Technology History | Two Park Central Tower — Microsoft's Albuquerque Is Three Addresses

Microsoft's Albuquerque is three addresses, and the one people photograph is usually the wrong one.

The company was incorporated on 4 April 1975, after Paul Allen came here to meet MITS, the firm behind the Altair 8800, carrying a version of BASIC that he and Bill Gates had written for it. The name was Allen's portmanteau, hyphenated at first.

Microsoft placed a commemorative plaque in 2006 at the MITS site, on a rock at Linn Avenue NE and California Street NE. It has been stolen and replaced more than once.

Gates and Allen lived at the Sundowner, a 1960 Route 66 motor lodge on Central Avenue, which was redeveloped from 2015 into seventy federally funded apartments for veterans, homeless and mixed-income residents.

This tower is the third address, and the only one where Microsoft kept an office of its own — the eighth floor, from 1976. They left for Bellevue on 1 January 1979, having found it hard to persuade good programmers to move to New Mexico.

The building opened in 1975 with Travelers Insurance as its first tenant, ten storeys and about 101,000 square feet, and over the years it held state offices including the employment bureau and veterans services. Then it emptied out, and stayed empty long enough to become a local byword for vandalism and stalled potential.

It was auctioned three times in 2023 before selling in August for just under two million dollars.

What happens next is the part worth recording, because it is the opposite of what happened to IBM's Endicott. Silverstone Equity Partners obtained a building permit in October 2025, the city agreed to put two million dollars into a twenty-three million dollar conversion along with a seven-year tax abatement, and the mayor broke ground in January 2026.

The result is to be called Serenade at Park Central: 110 apartments, twenty-one studios and eighty-nine one-bedrooms, with forty-one priced for households at or below eighty percent of the area median income and distributed across all ten floors rather than stacked on the cheap end.

The same developer owns the taller former Bank of the West tower across the intersection and intends to renovate that too.

Nothing on this building marks the Microsoft years. The plaque is at the other site, a short drive away, and it is the one to visit — daylight hours, by local advice.

The photograph shows the south-west corner in March 2026, two months after groundbreaking: construction fencing along the sidewalk, the ground floor boarded, and window openings stripped out on the upper floors. This is what the conversion looks like in progress, not a derelict building.

Photo: Xnatedawgx, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sources: City of Albuquerque Metropolitan Redevelopment announcements, October 2025 and January 2026; Albuquerque Journal on the 2023 auctions and the 2025 city agreement; Associated Press, 2015, on the Sundowner redevelopment; Atlas Obscura and RoadsideAmerica on the plaque and its repeated theft.