After draining our coffee cups we walked further east to La Posada. I had stumbled upon the hotel’s website while researching Route 66, and was impressed with the new owners’ lofty goal of restoring a first class railroad hotel from the 1930s to its former glory - and that after being used for many years as office space and nearly being torn down, which would have been the final indignity. Approaching the perimeter wall, NOS saw a horned lizard like the ones he and the neighbor kid used to catch in Roswell. He found that he isn’t as fast as he used to be, and the lizard escaped without so much as having to catch its breath.
The entrance plaza is spectacularly paved with colored concrete, alternating with patches of cobblestones. A wrought iron archway welcomes visitors to an inner courtyard just before the main entrance. That entrance was the back door when the trains brought actors, politicos and other luminaries to the hotel. Walking through that door into the cool dark entry that opens onto a myriad of spaces, artfully lighted from one direction and then the next, was, well, an Ahh moment. Hand-hammered tin icons and flamboyant canvasses filled the walls, and doorways into one intriguing space after another led to visual delights and more ways to spend money. The cabinets full of trinkets and genuine artifacts kept us in a state of sensory overload the whole time. This was California Mission architecture, but kicked up several notches, sort of what Frank Lloyd Wright did to Bauhaus with Fallingwater. The architect, Mary Colter, was given free reign, just this once, by Fred Harvey and the powers at the Santa Fe to design the buildings, grounds and even the furnishings, much of which have been restored or replicated by the new owners.
A docent in Harvey Girl dress (also designed by Colter) was in the lobby which now serves as a gathering place between the hotel, the gift shops and restaurants. She explained that she had a connection to La Posada through her mother, who worked there years before back in the day, and as a girl she came to visit and take in the sights of the legendary building and the legends who frequented it. Howard Hughes, Cary Grant, Lucky Lindy, Dwight Eisenhower and many other celebrities spent time here since it was next to the Santa Fe line and the Winslow airport. In the postwar ascendancy of Route 66, the hotel enjoyed a lesser success but even that eventually vanished and the railroad headquarters appropriated it as an expansion for their local offices.
The docent offered to let us join the tour she was about to begin, but we hadn’t yet browsed the gift shops and had more places to see down the road, so we begged off and went in search of a DVD she told us would give a good history of the place. Finding that and a whole lot more, we left with lighter pockets and walked back past the Eagles mural to the Vette and the mighty road.
