850-square-foot space couldn't fit more seating, and the rent held steady through a recession that didn't. In November of that year, the Ayers closed the Old Santa Fe Trail location for good and reopened at 505 Cerrillos Road, inside the Luna Community complex, with more room, more food options, and Sunday hours the old shop never had.
That is not a recent development. It is a fourteen-year-old fact that a lot of neighborhood copy has simply never caught up with. For most of that stretch, the guides describing coffee "on the edge of the neighborhood" were describing a building with a different tenant in it.
Here is the twist that makes this worth knowing rather than just correcting: Ohori's does have a location that fits the old description now. A St. Francis Drive shop, at 1098 ½ South St. Francis, sits right along the road that forms part of South Capitol's actual boundary. So the sentence in those old guides happens to be true again, just not for the reason anyone who wrote it originally meant. If you're chasing that cup of coffee, St. Francis Drive is where to look. Old Santa Fe Trail near the Capitol has been Kaune's territory alone for well over a decade.
What's Actually on the Corner
Kaune's is the anchor that never left, and it has been Santa Fe's grocer since 1896, moving to its current spot at Old Santa Fe Trail and Paseo de Peralta in 1950. Owner Cheryl Pick Sommer pushed the store further upscale with a major renovation that stripped out the old floor-to-ceiling aisle stacking in favor of open sightlines, natural light, and a chopped salad counter, aiming the shop at a younger customer who wants Casaliva olives and bergamot-rubbed cheese without a drive to Whole Foods. Long-time regulars still come for the hand-cut meats and the wine wall. Newer ones come for the salad bar and stay for the wall of chocolate.
It's the kind of place that outlasts the businesses around it precisely because it never tried to be trendy in the first place. Ohori's could move across town twice and Kaune's would still be the fixed point people give directions from.
The Park Everyone Walks Past
A few blocks south, at the corner of Cordova Road and Galisteo Street, sits the other anchor of a South Capitol walk: Harvey Cornell Rose Park. Most residents know it as a quiet green space with roses and a fountain. Fewer know it was nearly a punchline before it was a park.
Here's the timeline, condensed from the Santa Fe Rose Society's own account and Extension Master Gardener records:
| Period | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1930s | Nat Stern donates the sloping tract of land to the city |
| Following decades | Left untended, the lot fills with tumbleweeds and blowing dirt; new homeowners on either side complain, but the city has no funds to clean it |
| 1957 | The newly formed Santa Fe Rose Society, led by first president Joe Clark, spends more than a year lobbying the City Council to let them plant a garden there; the Council agrees, and retired National Park Service Chief Landscape Architect Harvey Cornell, a longtime Santa Fe resident, is asked to draw up the grade slope plan |
| Mid-to-late 1960s | The garden as it stands today gets planted, more than 800 bushes going in, starting with Blaze climbers along Galisteo Street; a Santa Fe Reporter retrospective notes the earliest identifiable rose list dates the planting to somewhere between 1965 and 1969 |
| Around 2010 | Rose Society membership thins with age, bindweed threatens to choke the beds, and the group partners with the Santa Fe Extension Master Gardeners to keep the garden alive |
| 2017 | The Cornell Rose Garden marks its 50th anniversary, putting its true founding closer to 1967, a full decade after the City Council fight that made it possible |
That gap between the fight and the finished garden is the part most residents never hear. The Council said yes in 1957 or so, but it took roughly ten more years before Cornell's design was actually in the ground. The garden also almost didn't survive its own volunteers aging out decades later. It took a formal partnership with the Master Gardener Association, still active today, to eradicate the bindweed and keep the rose count intact. The park was named for Cornell only after his death, an honorific for a man who had already retired once from federal landscape work before Santa Fe pulled him back in for one more project.
If You Want In on the Deadheading
The clinics that keep the garden going are still running, jointly hosted by the Rose Society and the Extension Master Gardeners as part of the current year's education series. Deadheading sessions are hands-on and free: instruction runs from 9 to roughly 9:30 in the morning, with practice continuing until noon. Bring your own pruners, gloves, a long-sleeved shirt, and a hat. A light plastic container for the cut canes helps too. It's a good way to spend a Saturday morning if you have ever wondered why the roses along Galisteo Street bloom the way they do, and it's a direct line to the same volunteers who kept this garden from disappearing entirely.
The Walk, As It Actually Stands
So here is South Capitol's real morning loop, not the one still circulating in outdated copy. Start at Kaune's for whatever the day calls for, a sandwich from the deli counter, a bottle from the wine wall, a box of chocolates if it's someone's birthday. Head south past the tree-lined blocks toward Cordova Road, where the Rose Garden opens up at the corner of Galisteo Street, its terraced beds and center fountain still tended by the same volunteer network that rescued it more than a decade ago. If coffee is the point of the walk rather than the destination, the nearest Ohori's is on St. Francis Drive, not on Old Santa Fe Trail, and it hasn't been there since 2012.
None of this changes what makes South Capitol worth walking in the first place. It changes what you'll actually find when you get there, which is worth more than the version of this neighborhood that keeps getting copied and pasted without anyone checking the address.
If you ever find yourself wondering what a home near that corner, or near the rose garden, might be worth in today's market, Paige Cochran is glad to walk you through it, free valuation included.
