Salvation Books a Room

This city was dead. Stores were boarded up, residents were fleeing, downtown was nothing but weeds and ghosts. You could eat your lunch in the middle of the main street, the mayor says, without fear of being run over.

Then, 10 years ago, something happened. Winslow set out to save its one great building -- a 1930s hotel where movie stars and American icons once stayed -- and the building wound up saving Winslow.

Restoration of the crumbling La Posada triggered a chain reaction of other restorations, which remade Winslow’s downtown and revived its economy, while spurring other less obvious “restorations,” from the legacy of a brilliant Western architect to the passion of an Orange County peace activist.

Now, this historic city on Route 66, with its smart new public plaza and vogue new coffeehouse, its crowded calendar of art shows and poetry readings, and its own international film festival, is a ghost town no longer. Residents are quick to give credit for the sweeping changes to several local boosters and business leaders -- but they are most grateful to their restored hotel. They speak of La Posada as if it were a person, and describe the connection between city and hotel as an intimate, mutual debt:

Winslow filled the hotel with guests, and the hotel rid Winslow of ghosts.

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The decline of Winslow began more than 50 years ago, with the decline of railroad travel. Winslow was founded in the 1880s as a hub for the Santa Fe Railway and a home for its workers. Janice Griffith, director of the downtown Old Trails Museum, says Winslow was once a city whose heart and soul ran on rails.

During World War II, 3,500 troops bound for combat in the Pacific would stop each day in Winslow to be fed. Some days, residents would watch as trains arrived from the opposite direction, draped in black bunting, laden with bodies of boys killed in battle.

“The train would have 1,400 caskets and a three-man crew,” Griffith says. “What this did was create a sense of compassion and support between townspeople and all arrivals. When you’re a travel town, you develop that kind of relationship to people coming through.”

By the 1970s, however, fewer people were coming through. The decline of railroad travel was followed by the opening of Interstate 40, which bypassed Winslow altogether. Overnight, Route 66 became a back road, Winslow a backwater. Traffic vanished, and with it went bars, cafes, gas stations -- life. The population swooned by 20%, to 8,000.

The starkest symbol of the city’s demise was La Posada, built by the Santa Fe in 1929 for $2 million, a huge sum at the start of the Depression. The hotel, which closed in 1957, still dominated the main drag, but was gutted and forlorn, a destination only for drunks from Winslow’s roadhouses, who passed out on its lawn. Although the railroad still owned La Posada, the hotel’s grounds were a jungle and its rooms used mainly for office space and storage.

Still, a few stubborn Winslow residents, led by Griffith, refused to let La Posada go. They knew that Albert Einstein, Clark Gable, Howard Hughes, Errol Flynn, Will Rogers, Harry Truman, Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart and scores of other famous figures once snoozed in the hotel’s suites. They knew that the 70-room hacienda-style building was the masterwork of Mary Colter, one of America’s most important female architects, a contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright.

They knew that someone out there must care about saving such an architectural treasure.

Colter had been the main architect for the legendary Fred Harvey Co., which built first-class railroad hotels and restaurants throughout the West along the Santa Fe’s transcontinental route. In 1928 she was tasked with designing an oasis in the wilds of northeastern Arizona where people could spend a night of luxury before heading to Los Angeles or Chicago, or visiting one of the many nearby tourist sights, like the Painted Desert or the Petrified Forest.

Rather than merely design another swank hotel, however, Colter created an 80,000-square-foot work of art, which challenged guests as much as it charmed them.

At 60 years old, Colter was at the height of her powers when she built La Posada, and the hotel was a bold declaration of her ideas. It tried to tell a story. It used simple materials that harmonized with the land. It broke with European tradition by being both roughhewn and romantic, like the American West itself.

“When she was doing this, in the early 1900s, it was new,” says Arnold Berke, author of “Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest.” “She helped pioneer this style that someone later on called ‘National Park Service rustic.’ ”

Guests at La Posada stepped directly from the train depot into the lobby, but Colter wanted them to feel as if they were visiting a wealthy family’s ancestral ranch in the Southwest of the 19th century, so she filled the hotel with common areas and cozy libraries, Spanish arches and long dark corridors. She accented the informal atmosphere with a hodgepodge of textures, from embroidered silk to rusted iron, and a dazzling array of furniture: Here a pew from an ancient Mexican church, there a 200-year-old wooden chest from a nearby farm.

The floors were equally eclectic, made of stone, tile, brick, oak, and in the hallways just outside the guest rooms a mosaic of rubbery linoleum, extra soft, to muffle the click of footsteps. Inside the guest rooms Colter covered the oak floors with Navajo rugs, which she encouraged construction crews to trample as they worked, to give them a weather-beaten look.

When guests weren’t admiring her interior designs, they could gaze through her many different-sized windows, which provided kaleidoscopic views of the trains gliding past all day. If a train wasn’t passing, guests could look out at Colter’s grounds, a stunning 20-acre Eden in the high desert, with sunken gardens, spurting fountains, redolent flower beds and a genuine Hopi cornfield.

A stone wall with gun turrets fronted one edge of the garden, stage dressing that hinted at the elaborate and historically accurate back story Colter dreamed up for her hotel: The wall was the very kind of fortification that would have been used to defend a Mexican ranch on the fringe of the frontier centuries ago.

