In their 20s my parents drove from west Texas to war service in Oakland California when driving the desert was still inadvisable and not, you know, funny. You kept a canvas bag hung on the car, did your own repairs with your own spare parts, and God help you if your block or spouse cracked. The roads were ungraded, amateurish, endless, washboarded, unpredictable, tough. Anyway she said that at a certain point on this empty and insanely hot journey you had to drive on 8-foot planks. Just past Yuma the Imperial Sands shifted and blew so much it was better to send the hardbitten Devil's Island roadcrew out occasionally to find the plank highway, dig it up, and... you get the idea. As part of this story Mom also described the early days of the Grand Canyon as laughably dangerous for early visitors, pack mules slipping and bouncing off the sides of the canyon like thrown tires, braying like crazy on the way down, with fat Eastern tourists still attached. Deaths, Mom said darkly, hushed up, so as not to scare off the tourists.

She was trying to tell me something about the West. Specifically that it was still untamed and dangerous in her day. But also what I got from it was, hmmm, there were people at the Grand Canyon who hushed things up, people in charge who had organized, promoted, packaged, merchandized, sort of invented the Grand Canyon. That was a cool idea.

Mary Colter was born in 1869 in Pittsburgh. In 1902 she got a job with "Fred Harvey" to decorate the Indian Building, part museum and part shop, at the Alvardo Hotel in Santa Fe. "Fred Harvey" as you know famous for selling pretty girls in high-necked collars, high-quality food, and souvenirs all along the railroad in the American west.

BTW it's "Fred Harvey" because that name is a convenient fiction. The living human person Fred Harvey died in 1901. He insisted his company be called just "Fred Harvey" with no Inc. or Corp. or The, but he himself was dead by the time Colter came on the scene. And Harvey was English, so feel free to imagine his last words "Don't slice the ham too thin!" in the voice of, oh, let's say, Keith Moon.

She began working full-time for the company in 1910, doing duty both as interior designer and architect, accidentally inventing the National Park Service Rustic genre along the way. She was a short chain-smoking perfectionist. Working as one of few female architects and in rugged conditions, to say the least, Colter created a string of landmark hotels and commercial lodges along the southwest rail line. After decorative in the Indian Building at the Alvardo, she worked for the company until 1948, and her 21 "Fred Harvey" projects include:

And this place, La Posada, 1929, Winslow, Arizona.

La Posada, the Resting Place, was the final great Santa Fe Railroad hotels to open, the final resting place you could say if you felt clever. It opened immediately before the Depression, much to the regret of the Santa Fe Railroad. Most of the other Colter hotels are in beautiful settings. This one is not.

Approach Winslow by rental car Highway 40 and you won't see any indication of La Posada, no billboards among the dinosaurs and jackrabbits and Route 66 crap, no little blue official signs, no hint of Winslow's best treasure. So you find it yourself.

Hint: it's next to the tracks. Well it would be wouldn't it. In fact, on a patch of land right between the tracks and the old Route 66. One web source says there are still 100 freight trains rolling through here daily but the walls in the guest rooms are 18 inches thick, so don't worry, it says. (Are the windows also 18 inches thick, my mental-partner-wife-and-Marxist-muse Darlene wants to know.) And it's been beautifully restored, it's done, don't worry about falling over sawhorses or getting maddogged by a drywaller who thinks he recognizes you, no, except for the gardens and grounds and the East Wing.

There's more sheer lobby at La Posada than I've ever seen before.

Enough lobby for 15 to 20 Chicago hotels, the public space just keeps unfolding around you, just that spatial effect of generosity is beautiful in itself. As in every Harvey property I know about, there's a restaurant and a huge physically attractive gift shop, two actually. There are 33 guest rooms open today, down from an original 70-something. but mainly there is social space, a big room up three steps with a big fireplace and four old ladies playing cards, another room overlooking a back garden, an Orangerie, another reading or writing room, another couple of small lounges, and more public areas upstairs and around the front gardens.

(Somewhere Conan O'Brien talks about constructing his skits by taking them to a certain stage, then pushing them farther, remembering as a kid that satisfied fascination when a comedy bit would take a strange left turn and a life of its own, the bit wouldn't stop, and that's what the La Posada lobby is like.)

Two puzzling things.

