Page 15 - 2019 Las Vegas & San Miguel Co. Visitors Guide

The railroad then started building a new health resort for Fred to run, the Montezuma, just outside of town at the Hot Springs, while at the same time expanding across New Mexico from its Las Vegas hub, with new stations—and Harvey restaurants— in Deming, Lamy, Raton, Rincon, San Marcial, Vaughn and Albuquerque. And the Optic covered Harvey’s rise in glorious detail—including every time he became angry at his staff for performing below perfection (describing him firing his Dem- ing manager by heaving him out the front door with “the dining room equipment” following him “in quick order”) or was laid low by the stress of commuting between his home in Kansas and Las Vegas.
The Montezuma’s grand opening was in spring of 1882. The resort opened to wonderful reviews in American and British papers, but unfortunately was a flop as a business, and within a year Fred was pulling out of it to focus on the trackside restau- rants in town and across the state. This is when the “Harvey Girls” were born. Originally, restau- rants in NM had male African-American servers, who often found themselves unwittingly in racial incidents. After yet another one in nearby Raton, Harvey was persuaded to change his wait staff to all single women hired in the Midwest (which led, over the next decades, to over 100,000 single women getting the chance to work and travel.)
The Montezuma burned to the ground in early 1884, was rebuilt and burned down again in 1885, and then run with modest success by the railroad. But the Harvey company boldly expanded with the Santa Fe all over Arizona and California— and Albuquerque grew into its major hub in New Mexico.
The coming of the Castañeda, which was built in 1898, represented the railroad reinvesting in Las Vegas. The hotel enjoyed heydays all through the early 1900s, when legendary chef Dan Tachet created his signature dish, Chicken Castañeda and introduced travelers to the tastes of the Southwest.
Early motion picture stars stopped there on the way to Hollywood starting in 1910 (Tom Mix and director Romaine Fielding even made some mov- ies in Las Vegas). In the mid-1920s, Fred Harvey created its Southwest Detours—very popular train and car trips all over New Mexico and Arizona, to Native-American reservations and sites of great history or natural beauty. And the Castañeda be- came the gateway for travelers from the east head- ed to the Grand Canyon, where Fred Harvey also ran the hotels at the South Rim. Business was hurt by the Depression, then reinvigorated by the Sec- ond World War when Harvey hotels fed western train-traveling soldiers. But the hotel was closed by the railroad in 1948, not long after Harry Tru- man made a campaign stop there.
The Castañeda then sat largely unused for nearly 70 years. In fact, the railroad originally sold it for salvage, and it was only kept from the wrecking ball when a local railroader bought it to convert part of it into apartments. While many of the famous Harvey trackside hotels closed at that same time—ironically, just after the 1946 release of the Oscar-winning film about them, “The Har- vey Girls,” starring Judy Garland—Las Vegas had the distinction of being home to two of the old- est, most architecturally and culturally significant, and most endangered of the grand old buildings.
The Montezuma had been barely utilized since the early 1900s (when Teddy Roosevelt was Pres- ident, the railroad tried to convince the govern- ment to take it for free as a military health retreat; they wouldn’t.) Then in 2001, the Montezuma was saved and gorgeously restored as the cornerstone of the U.S. campus of United World College.
That made the situation with the Castañeda even more painful. It was just sitting there, sad and lonely, next to the railroad tracks, a hulking structure with broken out windows, a leaky roof, and a bar that was open only when the quirky longtime owner felt like it.
That’s what the hotel looked like when my wife, Diane, and I first came to visit Las Vegas in 2005, as I started researching a biography of Fred Har- vey and his multigenerational family business. Wherever we went in town, we were told that Las Vegans were livid over the condition of the old building, and that its owner—who still lived there and sometimes rented out other rooms as apart- ments—was asking so much for it that it would never be sold and saved.
When the book, Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West — One Meal at a Time was finished, I came to Las Vegas on tour. The very first question I was asked concerned the Castañeda. Did I know anything new about its possible restoration? Was there any- thing I could do to convince the owner to sell it? And was there anything I could do to convince that couple in Winslow Arizona who had per-
formed a miracle restoration of the Harvey hotel there to come do the same in San Miguel County?
It turned out I did know that couple, Allan Af- feldt and Tina Mion, but not well. My wife and I had stayed in their magical hotel in Winslow, one of the greatest achievements of Fred Harvey design guru Mary Colter. After my book came out in 2010, we got to know the couple better, along with what turned out to be a surprising number of people fas- cinated with Fred Harvey-related history and SW travel.
There were, at that time, Arizona Harvey enthu- siasts—who stayed at La Posada (which had a four- star restaurant, the Turquoise Room, and its own Harvey Girl re-enactors) and the Harvey hotels at Grand Canyon South Rim, and researched at the
A cover of the 1909 Santa Fe Railway pamphlet describing Fred Harvey hotels, dining rooms, and sample menus
Heard Museum in Phoenix, which held the com- pany’s amazing Native American art collection and business records, and NAU Cline Library Special Collections. And then there were New Mexico Har- vey enthusiasts, most congregating around La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe (where concierge Steve Wimmer dispensed Harvey history gossip) and the restored Belen train station. Albuquerque was still mourning the destruction, in 1970, of its grand Harvey hotel, the Alvarado, and the train station right next to it. They were separated, in the day, by the Harvey “In- dian Room” where its native art collection was dis- played and sold, and where Colter got her start.
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