Page 63 - 2019 Las Vegas & San Miguel Co. Visitors Guide

Benigno Romero. From Helen Haines, History of New Mex- ico: From the Spanish Conquest to the Present Time (New York: New Mexico Historical Publishing Co., 1891), 369
designed the Palace Hotel in Santa Fè, the Wiley residence on Hillsite Park, Miguel Antonio Otero Sr.’s residence in Bernallilo, the U.S. Post Office on Bridge St. and the three other Victorian com- mercial houses built on the Plaza by the Rome- ro brothers in 1882. In the Las Vegas Gazette’s words, “Las Vegas, and the territory as well, is fortunate in having so competent and tasty an ar- chitect as Mr. Charles Wheelock.”
The hotel cost about $1,000,000 (in contem- porary currency) to build. Fourteen ornate cast-iron columns with Corinthian capitals were purchased from the T.R. Pullis and Sons compa- ny of St. Louis to bedeck the front facade. The bricks for the hotel were manufactured by Hugh Prichard, who was capable of producing 10,000 bricks a day, but had to dramatically expand his operations to keep up with the building boom in Las Vegas. With a name change, it opened as the Plaza Hotel in March 1882, being “First-Class in all its Appointments” and managed by “Mrs. S.B. Davis, Proprietress.” For years the owner of the Exchange Hotel in Santa Fè, the widowed Davis moved to Las Vegas to open up the Plaza Hotel, investing in “appointments” which would have a value of half a million dollars today.
With the development of the Harvey Houses, and other accommodations in New Town, the Old Town merchants considered the Plaza Hotel diminished in importance only a decade later. Merchant Charles Blanchard had his property ap- praised in August 1891 by other plaza merchants Marcus Brunswick and Oliver Houghton. The resultant Property Inventory included, “15 shares of Plaza Hotel, full paid $100 a share (worthless).”
To the east of the Plaza Hotel, merchant Charles Ilfeld was to build one of the first depart- ment stores of the West, called the Great Empo- rium. Ilfeld had started his career in New Mex-
ico with A. Letcher & Co., of Taos,
NM. In 1867, the company moved
their mercantile operations over the
mountains to Las Vegas with the aid
of a hundred mules, acknowledging
that the economy in Las Vegas held
greater prospects than the older
trade center of Taos. In the Empo-
rium, Ilfeld wholesaled and retailed a
wide variety of goods: “clothing, hats,
boots, shoes, men’s furnishings, Indi-
an blankets, carpets, furniture, china,
glass, silverware, woodenware, harness, sadlery, hardware, stoves, paints, oils, drugs, ranch sup- plies, agricultural implements, groceries, grain, hay, lumber, buggies and farm and spring wag- ons.” He held an exclusive in Las Vegas on the clothing patterns made by the Butterick Publish- ing Company. Upon the Emporium’s opening, the Las Vegas Gazette praised Ilfeld, “The first floor is provided with a large and commodious office, built of imitation walnut.... The office would do credit to a banking establishment. An Osgood elevator affords easy means of carrying goods from the basement to the third floor....”
The success of his department store created the problem of overcrowded goods, so Ilfeld more than doubled the size of his building, to the east, beginning in 1890. For the expansion, steel gird- ers from Chicago and red-brown sandstone quar- ried a couple miles west of the Plaza were used. The Optics of mid-December 1891 exclaimed the “Pride of Las Vegas” looked “southward upon that beautiful oval of summer verdure, the Plaza.” Il- feld’s bookkeeper Rodney Schoonmaker devised the tagline of “Wholesalers of Everything,” since it contained “liquors in the basement, coffins on the top floor and everything in between.” The Charles Ilfeld Company went on to own stores in Santa Fè, Albuquerque, Raton, and Durango, warehouses in Farmington, Gallup, Santa Rosa, Magdalena and Trinidad, and country stores in a dozen locations throughout eastern New Mexico. The Las Vegas Daily Optic announced, “’Chas. Il- feld, jobber and retailer of general merchandise,’ says the modest business card, giving but a faint idea of the largest and finest department house in all the Southwest.” The Great Emporium was incorporated into the Plaza Hotel in 2008, with its first floor recreated as a ballroom,
along with a plush lobby.
Many significant events oc-
curred at the hotel in the 20th century. For a few years starting in 1913, film director Romaine Fielding used the hotel as a head- quarters to create popular movies, such as The Golden God and The Rattlesnake. It was then known as the Hotel Romaine. In the 1960s,
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“Mama” Lucy Lopez ran a restaurant in the hotel that was very supportive of Highlands University students, essentially running an alternative cafe- teria. These were the years of the Chicano move- ment in Las Vegas, and in New Mexico. A good number of her customers turned into politicians that were to dominate the House of Representa- tives for a generation. In 1983, a group that in-
“Mama” Lucy Lopez
cluded the Slick and Lucero families, restored the decaying and poorly remodeled building back to its former elegance. The remarkable inclusion of llfeld’s Emporium into the hotel, however, put great financial pressure on the establishment. Preservationists Allan Affeldt and Tina Mion bought it in 2014, and invested a million dollars into numerous additional improvements, from finishing basement floors to rebuilding the kitch- en. Now on a sound path, the Plaza Hotel’s future ability to economically and customarily support the core of the community, as it did in its heyday, looks ever more promising.
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