The Crown Jewel

THE CROWN JEWEL

By Cheryl Eichar Jett Photographs by Deborah Allen

One day in the late 1920s, a petite, 60-ish Midwestern woman stepped off an Atchison,

Topeka & Santa Fe (AT&SF) train in Winslow, Arizona. She had been tasked by Fred Harvey, her employer for a quarter of a century by then, to design a luxurious resort hotel there.

It would be the last railroad hotel in Fred Harvey’s string of lodging gems along the AT&SF tracks in the American

Southwest. The woman was Mary Colter, Fred Harvey’s chief designer, and she had been given free rein to design the Winslow hotel as she envisioned it — the building, the landscaping, the décor, and the art. It would be her masterpiece.

Almost seventy years later, in the mid-1990s, a social activist and graduate student and his wife, an artist who had met her husband on a peace walk across Ukraine, arrived in

Winslow. They had come to observe the dilapidated AT&SF railroad offices— once the romantic La Posada — stripped of Mary Colter’s genius and cheapened by bland office partitions. A local preservation group was struggling to save the once-beautiful old hotel from destruction. The couple’s names were Allan Affeldt and Tina Mion, and Allan was about to find his new calling.

Now, the story of La Posada belongs to Affeldt, who captained the charge to save it, Mion, and their third partner, sculptor and friend Daniel Lutzick. But the saga of

La Posada began with the iconic Fred Harvey, whose travel and tourism empire set the bar for those who came after, and with architect-designer Mary Colter, who romanticized the

Southwest for us all.

The Players — Act One

Fred Harvey and his same-named company is at the heart of many Southwestern American stories of the late 1800s and early decades of the 1900s, and no less this one. Harvey began with one trackside shack in Topeka, Kansas, serving decent food to passengers used to bad food — or no food. From modest trackside eateries to hotels to coffee shops within union stations, Fred Harvey served the traveler in what was then the major mode of conveyance — the railroad.

Ford Harvey, Fred’s oldest child, had shadowed his ill father for fifteen years when Fred died from colon cancer in 1901. Groomed to take the reins since age 19, Ford was ready, assisted by trusted managers and Fred’s son-in-law John Huckel. Fred left behind instructions — the name of the company would continue to be simply “Fred Harvey.”

Mary Colter’s favorite possession growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota — and likely the key to her love of Native American art and culture — was a Sioux drawing given to her as a child. After the unexpected death of her father in 1886, her mother and sister moved to California with Mary, where she studied at the California School of Design and apprenticed to a local architect. In 1902, she decorated the Indian Room at Fred Harvey’s magnificent new Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after which she remained with the company until her retirement in 1948.

Fred Harvey’s Last Great Railroad Hotel

By the late 1920s, Fred Harvey still owned or oversaw around 85 properties across the Mid- and Southwest. But they had a plan for one last property that would outshine them all. That hotel would be tucked away in a pretty little town in southeastern Arizona. The company saw Winslow as an enticing stop between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Grand Canyon. With a population of 4,000, it was a convenient hub for tourists from which to visit the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, and the Meteor Crater. The new Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT) Airport was bringing the likes of Charles Lindbergh and Howard Hughes into town. And the economy was booming. By the late 1920s, tourists were flocking to the Grand Canyon and other Southwestern attractions. It was an exciting time.

In 1927, Ford Harvey wrote a letter to his brother Byron extolling the nearby presence of attractions and adding, “I am convinced there is quite a future there!” Then in January 1929, the Santa Fe Railway announced the new hotel and station, with construction beginning in April. Mary Colter is thought to have been working on the plans since 1928.

John Huckel, Colter’s day-to-day boss, was well aware that the very idea of a romantic, luxurious resort hotel demanded the artistic sensibilities of their chief designer. Colter employed the method of design creation that she’d initiated with her Grand Canyon projects — imagining a full story for a building, to create both its past and its raison d’etre. Her vision for La Posada was that of a Spanish hacienda, its family of inhabitants, and the art and artifacts that they would bring back from their world travels.

