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| La Posada Hotel Winslow AZ |
SUSAN CLOKE
Columnist
Route 66. La Posada Hotel, Winslow AZ. Built between the railroad tracks and
Route 66, La Posada Hotel was originally built in the late 1920’s by the Santa
Fe Railroad and the Fred Harvey Company for the people riding the Super Chief
on the Chicago-Los Angeles route. Through the good work of Allan Affeldt it has
once again become a destination hotel.
In the first half of the 1900’s Harvey Company built
hotels and restaurants along the routes of the railroads in the western United
States. Fred Harvey is credited
with being a leader in promoting tourism to the Southwest. Samuel Hopkins Adams’ novel about the
Harvey waitresses, The Harvey Girls,
was made into a film of the same name starring Judy Garland. Her song from that film, On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, won
an Academy Award.
The famed Mary Colter was the architect for La
Posada Hotel. Colter designed the
hacienda style Spanish Colonial Revival La Posada in 1929. She designed the hotel, the 6-acre
gardens, the furniture, the china, even the hotel uniforms. El Posada was listed as a National
Historic Landmark in 1987.
Colter may be most widely known as the architect
of the 1922 Phantom Ranch buildings at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and the
cabins on the rim of the Canyon and Hermit’s Rest.
Colter also worked for the Santa Fe Railroad
where she designed the Turquoise Room Dining Car and the now highly collectible
Mimbreno china and flatware for the Super Chief Chicago-Los Angeles rail
service.
In the 1930’s and 40’s the Santa Fe Super Chief
was the classiest train between Chicago and Los Angeles. The idiom of the day was “I just chiefed
in from the Coast.”
One of her last designs was the Streamline
Moderne cocktail lounge at Union Station in Los Angeles, which now can be seen
on Los Angeles Conservancy tours.
The Santa Fe railroad closed the hotel in 1957
and used the facilities as offices, wrecking havoc on the interior of the
building.
Along came Allan Affeldt and Tina Mion. They bought the hotel with the
intention of restoring it. “Our
friends thought we were crazy,” said Affeldt who calls himself a “serial
eccentric entrepreneur”. He is
married to Tina Mion, whom Ed Ruscha called the “foremost figurative artist in
the Southwest.”
Work on the hotel restoration is ongoing. Also planned are the converting of the
old train station to an Art Museum, planting a vineyard and making wine, a
sculpture garden and a potager. James
Turrell is designing a “sky space” for La Posada and when Turrell’s Roden
Crater opens La Posada will be the embarkation point for visitors.
Allen Affeldt bought La Posada in 1997 and began
work on the restoration of the original Colter design. He said, “I believe we save great buildings in the same way we save
families, cities and nations: one day at a time, with constant investment and
courage, undaunted by naysayers and long odds. I believe in the sacredness of place, and in the power of
great architecture to inspire creativity, kindness and civic responsibility.”
You too can “chief in” from the Coast. This time on an Amtrak train. You can still disembark at the front
entrance of La Posada and enter the restored hotel and have a great meal at The
Turquoise Room. Named for the
dining room on the Super Chief.
The Turquoise Room at La Posada is run by James Beard nominated chef,
John Sharpe.
Sharpe is developing a menu of Native American
inspired foods such as cornhusk wrapped and baked salmon or locally sourced
churro lamb for the squash blossom and lamb sampler platter. Breakfast might be corn polenta with
fire roasted tomatoes, fresh spinach poached eggs and corn salsa or waffles and
pancakes served with locally produced prickly pear or mesquite syrup. He brings the idea of eating locally
and sustainably grown produce and products to the La Posada kitchen.
Each of the fifty-three rooms in the hotel is
named for a famous hotel guest. Presidents Roosevelt and Truman; actors Mary Pickford,
Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper; aviators Amelia Earhart and Pancho
Barnes; Albert Einstein; all were guests at La Posada.
My thanks to Meaghan McNamee, the bartender at
the Martini Lounge at La Posada, for her stories about the hotel. A local resident, the daughter of a
Scottish Irish father and a Navajo mother, she calls La Posada “a magical
place.”
Martini Anyone? On the Super Chief a martini was 30 cents. Today, at the hotel they are a little
more!
What Say You?
