Maya Landmark on Route 66 Became Haunt of Actors, Ghosts

During Prohibition, tourists came here to get their kicks on the brand-new Route 66. In the Great Depression, it was a landmark for those seeking the promise of California. In the 1960s and ‘70s, flower children and druggies flocked here, looking for harmony. Today, the landmark Aztec Hotel is being spruced up and restored to the landmark it once was.

Along Monrovia’s stretch of the famed Route 66 is the town’s most eccentric architectural gem: a development that, in classic Southern California style, has a past both lush and louche.

Nearly eight decades ago, a British architect who was also an amateur archeologist, explorer and author with a flair for the flamboyant brought his fanciful imagination to Monrovia. Robert Stacy-Judd rendered his idea of pre-Columbian style in concrete at the corner of Foothill Boulevard and Magnolia Avenue.

Amid the Queen Anne, Victorian and Craftsman-style houses of a town now known for its preservationist standards, the Aztec Hotel and its adjacent Brass Elephant restaurant are relics of the brief 1920s fad that took the Spanish Revival style one step beyond, to fanciful Maya revival designs.

When Stacy-Judd came to America, after designing Egyptian-style theaters and hotels in England and Canada, his acquaintance with the Maya was probably through National Geographic magazine. Although he took up Maya style, he insisted on calling it “Aztec”--the name he put on the hotel.

He went on to raise a Maya-style Masonic Temple in North Hollywood, a Baptist church in Ventura and other surviving Maya-esque buildings. He was such a relentless self-promoter that he wore Maya garb to cocktail parties, an ensemble complete to the head feathers.

The Depression put a crimp in some designs that were never built--such as a kitschy Maya hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, a monolithic 13-story Maya department store and a Maya mega-auditorium with 23,000 seats.

Stacy-Judd finally saw the Central American monuments he admired when he traveled south during the Depression. He later wrote volumes on the civilization of the Maya and, more fancifully, about the “lost continent” of Atlantis.

Before his death at 90 in 1975, Stacy-Judd designed hundreds of homes, buildings and stage sets for films and helped with the design of Howard Hughes’ famed wooden airplane, the “Spruce Goose.”

Today, his Aztec Hotel stands as a monumental slice of Southern California architectural history, a testament to the maverick ambition of a free-spirited designer and a staid community that nonetheless allowed it to be built.

In 1924, Monrovia decided it needed to build a hotel that would command attention, and the Chamber of Commerce raised the money by selling stock in it, even though it had not yet been built. With part of that $138,000, the chamber commissioned Stacy-Judd. Members took one look at the proposal for his pre-Columbian cliff dwelling in Monrovia’s Gold Hills, according to local historian Steve Baker, and rejected it as too grandiose and expensive.

They settled on a scaled-down version on the future Route 66. Stacy-Judd’s hotel of Maya motifs with touches of Art Deco had 36 rooms, eight apartments and seven ground-level retail stores. It cost $250,000.

The interior was seductively adorned with murals of Maya culture, including the sun god who must be regularly placated with the blood of human sacrifice and the god of lust. Barker Brothers custom-designed the furniture, a few pieces of which survive.

In 1925, in the midst of Prohibition and one year before Foothill Boulevard was officially designated U.S. 66, the two-story Aztec Hotel opened. It had a mortgage, dinner dancing, and a speak-easy in the basement. It attracted instant and national fame.

“I cannot begin to describe it to you,” a newspaper columnist wrote.

Stacy-Judd’s signature triangular forms grace the outside and doorways. They also appear, right-side up or inverted, throughout the interior, the thumbprints of a man who saw himself as a visionary.

First it was the tourists who sent home penny postcards about the crazy architecture. Then came the wheeled nobility of Hollywood, such as Tom Mix. Into the early 1930s, the likes of Clark Gable made it a Hollywood watering hole en route to Palm Springs. Santa Anita’s racing crowd, including Bing Crosby, took a liking to its picturesque setting.

But later the high-class drinkers and diners went elsewhere, and the hotel became a boardinghouse, then a flophouse and a hangout for hookers. By the early 1980s, after ambitious redevelopment improved Monrovia’s downtown, new owners reclaimed the expensive real estate and kicked out the drug crowd that had hung out at the hotel. After some remodeling, the restaurant and bar reopened as the Brass Elephant in 1983.

Now the Aztec is owned by Kathie Reece, a singer and public relations representative for a Cadillac dealer, who is trying to breathe new life and style back into the Maya-Deco beauty, still scarred by the indignities of long-ago boarders.

For architectural historians, the Aztec is a gem, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But its other fans include psychics and mediums, who are enthralled by a hotel where some guests may never have checked out.

Psychics and employees swear that former guests haunt the place. At least a dozen spirits--the math depends on the psychic--supposedly call the hotel home.

The most dominant spirit is said to be a 24-year-old hooker from Kansas who calls herself Razzle Dazzle, according to Shirley Ortega, a medium from Azusa who says she channels spirits. Ortega believes the dark-haired woman, who, she says, sports a 1920s finger-wave hairstyle and a long cigarette holder, was killed by one of her customers.

“Not long after this woman and her customer went inside Room 120 for a quickie,” Ortega says, “they began to argue over the price.”

Ortega describes the man pushing the young woman against the wall, where, Ortega says, she fell and hit her head on radiator pipes. He waited for her to die, then left.

Ortega says she can see customers in evening clothes and hear their laughter in a room where a black man plays the piano under a cloud of cigar smoke. Another spirit, the hotel’s Jazz Age bookkeeper, latched onto Ortega, guiding her to a room where a lot of money was once laundered, the medium says.

Other psychics also say the hotel is paranormally active. Michael J. Kouri, a Pasadena psychic who has written “Haunted Houses Within the Azusa Township,” says he came across the spirit of a middle-aged Italian immigrant and father of six from the Depression era, visiting from Chicago.

“He was dressed in a gray suit and hat and his body was slumped against the wall, with blood dripping down his face, holding a pistol in his hand.”

The man had hoped to recoup his lost fortune, Khouri says, but failed and committed suicide.

Others are drawn to the hotel’s visible attractions. In 1993 Robert Redford offered $1 million for one night with Demi Moore in “Indecent Proposal” in a casino set that the movie company built in the hotel.

Reece spends 16-hour days trying to right the wrongs inflicted on her historic hotel, so it can once again stand as the city’s most enduring edifice.

“I remember thinking when I was singing in a band here years ago, how sad it was that this hotel was never loved like it should be,” Reece said.