El Tovar and Mary E. J. Colter

Front of El Tovar hotel from the roof of Hopi House, c. 1907. (GRCA 12088A)

A luxury hotel opened near the south rim of the Grand Canyon in January 1905. “El Tovar is probably the most expensively constructed and appointed log house in America,” The Hotel Monthly declared in 1908, while going on to call it “the quaintest hostelry on the continent.” The hotel, built by the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railway for a reported $250,000, was designed by architect Charles Whittlesey and operated by the renowned Fred Harvey hospitality company.

Western side of El Tovar, 1936 (NPS/George Grant, GRCA 17517)

Publicity material from the railway described the hotel as a combination of a Swiss chalet and Norwegian villa. It could accommodate 250 guests at a cost of $3.50 to $4.50 per room, meals included. In spite of its remote location, the hotel was described as offering “[m]etropolitan luxuries and services.” These included electric lighting, steam heat, sanitary plumbing, and water reserves in case of fire.

Private dining room, El Tovar, c. 1905 (GRCA 09541)

During the summer of 1902, Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) had worked with Whittlesey in Albuquerque on his design of the hotel. Construction on the hotel did not begin until 1904, after a different site was chosen for it. While Whittlesey later left his position as chief architect for the Santa Fe Railway, in 1910 Colter began working full-time for Fred Harvey, the railway’s hospitality concessionaire. She would be a frequent guest at El Tovar while working on multiple projects at the Grand Canyon.

In her position as artist, decorator, and architect for Fred Harvey for nearly four decades, Colter was involved in the renovation of many hotels along the Santa Fe line. El Tovar was no exception. In the early 1930s, Colter designed additional guest bathrooms for the hotel. The contractor for the Desert View Watchtower moved his workforce to build eighteen new bathrooms in El Tovar when winter weather paused contruction on the observatory and rest house Colter designed.

In 1933, the same year the Watchtower building was dedicated, Prohibition was repealed. Fred Harvey added a cocktail lounge to El Tovar to accommodate thirsty guests. Playing on the word “cock,” Colter filled a plate rail in the cocktail lounge with colorful ceramic roosters. “She had a knack for finding the unusual and eventually finding a place or use for it,” Colter’s friend Fred Witteborg wrote. It served her decorating projects well.

The roosters in El Tovar’s cocktail lounge were a popular feature. “The public instinct for collecting has made it necessary to screw such things to the walls, but one may still look at them,” the writer Erna Fergusson observed in 1940.

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Sources:

Fred Harvey, “El Tovar: a new hotel at Grand Canyon of Arizona,” c. 1905-08.

“Grand Canyon, Arizona,” The Hotel Monthly, June 1908, 18 – 19.

“Improvements at Grand Canyon,” Arizona Daily Star, April 27, 1904: 4

Colter, Mary E.J. "Untitled typescript autobiography." Heard Museum Digital Library. c. 1948-1958.

Frederick W. Witteborg, letter to Virginia Grattan, February 7, 1958. Virginia Grattan Collection, Special Collections, University of Arizona Libraries, Tucson.

Winslow Daily Mail, December 19, 1931, 3.

Fergusson, Erna. Our Southwest. (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1940): 204.

Panoramic front view of El Tovar hotel, c. 1905 (GRCA 09835)