FEATURE
STORIES
Arizona, Neatly Bound
By Lindsay DeChacco
It was toward the end of a tightly wound Arizona road tour when I rolled into
Winslow. The trip had already packed an impressive sampling of national parks
and monument into six days of van travel, and I was eager to spend my final night
in Winslow’s fanciful railroad hotel.
From the start, the heavy brass room key dangling ponderously in my pocket seemed
to denote a certain import to the occasion.
La Posada pulls a perfect balance of austere grandeur coupled with lighthearted
whimsy. The rooms, named for movie stars of the 1920s and ’30s like Shirley Temple,
Clark Gable and Mary Pickford, are hacienda-style quarters furnished with rough-hewn
antiques. The bathrooms veer toward a retro modern style, with checkered black
and white floors, mid-century fixtures, and walls in vivid turquoise or a shade
of pink that perfectly recalls the underbelly of a salmon.
La Posada’s most notable fixtures by far are the Winslow Harvey Girls,
who were on hand that evening in the drawing room. As far as I could tell, this
group of silver-haired volunteers is a cross between historical society and hotel
welcoming committee.
The ladies came attired in voluminous black dresses topped by crisp white aprons,
a uniform modeled after that of the original frontier waitresses who carved a
niche in American history by heading west to work in Fred Harvey’s precursor
to the modern hotel and restaurant chain. The Fred Harvey Company founded its
establishments, La Posada among them, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe rail lines.
That evening, they delivered La Posada’s storied past to a group of us perched
on an eclectic assortment of seating. Their main topic of dissertation was, naturally,
the Harvey girls, who MGM immortalized in 1946 in a rosy Technicolor musical
of the same name, headlined by Judy Garland. However, the ladies also devoted
an equal amount of time to two other key figures: Mary Colter, La Posada’s architect,
and Fred Harvey himself.
If Peggy Nelson, current head of the Winslow Harvey Girls, can be trusted, at
least one version of the story has Harvey, fed up with his carousing male wait
staff, firing the whole lot during a particularly unsatisfactory inspection.
Later he put out advertisements across the country, recruiting ladies between
the ages of 18 and 30 with “good moral character.”
If Judy Garland can be trusted, the resulting troop of adventure-seeking females
who took up the posts leavened long hours of toil with gay musical numbers.
However, it was the juxtaposition of their story with that of Mary Colter, which
particularly arrested my fascination. For one thing, during a time when women
striking out to waitress was painted as almost scandalously progressive — and
those who did venture forth were fettered by 10 p.m. curfews and hectoring den
mothers — Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter was not just designing hotels, but extravagantly
over-budget hotels.
Colter considered La Posada her masterpiece. She began work on it in 1929, the
same era that marked the dawning of the golden age of Hollywood. The structure
itself reads like an adaptation of an epic classic, a story that existed unbound
in Colter’s head. Its design is based on an intricate fantasy she concocted tracing
four generations of Spanish gentility.
Some estimates saw the budget ballooning to somewhere in the neighborhood of
$2 million before everything was said and done. But Colter remained blissfully,
or perhaps stubbornly, oblivious to the inauspicious timing of her masterpiece.
The hotel debuted at the start of the Great Depression, never got its bearing
and was shuttered less than 30 years later. Its museum-quality furnishings were
siphoned off in 1959; by the mid-1960s it had devolved into charmless railway
offices with acoustic tile ceilings and partitioned offices.
Today, La Posada is closing in on nearly a dozen years of restoration, spearheaded
by Allan Affeldt, who purchased the building in the late 1990s. Under his direction,
restorers have breathed new life into Colter’s vision. If original furniture
couldn’t be corralled then detailed duplicates were commissioned.
The hotel, in turn, inspired a renaissance of sorts in Winslow, a flagging Route
66 town which had similarly lost its bearing when the I-40 bypassed it in the
second half of the 20th century. “I’m so jealous of what is happening in Winslow,”
asserts Donna Eastman Liddle, who represents Williams, the other Route 66 town
that neatly sandwiched our journey.
It seemed natural to draw comparisons between the two towns that flank Flagstaff
in the northern reaches of Arizona. They possess a number of parallels, both
inhabiting the unique domain of the twice forsaken. Their first bloom of prosperity
was dimmed by the decline of the railroad and later the fateful snub of historic
Route 66, when the I-40 highway effectively dismantled and disenfranchised the
towns. Williams went down in history as the highway’s most stubborn hold out.
It was the last town to be bypassed by the I-40 in 1984.
Williams returned to its railroad roots when it reopened passenger service to
the rim in 1989 and branded itself Gateway to the Grand Canyon®.
Despite its own subversion by planes and automobiles, Winslow never departed
from the rails. On the back patio of La Posada, I spent one morning curled up
with a book, raising my head periodically to count the cars as trains blew through
the backyard. At one time, they would have stopped to decant weary passengers
into the poised hands of the Harvey girls.
Where Williams anchored the front end of the road tour Winslow drew it to a close.
Throughout the days in between, our journey launched us north above both as we
traced a jagged arc, like an amorphous Macy’s Day balloon, into the northeastern
corner of Arizona.
These days were comprised of a dizzying number of tours, many back to back in
a single day. In general, a guided tour isn’t my favorite way to see a new place.
I prefer to shuffle aimlessly for the first few hours, ultimately landing in
a sidewalk café when I’m too tired to walk anymore to spend the latter part of
the afternoon watching others shuffle by me.
