ARIZONA | HISTORY
La Posada Hotel in Arizona is a train stop with a history lesson
Built along the Santa Fe Railway by the Harvey Co., the building is undergoing a pricey renovation.
Early on a bright, clear May morning, bracing and brilliant in a way I've always associated with the American West, I stepped down from Amtrak's Southwest Chief at the trim adobe depot at Winslow, in northeastern Arizona. The rambling, Spanish-Colonial-Revival La Posada was adjacent.
I entered the original front door, on the railroad side of the building, and found a lobby, lounges, restaurant and guest rooms that were handsome and redolent of the past. And through the inn's figurative front yard rolled a seemingly inexhaustible fleet of freight trains. I was in a train fan's paradise.
That trip, taken a few years ago, was so enjoyable that I returned to La Posada with my wife, Laurel. This time, like almost all visitors, I came by car and entered the Arizona inn through what's now the front door, from an intact section of the fragmented but still famous Route 66.
La Posada, it turned out, was better than ever, with new landscaping and more (and more-luxurious) guest rooms. Rooms run from $99 to $149 a night, though prices are scheduled to bump up in March.
For our February visit, I'd requested a room with a view -- of the trains. We were assigned No. 101, facing the tracks, with a door opening right on the South Arcade, so I could scramble outside with my camera at a moment's notice.
Approached from either side, La Posada seems little changed by the nearly eight decades that have passed since it opened in 1930. Actually, that perception is deceiving, because La Posada (Spanish for "inn") has changed plenty. But now it's more or less back where it started.
La Posada is a destination in itself, and not just for train enthusiasts like me. Using the excellent booklet the inn provides, we explored its every nook and cranny and absorbed its history.
The inn's back story involves one of the most successful business partnerships in America, sealed with a handshake in 1876 by Fred Harvey and the Santa Fe Railway.
Before dining cars were common, lunchrooms were an important -- and generally unpalatable -- aspect of rail travel. Harvey thought he could do better. The deal he struck with Santa Fe called for the railroad to construct and own lunchrooms, restaurants and hotels along the rail lines, and he would run them.
The railroad would also supply the coal, water, ice and transportation of furnishings, food, supplies and personnel -- most notably the Harvey Girls, waitresses recruited by the company through its offices in Chicago and Kansas City, Mo.
The first Harvey establishment was a lunchroom in the depot at Topeka, Kan., and right from the beginning he insisted on quality.
"Don't cut the ham too thin," Harvey was reported to have said on his deathbed in 1901. At the time, the company operated 15 hotels and 47 restaurants strung along the Santa Fe, and 30 dining cars.
Most of its finest properties would come later, under the leadership of Fred's sons Byron and Ford. Among them were El Tovar at the Grand Canyon and, finally, La Posada.
The design of this landmark hotel was left to Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter, who from 1902 to 1949 created hotels, restaurants, shops and depots for the Harvey/Santa Fe team. Colter's aesthetics were rooted in the indigenous cultures of the Southwest. Indian art and architecture informed many of her designs, including Hopi House and the Watchtower at the Grand Canyon's South Rim. Colonial Spanish and Mexican aesthetics, a second dominant theme, characterize La Posada, Colter's final and favorite building.
She envisioned La Posada as a late-18th century rancho owned by a wealthy Spanish colonial family and enlarged over the generations -- thus its purposely rambling design. Choosing 1869, the year she was born, to interpret, Colter filled her gracious, homey building with often rough-hewn, hand-crafted furniture and with the sort of art that a wealthy don might have collected in his travels.
Despite being a design triumph, La Posada probably never was a success financially, thanks to the Depression and the shift in travel habits from trains to cars and airplanes. In 1956, La Posada's restaurant and lunchroom were closed. Plans to auction off the inn's furnishings prompted Colter's poignant valedictory, "There's such a thing as living too long." When she died in 1958, she no doubt assumed her beloved La Posada would be razed, and it did indeed came close in 1959.
So how is it that today's traveler can walk into a lobby, cool and quiet, that looks and feels a century old?
"People often remark how lucky I was to find a building in such good shape," said Allan Affeldt, La Posada's current owner. "They have no idea [of]its condition when I bought it. In 1993 it was on Santa Fe's disposal list," Affeldt continued. "It was also on the National Trust for Historic Preservation's 'Most Endangered Properties' list. In the early '60s, using the building for office space, Santa Fe gutted most everything. They lowered ceilings with acoustical tile and covered the floors in vinyl.
"This was both a tragedy and a blessing."
Had the structure not been modified and used in that way, it no doubt would have been torn down. In 1997, BNSF Railway (successor to the Santa Fe) transferred La Posada to Affeldt for $158,000, the value of the land, and wrote off the structure. Restoration costs were estimated at $12 million, though Affeldt may complete it for less by doing the work with his crews.
Affeldt and his wife (artist Tina Mion) moved in on April Fools' Day in 1997, and restoration began immediately, proceeding by stages. In November of that year, the first five guest rooms opened; the inn will eventually offer 52, when 14 luxury suites (most with fireplaces, spas and sitting rooms) are completed, possibly this year.
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