In the year and a half before La Posada opened in 1930, disasters rippled through the Fred Harvey empire. Ford Harvey died unexpectedly in December 1928 at age 62 from the year’s deadly wave of influenza and his brother Byron

Daniel Lutzick, Tina Mion, and Allan Affeldt at the front entrance of La Posada.

became president. In March 1929, Colter was seriously injured in a taxicab accident in Kansas City; she recovered in a hospital, dictating correspondence, before going back to work, albeit in a wheelchair, onsite. And in the autumn of 1929 came the Great Wall Street Crash. But the railroad was such an institution that it was almost unthinkable that it would not remain the mainstay of American transportation.

On May 15, 1930, La Posada opened its 75 guest rooms and two dining rooms to the public, with an assortment of Santa Fe Railway and Harvey company officials in attendance. The sprawling, asymmetrical 78,000-squarefoot building, resembling a compound more than a single structure, was made of poured reinforced concrete covered with stucco. Standing out from the surrounding desert, the site was edged on the south side with railroad tracks, there to detrain its eager passengers. Gardens and archways beckoned travelers into cozy art-filled but carefully mismatched spaces. Those travelers included celebrities of all sorts — Will Rogers and his wife, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, and Howard Hughes, who had his own regular room.

The Winslow Daily Mail touted the new resort: “This transplantation of the Spanish ‘rancho’ brings to our community a tourist hotel second to none in the Southwest

[and will] make Winslow the home-like headquarters for all detours to Arizona’s wonderland of vistas.” However, an official at the Santa Fe Railway appeared to have had a less optimistic view, as he sent a telegram to the Fred Harvey company: “Hope income exceeds estimates as much as the building costs did.”

The Interim

It seems natural now, but at the time, the huge changes that were underway in America’s travel and tourism sectors were unexpected and enormous; the once all-powerful trains were seeing less ridership and the growing number of automobiles on American highways were becoming king of travel. And the impact of the ‘29 financial crash continued its slow but thorough march of damage through the country’s economy. As the full measure of those factors played out, La Posada — as well as the rest of the Harvey empire — felt it keenly.

“The history of La Posada is bookended with the railroad era and the decline of automobile travel and then the renaissance of historic tourism. The building was designed for people traveling by train, that’s why it’s backwards, the front of the building faces the railroad tracks, but by the time it was built, that era was already coming to an end... and after that, in the ‘50s, was the rise of the national highway system,” Affeldt explained. “The railway and the Fred Harvey Company tried to adapt, [but] they were not successful.”

La Posada closed its doors after only 27 years, in 1957, as American motorists, still in the post-war boom, were seeking out drive-up motor courts. In 1959, AT&SF auctioned off La Posada’s museum-quality furnishings, and in 1961, the building was gutted and partitioned off for railway offices. While the railway waffled between centralizing and decentralizing its headquarters, the building, in all its tedious sameness, deteriorated.

The Players — Act Two

Allan Affeldt was born in Southern California, where his father was in the tile business and subscribed to architecture magazines, which young Affeldt devoured. “When I think about it now, it [Southern California] was so homogenous and so uninspired and I really didn’t know that there was great architecture until I started traveling,” Affeldt said. “And that’s another important thing about La Posada and some of these buildings, they’re usually free and open to the public. I grew up relatively poor and I couldn’t afford to stay in a fancy hotel, but I could go to a church and see beautiful architecture and I could go to a great old hotel and walk around. Great hotels and historic buildings do that for a lot of us. I think that’s an under-appreciated cultural benefit of saving these places.”

On leave from his doctoral studies at University of California, Irvine, in 1986, as President of International Peace Walk, Affeldt helped lead the 2,500-mile Great Peace March for nuclear disarmament from California to Washington, D.C., and the Leningrad to Moscow Peace Walk in the summer of 1987. He partnered with San Francisco concert promoter Bill Graham to produce the first rock concert featuring both American and Soviet musicians at Izmailovo Stadium in Moscow on July 4, 1987. By the time that La Posada came into view in the 1990s, Affeldt had worked in public relations, nonprofit finance, strategic planning, and — fortuitously — responsible architecture and development.

Painter Tina Mion, known for her innovative, insightful portraits and her commentaries on politics and human nature, grew up on the East Coast, spending summers in Washington, D.C. As a young adult, she traveled to India, Sri Lanka, and Ukraine, producing art wherever she was. “I think, because I moved so much when I was young, and lived in so many places, that really helped, coming to Winslow and to this huge, empty, abandoned building,” Mion said. “I am always going to find a way to work, no matter where I am.” Several of Mion’s paintings now hang in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Mion Museum at La Posada displays many of her works.

