La Posada and the Automobile
In its announcement of the May 1930 opening of La Posada, the Fred Harvey hotel and restaurant located between the railroad tracks and Route 66 in Winslow, Arizona, National Hotel Reporter called the building “unique in every detail.” The article continued, “The idea, as carried out by Miss [Mary] E. J. Colter in designing and decorating, is that in inaccessible localities…it was impossible to follow exact styles and materials used in Spain.” The result, the reporter wrote, was “a style peculiar to itself and the attempt has been made to create such a building so found in ‘La Posada.’”
While Colter was engaged in preliminary design and decorating, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway’s architects and engineers produced the working drawings for construction for the building. When complete, the railway owned and Colter’s employer Fred Harvey operated La Posada. The contract for construction, including the adjacent depot, was awarded to an El Paso company in April 1929, with a bid of approximately $600,000. Later reporting said that, with furnishings, the project cost about a million dollars.
One impetus for the new hotel, which replaced the old smaller Fred Harvey hotel and restaurant across the tracks, was to expand Fred Harvey’s motor tours. While the hospitality company had long relied on the Santa Fe Railway to deliver its customers, the rise of the passenger automobile challenged this model. Freddy Harvey saw the remote Southwestern attractions reached by sometimes treacherous roads as an opportunity. “It looks as if this motor business might grow rapidly and into important proportions,” he wrote to his uncle Byron Harvey in 1927, identifying “the Petrified Forest, Hopi Villages and Painted Desert, the Meteorite Canyon and the White Mountain country” as sight-seeing attractions for the company’s expanded motor tours. A hotel industry journal endorsed the strategy, writing “The completion of La Posada provides a strategic and logical base for the westward extension of Harveycar motor service.”
La Posada Hotel by Kent Kanouse, © 2016. (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Overnight guests could stay in one of La Posada’s 74 hotel rooms (eight were reserved for railway workers), all but twenty with private bathrooms. The restaurant and lunchroom could seat nearly 250 people. Train passengers could enjoy a quick meal in the lunchroom during stops at the Santa Fe Railway’s Winslow depot next door. They could also disembark for a seventy mile “motor cruise” through the Petrified Forest before re-boarding the same train in Holbrook.
Clay Gilliland, Trackside view, 2018 (CC BY-SA 2.0)
As it turned out, the timing for this expansion in tourist services was inauspicious. The 1929 stock market crash came about six months after construction on La Posada began, and the Great Depression lingered for years after that. Rail traffic continued to decline, except during World War II. The restaurant and lunchroom’s business peaked then, with as many as 3,500 meals a day served at La Posada to military personnel passing through. After the war, rail traffic dropped steeply. The addition of more dining cars and sleepers allowed trains to speed by the majestic hotel without stopping.
Owing to the decline in guests, La Posada closed its restaurant in 1956. In 1958, the Santa Fe advertised La Posada for sale and closed the hotel in 1959. Not finding a buyer, the railway sold off the carefully selected furnishings and fittings. It moved its offices into the hotel building, adding new partitions, acoustical tile ceilings, and fluorescent light fixtures.
The Santa Fe Railway’s passenger operations were taken over by AMTRAK in 1971, and the railway added La Posada to its disposal list in 1989. It moved out of the building completely in 1994. La Posada sat vacant and threatened until 1997, when new owners moved in and began restoring La Posada to its former splendor. Today, the restaurant and hotel are once again open and available for guests to enjoy.
Most arrive by automobile.
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Sources
“’La Posada,’” National Hotel Reporter, May 27, 1930: 1.
“La Posada and Harveycars, Winslow,” The Hotel Monthly, February 1931: 44 – 55.
Roger W. Birdseye, “A Typical Spanish Rancho: ‘La Posada,’” Hotel Monthly, November 1930: 21 – 25.
“New Harvey House and Station to be Started at Once in Winslow,” Winslow Daily Mail, April 16, 1929: 1.
Letter from Frederick H. Harvey to Byron, February 21, 1927. Virginia Grattan Collection, ASU3546633_MS656_Box1_F1,
Statista Research Department, “United States: motor vehicles in use 1900-1988,” Dec 31, 1993.
Janice Griffith, “La Posada: Built Upon the Red Earth,” Designer/Builder, April 1998, pp. 25 – 29.
Robert G. Graham, “La Posada Historic District,” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, July 9, 1991.