True West at Legacy Café

By Lynne Robinson | photography by Bill Curry

Where history and love meet to create a community café museum

McCarthy Plaza stretches along the east edge of Taos Plaza, threading from the historic square through the narrow alley into the parking lot beyond—an unassuming passage that has quietly anchored generations of activity in the heart of town. The McCarthy family’s imprint remains visible here, not as a marker of ownership so much as continuity: a corner of the plaza that has evolved alongside Taos itself, adapting to changing storefronts and rhythms while remaining rooted in the everyday life of the community.
The Legacy Café is the first space to greet visitors on this well-tended corner of the Historic District’s center. From early morning onward, it draws locals and tourists alike into a steady rhythm of conversation and coffee.
The café is a veritable cabinet de curiosité; step inside and one is met with relics, fragments of history, and ephemera chronicling the past century in Taos. And yet the present is very much alive inside a space that hums with activity, its rhythms ebbing and flowing with breakfast and lunch traffic.
Ruthann McCarthy decided to open the café after returning to her hometown of Taos from Los Angeles, where she had lived her entire adult life, raising her sons. The decision marked less a reinvention than a return—to place, to memory, and to unfinished ties. McCarthy, who grew up here, was studying theater and dance at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in the early 1980s when she flew to L.A. to audition for the short-lived, but much-hyped, Los Angeles Express (USFL). She got the job. Like many who passed briefly through Hollywood, she came close enough to glimpse possibility without ever fully claiming it.
The following years were spent auditioning, which landed her a few roles. She downplays her time in Hollywood, noting that her unwillingness to compromise her own boundaries ultimately narrowed the roles available to her. She married a professional boxer, became a kickboxer herself, and raised her sons in Hollywood, returning to Taos for family Christmases and occasionally in the summers to spend time with her parents.
Long before the café took shape, the McCarthy name was already woven into the fabric of Taos. “The McCarthy family has been serving our community in Taos’ Historic District continuously since 1904,” she explains. “We strive to keep the history and stories of our many cultures alive.” Her parents, Tom and Barbara McCarthy, grew up on the same block in the Historic District of Taos. The Casa Benavides Inn, which they started, incorporates both of their original family homes.
Tom and Barbara were born as the country still reeled from the effects of the Great Depression, during which time their parents had established successful businesses in Taos. Tom’s grandfather arrived in Taos in 1904, joining with George and Frank Bond and Gerson Gusdorf to help establish Bond, Gusdorf, McCarthy Company on Taos Plaza. Tom and Barbara’s families lived close to one another in homes on Kit Carson Road, forging a childhood friendship that turned into a high school romance and continued as a lifetime of love and marriage.
In 1989, the couple bought the Lewis Art Gallery building, originally built by Barbara’s father, Carlos Benavides, on Kit Carson Road. The gallery, along with three adjacent homes built by Benavides and the original McCarthy family home, were converted into living quarters and guest rooms at the Casa Benavides Inn.
Tom and Barbara also bought the McCarthy family business, El Mercado, and opened the Old Mexico Shop, Village Weavers, and the Clotheshorse, continuing the family’s mercantile legacy in Northern New Mexico.
The Legacy Café is a testament not only to Ruthann McCarthy’s family history, but also the history of downtown Taos. Many of the restaurant’s fixtures and furnishings come from former businesses in the vicinity. A replica of Taos Pueblo that occupied the Kachina Lodge bar for years, a small model of the Tío Vivo that sits on McCarthy Plaza during fiestas, plus countless photographs of Taos and its inhabitants spanning the 20th century cover the walls like Taos’ on very own Sardi’s. Together, these objects function as a public memory—less about nostalgia than continuity.
On a busy holiday-season morning, McCarthy and her partner, Brad Hockmeyer, sat together in a booth at the café as locals and visitors filled the room. Both are striking, marked less by age than by the histories that tether them to their places of origin.
Hockmeyer is best known in Taos for founding KTAO (KTaos), the world’s first solar-powered radio station, more than three decades ago. Though other stations are now powered by the sun, Hockmeyer was in the vanguard of the sustainable energy movement when he decided solar was the way to go.
Between the two of them, they have good reason to be concerned with ensuring their respective legacies in Taos continue. “We created Legacy Café for locals who want to bring their out-of-town friends to get a feel for what Taos is all about,” McCarthy explains. “When I grew up, it was the Plaza Café, so when this space became available, it seemed like we needed to do something to bring the plaza back to life.”
Hockmeyer concurs. “When I first moved here in 1979, Taos plaza was the center of activity. Through the ‘80s and into the ‘90s even, the plaza was where all the locals hung out.”
He was born just outside of New York City, back in the 1950s, and spent many nights at the legendary Fillmore East, soaking up the music that was changing the world. Hockmeyer attended Emerson College in the early ‘70s but dropped out after his sophomore year, joining a commune in Vermont and immersing himself in the counterculture.
“During the ‘70s I began my radio career at WRUV, the University of Vermont’s radio station, and WNCS, a commercial station in Montpelier,” he explains. “When my ex-wife and son moved to Santa Fe in 1978, I followed them out a couple of months later.”
While living in Santa Fe he drove up to Taos one day, tuning in to KXRT, which sounded very similar to the station he’d worked at in Vermont. He applied for a job shortly afterwards and started work in the summer of 1979.
In 1986 he and the late Bill Whaley co-founded KTAOS, under different call letters. The radio station was housed in a mobile home on Blueberry Hill Road.
“We were known as the ‘hippies on the hill,’” he says, “and I sought to change that image by cutting my hair, wearing a jacket and tie, and joining the Taos Chamber of Commerce, where I was elected president in 1991.” It was an evolution that mirrored Taos itself—idealistic at heart, but increasingly fluent in how to sustain that idealism.
In 1991, KTAOS received FCC approval to increase its broadcast power from 3,000 to 50,000 watts and relocated its tower to Picuris Peak. On Thanksgiving Eve that year, KTAO became the world’s first solar-powered radio station.
“While living in Vermont I had attended multiple music festivals and I wanted to present a music festival in Taos, powered by the sun, that would draw attention to both Taos and solar energy,” Hockmeyer remembers. With the help of Dawn Richardson, a promoter, and Luis Reyes at Kit Carson Electric, his dream was soon manifest.
The KTAO Solar Music Festival, featuring Michael Franti & Spearhead, Eliza Gilkyson, and Robert Mirabal, among others, was held on the 1997 summer solstice at Mike Reynolds’ Greater World Earthships Community. Long before sustainability became a talking point, Taos was already dancing to it.
Soon the station had outgrown the trailer on Blueberry Hill Road, and he began to look for a location that would accommodate a growing staff and provide space for community gatherings.
“I bought the Solar Center in 2004 and KTAO immediately began hosting concerts, as well as fundraisers where the community could come together,” Hockmeyer says.
In 2010 he sold the station to longtime employee Katie Speirs, who still runs it with her husband, Dave Darus, the station’s general manager.
Hockmeyer went on to act in films and continues to have an on-air presence at KTAOS, where his alter ego, Johnny Ray Rawhide, spins alt-country on Saturday mornings.
As Hockmeyer built his own considerable legacy in Taos, McCarthy remained in Los Angeles while her kids attended school, staying even after her marriage ended. But when her mother passed, she decided to move back home to care for her elderly father.
Shortly after her arrival, McCarthy and Hockmeyer met, and as they tell it, the attraction was instant. As two mature adults, theirs is a partnership shaped by long histories—Hockmeyer brings a life marked by deep personal experience—mutual respect, and a shared sense of responsibility to place.