Daniel Lutzick had been an art student and college friend of Affeldt, and neighbors of a sort. “We were living in something called Irvine Meadows; it was a trailer park where you were supposed to take your RV back to your family after two years and the next kid in line would come back with it. Of course, when you live somewhere that costs you $100 a month, you tend to stay. Some renters had been there from the ‘50s or ‘60s,” Lutzick explained. “Allan was three or four trailers down from me and we loved it. That was by far the most important experience I had in college.” After school, Lutzick worked his way up the corporate ladder at a video arcade company but rejected the lifestyle when he realized that it didn’t represent success to him.

Affeldt’s First Hotel

In 1994, Affeldt discovered La Posada on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s endangered list. At first, his intent was just to help the local preservation group save the hotel from the wrecking ball, but his efforts soon grew into a full-scale project. The property wasn’t even listed for sale, and it took three years to sort out the financial, legal, and environmental issues in order to purchase it— $156,000 for the land; the building was free— from the railway. The restoration necessitated a $12-million-plus plan, and Affeldt put his fundraising skills to work — and his dissertation on hold.

“I don’t think that we entered this project thinking of where it would go,” Mion said. “We were really just in the moment, and I think if we had thought too far in the future, it would have paralyzed us. The way we looked at it was, we restored one little corner, one little room, at a time, and we really didn’t think of where it was going to go.”

Affeldt and Mion arrived in 1997, as she describes on her website, with “one chair, an old basset hound, and a couple of rabbits.” Mion finds a parallel in their move to Winslow with architect Colter’s fantasy of the Spanish family’s hacienda. “Mary did not want it to be a museum, so we are living out her fantasy as a family moving in.”

Prior to Affeldt and Mion’s arrival, Lutzick, done with corporate life, went on ahead to Winslow to get handson. Plenty of projects awaited, including a few homeless folks and the detritus of many years. “We managed to get in and do the work. It wasn’t like Los Angeles where you need an architect, and an electrician. We could begin work immediately and do demolition and cleanup ourselves,”

explained Lutzick. “We were like, ‘Six rooms are ready,’ and Allan said, ‘Let’s open it up.’ I’d be knocking something down with a sledgehammer and someone would walk in and ask, ‘Is this a hotel?’ I’d be like, ‘Oh, yeah, let me show you a room.’” This was late 1997, and amidst the dust, restoring and renting one room at a time became a model for how to restore (and fund) an old hotel.

With guests now arriving via Route 66 instead of the railroad, the original back side of the hotel became the front. “We completely redesigned the lobby and now the building is entered from the other side. There was no parking on the Route 66 side of the property, so we had to make a parking lot. There were no gardens on that side of the property, so we had to create those,” Affeldt explained. “We’re doing that now to the original bar inside the building; we outgrew it, so we have a new bar. Just like Mary Colter did, we work with local artists. But it’s a pretty radical re-invention of the building.”

A Community of Artists

As Affeldt sought out artisans and craftsmen to create pieces for La Posada, artistic relatives and friends were also drawn to the rapidly expanding “family” of La Posada. Daniel Lutzick’s notable works are the wooden mandala outside the library and the huge butterfly katsina in the lobby. Snowdrift Art Space, Daniel’s studio, is just down the street. Furniture craftsman (and brother of Tina Mion) Keith Mion made the Monks chairs, garden pergola, and most of the beds. Verne Lucero, known as a great master of New Mexican tinwork, created the La Posada Madonna plus chandeliers and sconces. The Train Gate, the garden gates, and the wishing well were fashioned by iron artist John Suttman, who moved his studio to Winslow.

“Original pieces started flooding back after people found out we were restoring the building. We have some wonderful Native American art and Navajo rugs and kachinas and things like that. They were things from the area,” said Mion. “Eclectic is good, it fits the vision. People that come, they love that each visit is different, they don’t see the same thing twice.”

Once La Posada was up and running, Affeldt moved on to Winslow’s local theater, restoring and opening it. Frustrated with the pace of things, he ran for mayor and ended up serving two terms.