My formula didn’t square so well with the surroundings. For one thing,
I was more likely to cross a Navajo Hogan than a sidewalk cafe. The eight-sided
Navajo dwellings cropped up sporadically amid desolate stretches of highway along
with eerily geometric rock formations, striated like a cross section of a Butterfinger
or flaky layers of phyllo dough. Yet, I did note that the first sign of life
we passed after leaving the ruins-laced Canyon de Chelly was a clapboard coffee
house with chalk menu on the front porch and a goat nibbling the underbrush in
the back.
We spent one afternoon at Monument Valley where most of the monoliths are rudimentary
shapes that vaguely resemble their names (the teapot, the mittens), or do not
(the stagecoach). One formation, the Three Sisters, stood out, as though nature
had taken special pains to refine this composition.
It became evident that its name refers to nuns rather than siblings, the one
to the left resembling a young ingénue with a serene chin and arms clasped gracefully
to her habit, while the Reverend Mother stands nearby showing a stout build and
corpulent profile. The third sister, however, is more a shapeless extrusion,
like the artist abandoned the project before the trio was complete.
Our guide at this point was an albino Navajo named Harold Simpson, who came teamed
with a taciturn younger brother. About halfway through the meandering excursion,
Simpson called an intermission next to a set of porta-potties and a lone picnic
table. Wordlessly, his brother disappeared, returning in a suit of Navajo regalia
to perform a dance scored by Simpson’s drumming, bells fastened to his footwear
chimed in time with his movement.
At another lazy interlude, Simpson pulled out a flute and I found that lying
on my back 
gazing at rock formations is a lot like staring into the clouds. Except,
the nebulous shapes emerge with a southwestern bent, like a Kokapelli flautist
tipping to the verve of his melody.
I laid in a slanted stone alcove with my hands propped beneath my head next to
Flat Stanley, a laminate cutout that grade schoolers dispatch across the country.
This Stanley was touring Navajo Nation care of Kathie Curley, who had joined
our party as its representative the moment we had crossed the border into the
nugget of reservation land straddling the Utah-Arizona-New Mexico border.
Curley was charged with the mission of documented Stanley’s journey, a task she
attacked with fervor, dressing him in Navajo finery as though he were a paper
doll on steroids. She draped his chest in forest green, shored his waist with
an ornamental silver belt, strung a turquoise necklace round his neck and affixed
brown felt moccasins to his feet.
From a balcony at the View hotel, I squatted below Stanley, holding his ankles
so he would appear from a photo to be taking in the view of the Mittens unassisted
from the terrace railing.
Outside of Page, Curley positioned him at the base of the Upper Antelope Canyon
with the cavernous walls spiraling above him like twisted taffy. These water
carved slot canyons, along with pieces of Lake Powell are both part of Navajo
Nation. We stayed one night on Powell in two houseboats layered like wedding
cakes, and ate roasted lobster under the stars.
On the first day of the trip, I boarded a helicopter near the Grand Canyon and
caught the precise moment the pine carpeted ground dropped from beneath us and
opened into a vast rust-colored expanse. Afterwards, we returned to Williams
for the night.
Winslow’s spokesman Bob Hall observed during our stay that Williams is a few
paces ahead of themselves in terms of resurgence. While this may be case, its
renaissance is perhaps not so thoughtfully conceived. Winslow’s main street might
still harbor the haunted look characterized by too many shored and derelict buildings,
but Williams seems to possess one too many personalities. On one end of the road,
mid-century motor courts have been renovated into low-ceiling luxury suites.
On another, the Wild West Junction is a cross between a motel and Western theme
park manned by whip wielding denizens in buckskins. Like an anachronistic living
museum, the only certain thing is William’s unerring faith in a blinking 66 or
Victorian shadowbox lettering to camouflage any manner of sin.
Personally I couldn’t help but like Williams for everything that set
it apart from Phoenix. The latter has always reminded me of a stifling orderly
alternate dimension I read about as a pre-adolescent, where homes are identical
and children bounce their balls in unison. Williams is like tumbling back through
a portal into a welcome chaos.
Based on this premise, it’s always difficult for me to discern if a location’s
enchantments are universal or belong to me alone. I liked the fact that the sky
in Williams wasn’t clear but whipped into a puffed up frenzy of white clouds;
that the landscape wasn’t tidy and spare but wooded and rampant with foliage;
and that the mountain air held the crisp bite of fall.
To be sure, up close some of the picturesque neighborhoods were undeniably dilapidated
and overgrown.
But it only took a little bit of imagination and the mist-shrouded filter of
morning to paint the quaint scene of a Kincaid townscape; a white spired church
arises beyond the railroad tracks while pine-covered hills spool out in the distance
— a picture perfect backdrop to launch an Arizona odyssey.
Photos (from top to bottom) courtesy of La Posada Hotel (two), istockphoto.com/George Burba, Nicholas Roemmelt
If you go
Detours of Arizona
866-438-6877
DetoursAZ.com
La Posada Hotel and Gardens
303 E. 2nd St.,Winslow
928-289-4366
laposada.org
Williams-Grand Canyon Chamber of Commerce
200 W. Railroad Ave., Williams
928-635-1418
williamschamber.com
Antelope Point Marina
Navajo Route 22B, Page
800-255-5561 (houseboat rentals); 928-645-5900
(marina information)
AntelopePointLakePowell.com
Monument Valley Simpson’s Trailhandler Tours,
LLC
Monument Valley, Utah
435-727-3362
trailhandlertours.com
Navajo Nation Tourism
Window Rock
928-810-8501
DiscoverNavajo.com