The Legacy Café, then, is a love story built on a love story—two generations of commitment converging at the same corner of Taos Plaza. It is the result of a continuum that feels aligned, not forced; a meeting place that builds on the relationship that was the foundation of Tom and Barbara McCarthy’s legacy.
Returning after decades in Los Angeles, McCarthy discovered Taos had been rediscovered yet again, this time by a younger demographic of digital nomads driven out of the cities by the pandemic in search of a new life. They brought different standards and lifestyles—off the grid in spirit, but with amenities—in a quest for their version of the “true West.” At the café, those newcomers sit beside lifelong residents, sharing tables that quietly bridge decades.
With their combined experience in the entertainment business, the couple are familiar with these cosmopolitan refugees fleeing urban life, and they include the newcomers in their broader vision of Taos’ future.
“Taos has always attracted creative young people who love the artistic culture here,” Hockmeyer says. “This is a community that encourages the arts, from painting and pottery to theater and live music. There is no end to the creativity here.”
McCarthy agrees, but her concern is more about the town itself, such as the last city administration cutting down a cottonwood tree on the ancient Taos Plaza without duly consulting residents. McCarthy took it upon herself to have several local artists make art from the trunk of the tree, auctioning it off to bring awareness to the government’s lack of transparency in this case, as well as the importance of community. For her, stewardship is not symbolic; it is active, participatory, and rooted in accountability to the community.
McCarthy’s legacy is forever tied to the community itself. The weekly roundtable sessions she hosts have become less a forum than a civic commons—neutral ground for shared concerns and collective imagination.
“I want to give a platform to community members, to give them a voice,” she explains as one of the café’s waiters comes to retrieve her. “They need my help,” she says with a smile, rising from the table as gracefully as a dancer, moving through the quickly-filling restaurant while greeting customers and bussing tables as she heads for the kitchen.
Hockmeyer remains at the booth, signing paychecks for McCarthy, who had recently broken her wrist and was unable to write.
“I have seen Taos go through many changes over these past 40-plus years,” Hockmeyer says, “and I am excited about the future.”
He reminisces about a day in the fall of 2025 when he sat at this very same booth with Charlie Crockett and the great Joe Ely, who died later that year. To him, the past and the future of country music coming together at the Legacy Café seemed more than a coincidence; it was perfectly aligned. Taos was once again in conversation with itself—and listening.

From the Spring 2026 issue