The entry sequence, approaching the property on foot from outside, seems dull and off-key. We wondered if it had been modified or screwed up somehow in the 1960s. So many things were. Such an undramatic entry from an architect so careful about user experience brings invisible question marks above our heads, because we're dimwitted, we don't realize we're coming in through the back door. The front door was on the Santa Fe Railroad side of the house. Well it would be wouldn't it. Der.

Puzzling two, too, is how La Posada reflects the character of Winslow or the landscape around Winslow. Why Winslow? The hotel has a view of... why? Were there ice mountains here in the 1920s? What the hell? The answer to that is that the Santa Fe Railroad and "Fred Harvey" established rail stations at 100 mile intervals, AND, this town happened to be the Santa Fe Railroad headquarters.

Turns out that here, the loose Spanish Hacienda style of the structure does not refer to anything local. It refers to a phony story.

Phony story?

That all 72,000 square feet of La Posada had been the "grand hacienda of a wealthy Spanish landowner," their property on this frontier for 120 years. His name was Don Alphonso de los Pajaros, without an heir (except for the peacocks), ruined by the Depression, and brought down to selling the entire estancia to the Santa Fe Railroad. To quote directly from their web site, which quotes from Colter's narrative:

The fourth Don Pajaro was a man of great culture born to fabulous wealth and a million-acre ranch. He added the west wing—33 guest rooms for his friends—and built gardens that were the envy of the Arizona Territory. By 1920, the hacienda looked as it does today—72,000 square feet of wonders from around the world. By 1930, it was all over; everything was sold, and it was not enough. The Harveys, who were contracted to run the hacienda as a new hotel, promised to maintain La Posada like a proud estate. The guest rooms would be rented. Travelers would dine beneath the Pajaro’s magnificent chandeliers, seated beside the Pajaro’s patron saints—planting, cooking, and building in their fragile and forgotten innocence.

Colter had done the same kind of "deep theming" at the Grand Canyon. Colter conceived Hermit's Rest as a sort of folly, as if it had been wired together by a reclusive mountain man. The Hopi House came with an implied backstory, and carried artificial age-effects. And the Watchtower was the product of a great deal of travel and research, and Colter cared enough about the narrative to prepare a written pamphlet for guides to carry around so they'd get it right.

At La Posada, this backstory was part of the deal. Along with your room, you got a narrative, you got mental images. He would have looked like Gilbert Roland, I'm guessing. Today he would look like Antonio Banderas. In a brocaded vest and a bolo tie. The property had expanded and the guest rooms built, supposedly, through the years, to accommodate the family's visiting artisans and guests and dignitaries and traders. The entire hotel was designed as if it had been added-to in sections (a cool idea); the upstairs East Wing had been the family's "private quarters," and the story of Don Pajaro was tied to specific places in the hotel, making the fiction powerful and memorable and almost tangible, associating images and specific places, like chambers for a memory palace.

Most importantly Don Alphonso had left behind his legacy of four generations, the family's collection of rare and beautiful and odd art and artifacts and furniture, arranged around the hotel. Turn any of those precious artifacts upside down, and you'd find a price tag.

 

There are interesting questions here about authenticity, boiling down to the notion that Mary Colter and "Fred Harvey" may have invented the American West as much as they presented it. My mental-partner-wife-and-Marxist-muse Darlene tells me she took a class at Columbia on this topic, and there's a rich vein of academic work about the invention of tourism in the American west, image-making and myth-making about Yosemite and Yellowstone, stretching back into the 1870s. All about 'authenticity.' It's a slippery concept.

Thinking about the fiction of "Don Alphonso de los Pajaros" leads you to consider that the tourists were meant to identify with his noble land-owning patrician self, that the Don was a sort of blank screen presented for guests to project their fantasies onto, leading to the thought that the created persona of "Fred Harvey" was so valuable that it outlasted its creator, there was Fred Harvey and "Fred Harvey" (did they ever disagree?), leading to the notion that there was Mary Colter and then the person I've just described to you, "Mary Colter," possibly another kind of blank screen for your fantasies just now. This is where I should mention that Mom's stories about the plank road and the mules don't check out. The plank road was taken up in 1926, before Mom was even born, and the credible sources about deaths at the Grand Canyon say they've never lost a single tourist on a mule ride. And now -- I have a headache. Or does it only feel like a headache?