A long narrow verandah facing the train tracks. “The real challenge with these things is that they’re never permanently saved. They’re only saved as long as you continue to put time and attention and love into them, and as long as people continue to discover them,” said Affeldt. “So even though we’ve done this gentleman’s work of lifting [La Posada] out of obscurity, the work is never done. There’ll have to be another generation coming along behind us.” But beneath the activity, one feels an ineffable sense of calm and peacefulness. The stark beauty of the high desert and the blazing orange of the sunsets seep into this extraordinary building, as perhaps does the spirit of Fred Harvey and Mary Colter, all three relics of a bygone time in America’s vibrant history. Designed as a luxury oasis then, it still serves as such now. It remains La Posada — the resting place.

A Name to Remember f

The American Southwest is known for its arid desert, expansive landscape, the art and culture of its Mexican and Native American inhabitants, and the romantically designed and decorated buildings that dot its towns. But behind these creations stood a woman whose name still rings revered in circles, today. Mary Colter, one of America’s first female architects, is now long gone, but her vision and genius still stand the test of time.

By the early decades of the 20th Century, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (ATSF) was bringing Easterners by the trainload to the Southwest, where entrepreneur, visionary, and restaurateur Fred Harvey had built a railroad hospitality empire based on providing fresh, accessible good food for the passengers made possible by the refrigerated cars of the ATSF, at trackside venues. With one “Harvey House” at a time, the innovative Fred Harvey expanded his operation steadily.

As the mystery and romance of the Southwest attracted more and more travelers, the ATSF and the Harvey company began to build larger and more deluxe establishments, incorporating food, lodging, and “detours” to escort their visitors via cars to nearby attractions. Thus began the iconic era of the legendary Fred Harvey railroad hotels. As pioneering architect Mary Colter stepped in to create a Southwestern travel and tourism triumvirate with ATSF and Fred Harvey, it was Colter’s touch that bestowed the great hotels with the mystique of the American Southwest.

Born Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1869 to Irish immigrants William and Rebecca Colter, her early childhood likely fostered a sense of exploration as the family traversed the country before finally settling in Saint Paul, Minnesota. As a child, she was given a gift of Sioux artwork, beginning her love of Native American design. She would later be quoted as saying, “I have always longed to carry out the true Indian idea, to plan a hotel strictly Indian, with none of the conventional modern motifs.”

After her father passed away in 1886, Colter convinced her mother and sister to move to San Francisco with her, where she apprenticed to a local architect and attended the California School of Design. She graduated in 1891 equipped to teach art, but became grounded in the California school of thought to turn to a new style of building, reminiscent of Spanish missions and situated thoughtfully within the landscape. Back in the Midwest, Colter began a teaching career, but fate had another plan: a chance meeting with Minnie Harvey Huckel, Fred Harvey’s daughter, led to her first commission in 1902 at age 33 as interior designer of the Fred Harvey company’s newest project: the Indian Building — a showroom of native art — next to the AT&SF Railway’s magnificent new Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque. Next, in 1904, she would design an Indian building — the Hopi House — across from the El Tovar Hotel at the Grand Canyon. The success of her work in those two shops led to an offer in 1910 of a permanent job with Fred Harvey, working from their Kansas City headquarters. First, she was assigned the interior design of the new station hotel, El Ortiz, in Lamy, New Mexico. From there, her designs included Hermit’s Rest, the Lookout, Phantom Ranch, and the Desert View Watchtower at the Grand Canyon; the El Navajo Hotel in Gallup, New Mexico; and La Posada in Winslow, Arizona. Inspired by the landscape, the culture, and the people of the region, Colter created an architectural legacy that still resonates today.

Throughout her career, Colter elicited mixed reactions from people, some referring to her as single-minded, a perfectionist, and demanding. Biographer Virginia Gratton described her as a “chain-smoking small woman with piercing violet eyes and unkept hair.” Southwestern author Frank Waters referred to her as having “an Irish wit, a tender heart, and a caustic tongue.”

Whatever the impression Colter conveyed, one thing was for certain — her work was her passion and her life. However, as the popularity of automobile travel signaled the end of the great railroad travel era, she witnessed the wane of several of her masterpiece hotels. “There is such a thing as living too long,” she was quoted in reaction to La Posada’s closing. Retired to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1948, she died ten years later at the age of 89. She had worked for the Fred Harvey Company for 46 years.