Despite her achievement with La Posada -- and other well-known buildings, including parts of Union Station in Los Angeles, the La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe, and a hotel and other structures at the Grand Canyon -- Colter’s reputation faded soon after her death in 1958. “She just sank into obscurity,” Berke says. “Any history of American architecture did not mention her.”

La Posada, her tour de force, might have faded away too, if Griffith and others hadn’t pushed for it to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, then publicized its plight.

“We had to get the word out to the nation that we had a national historic landmark here that was in jeopardy,” Griffith says. “To do that we had to avail ourselves of journalists and travel writers across the country. We had to get them to come here and see what we had. So we offered them every ounce of hospitality we could. Potlucks. Wine tours. Free lodging.”

One of the articles resulting from this makeshift media blitz caught the eye of Allan Affeldt. A resident of Irvine -- where he attended college and studied for his doctorate in cognitive science -- Affeldt earned worldwide attention in the 1980s by helping organize the Great Peace March across the U.S., a massive trek of citizens protesting the nuclear arms race. The march was followed soon after by an even more ambitious walk across the Soviet Union.

By the 1990s, however, Affeldt felt burned out. He grew tired of the peace movement’s infighting, he says, and disillusioned by the nation’s shift to the right. “Looking for something to do,” he read about La Posada in 1994, and drove here from Irvine to see it. “I didn’t really plan to buy it,” says Affeldt, 43. “I didn’t drive into Winslow thinking, ‘Oh well, I’ll move here!’ ”

But La Posada seized his imagination. He fell in love with the hotel’s history and potential, and believed that such a jewel, properly restored, could generate enormous publicity, attract capital investment, renew civic pride, and ultimately lead a citywide renaissance. Having failed to save the world, he admits, he saw in La Posada a chance to save one dying city. “Though I would never put it that way,” he says with a sly smile.

There was one hitch. La Posada wasn’t for sale. “The railroad prefers to tear these buildings down,” Affeldt says. “If they sell them, they have to clean them up, and this building was full of oil, asbestos, lead paint.”

Affeldt persuaded Winslow to let him represent the city in negotiations with the railroad, then persuaded the railroad not to knock La Posada down. For three years he ran a gantlet of railroad executives and local politicians, until finally, in January 1997, he and his business partner acquired La Posada for $158,000, much of which he borrowed from a friend.

Soon after, with his wife, Tina Mion, an artist, Affeldt launched the renovation. But he wanted to do more than renovate; he wanted to resurrect. And this meant hunting up Colter’s original blueprints, which everyone assumed were lost. “We found them on microfilm in the railroad’s engineering archives in Topeka,” he says. “They didn’t even know they had them.”

Some of Affeldt’s most eye-opening “research” entailed simply peeling away the layers of plastic and vinyl and particleboard the railroad had nailed over Colter’s turquoise and gold surfaces.

While saving what could be saved, Affeldt also went like a bloodhound after what was missing. Enormous wooden benches from the lobby, for instance, had been spirited away to the train station in Flagstaff. Affeldt asked Winslow’s mayor and several Winslow High School football players to go “reclaim” them.

Nine months into the renovation, Affeldt checked in the hotel’s first guest in 40 years. Also in 1997, Affeldt and Mion moved into the hotel, making it their home. “We really live in this 80,000-square-foot Spanish hacienda,” Affeldt says. “It’s kind of a fantasy world.”

Affeldt’s business partner, Dan Lutzick, lives just down the block, in Winslow’s abandoned department store, which he bought and turned into a 24,000-square-foot loft for himself and his dog. He plans to convert part of the space into another Winslow art gallery.

For $40,000 Affeldt also recently bought Winslow’s movie theater, which had been dark for years. The only movie theater in all of northeastern Arizona, it now shows new releases and last year was the setting for the first Winslow Film Festival, which Affeldt launched with the help of a film director from Los Angeles. The second annual festival is scheduled for this October.

Such real estate bargains are now hard to come by in Winslow. “I don’t think there’s a single building for sale in the downtown historic district,” Affeldt says, strolling past Standin’ on a Corner Park. Built by Griffith, the museum director, and other residents a few years ago, the park commemorates the Eagles hit song “Take It Easy,” which celebrated Winslow. (“Standin’ on a corner/In Winslow, Arizona/Such a fine sight to see ... “)

“Success begat success,” Winslow Mayor Jim Boles says of La Posada. The population is on the rise again, he says, and “traffic in town has increased tenfold.”

Unlike the old days, however, people don’t always speed through Winslow on their way somewhere else. “I think people drive through town,” Boles says with some wonderment, “just because they like it.”

More than half of La Posada’s 70 rooms have been completed, the $12-million restoration project funded with a mix of preservation grants and hotel revenue. Rooms range from $79 to $99, and though much remains to be done, especially in the gardens, the hotel maintains an 80% occupancy rate, drawing guests from around the world.

Europeans come in great numbers, Affeldt says, lured by the genius of Colter, the legend of Route 66, the music of the Eagles -- and particularly the romance of the railroad. Some 90 trains still go by La Posada each day, and Amtrak’s Southwest Chief still stops daily at the hotel depot.

Not every guest, however, feels at home.

“This building has a way of weeding out certain people,” says Katy Reeder, a clerk at the front desk. “They stay two minutes and come down to the front desk and say, ‘I can’t stay here. Too spooky. Too eerie.’ ”

It’s almost as though Colter finds certain people unworthy, Reeder says, and scares them off.

Which means Winslow may still be a ghost town after all.

Except that now, the ghosts have some civic pride.