A woman with a passion for her life’s work, Mary Colter became one of America’s earliest and most formidable architects. Her legacy has continued to inspire others across generations, and the preservation of much of her work is a lasting gift to those who venture into the Southwest.

The BLUES BROTHERS

One Saturday night in 1978, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi took the Saturday Night Live stage with guest guitarist Arlen Roth and others on the show, all wearing matching outfits — dark suits, fedoras, and sunglasses — that would later become the trademark look of the Blues Brothers. Roth had taught Belushi the lyrics of the song “Rocket 88,” and the performance was simply a part of that evening’s comedy, entertaining all who watched SNL that night. But it was a spark that would flame into a legend.

Just a couple years later, after releasing an album and a feature film, the Blues Brothers’ name, style, and antics had become known worldwide. As entertainers John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd and as the Blues Brothers, “Joliet” Jake and Elwood, they are forever tied to Chicago, to Joliet, and to Illinois Route 66. Some say that timing is everything, but a touch of serendipity makes magic happen that much faster.

Aykroyd and Belushi first met through The Second City Chicago-Toronto comedy club network in about 1973. But the magic really began to happen when they were both cast as members of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players on Saturday Night Live, and they really hit it off. The SNL cast and guests got into the habit of hanging out after show tapings at Aykroyd’s club, the Blues Bar, where Aykroyd had the opportunity to turn Belushi on to, well, blues. They listened to Sam and Dave records on the jukebox and began stocking instruments at the club for anyone who wanted to jam. Sitting at the club’s bar with Ron Gwynne, Aykroyd began writing a backstory for the new blues duo — the beginnings of a movie script.

With Belushi successfully turned on to blues music, the duo began singing with local blues bands. It was SNL band leader Howard Shore that suggested the name, “The Blues Brothers.” Aykroyd was quoted as saying that “the hats came from blues legend John Lee Hooker” and that the Blue Brothers act borrowed quite a bit from their often-listened-to duo Sam and Dave. Their high-energy antic-filled act was born.

What started as a joke, but also as a tribute to blues music and artists, snowballed as Aykroyd and Belushi assembled a talented band full of seasoned musicians. Their debut album, Briefcase Full of Blues, was released in 1978 and went double-platinum, selling over 2.8 million copies and producing two hit singles, “Rubber Biscuit” and “Soul Man.”

Aykroyd’s backstory scribbles turned into a self-titled musical comedy film, released in 1980 and now a cult favorite. The movie takes audiences on the journey of a paroled convict (Belushi as “Joliet” Jake) and his blood brother (Aykroyd as Elwood) “on a mission from God” to save the orphanage that they grew up in. The feature film developed their antic-filled characters and cemented a larger audience as they romped through their alter egos of “Joliet” Jake and Elwood in rollicking style.

Today, the familiar faces of “Joliet” Jake and Elwood Blues — both named after cities in northern Illinois — can be found in the “City of Steel and Stone.” Joliet is a destination that has wisely made use of its Blues Brothers connection: The Joliet Correctional Center — which housed Belushi (“Joliet” Jake) in the movie — was closed in 2002 and now stands as a frequented museum, offering visitors an intimate look at what was one of America’s most intimidating prisons. And if that were not enough, just down the road it is hard to miss the Rich and Creamy ice cream stand. It is not only home to delicious ice cream, but to dancing statues of Jake and Elwood Blues sporting their iconic black suits and fedoras. Another set of statues of the iconic pair kick back in the Route 66 welcome center lobby at the Joliet Area History Museum. And further down the road in Braidwood, the Polk-A-Dot Drive In has decorated their iconic eatery with life-size statues, including the Brothers. Route 66 in Illinois knows a good thing when it sees it.

Before The Blues Brothers, Joliet was, to many, just a passing town on Route 66, with little to pull motorists off the highway. However, the movie brought life back to the town and its historic prison. The Joliet Area History Museum now offers a welcoming start to a traveler’s experience, including sight-seeing tours at the Old Joliet Prison — a clear sign that the town has invested more in its Mother Road heritage.

The Blues Brothers started as a comedy act but brought an old Route 66 town together and created a legend not soon forgotten. As “Joliet” Jake said, “We have a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.” Time to hit the road.