Mary Colter, architect and decorator. . - Books About Antiques - Mary Colter, Architect of the Southwest - book review

Magazine Antiques, April, 2002 by Alfred Mayor

The American West was mythologized almost as soon as it was settled. Its exoticism was carefully tended by, among others, the Fred Harvey Company in conjunction with the Santa Fe Railway. The Santa Fe brought the people and Fred Harvey made them comfortable in hotels and restaurants along the rail line. They were served at table by a disciplined army of Harvey Girls and shown the sights in Harveycars.

Fred Harvey was an English immigrant who batted around the United States in a random fashion until in 1876 he sold the Atchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad on the idea of opening clean and wholesome restaurants at their rail depots. In 1889 he secured the right to operate all the restaurants on the Santa Fe line west of the Missouri River and in 1893 he won the dining car concession. Then came the hotels.

Mary Colter was the daughter of Irish immigrants who bad wandered the United States like shifting sands until settling in Saint Paul, Minnesota. There she narrowed her many interests to concentrate on art, architecture, and design--first as a student and then as a teacher. How she came into contact with Harvey is not known, but it seems likely that her growing reputation in Saint Paul attracted the attention of Minnie Harvey Huckel, Fred Harvey's daughter, who hired her in 1902 as the decorator of the Indian Building which was part of the Alvarado Hotel next to the Santa Fe station in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The Indian Building, in turn, was another profitable branch of Fred Harvey's enterprise. It was the work of yet another immigrant, Herman Schweizer, who came to New York from his native Germany in 1885. He began to buy Indian crafts, which he sold to passengers along the Santa Fe line. Harvey hired him to setup an Indian department, selling its wares through Indian buildings at the rail depots. Schweizer's interest in Indian things paralleled Colter's, and the two became fast friends and collaborators.

The first complete building Colter designed for Harvey was Hopi House (1905), across from Harvey's El Tovar Hotel on the lip of the Grand Canyon. It was an entirely convincing evocation of the Hopi Indian dwellings Colter had visited in Oraibi in northeastern Arizona. Because she was as interested in materials as design for all her projects, she specified Kaibab limestone for the building, Coconino sandstone to face it, and local logs peeled of their bark for floor and roof, "although she relied on sections of Santa Fe rails to span some of the wider openings." The stone was laid up with mud mortar, and chimneys were made from stacks of ceramic water jars with their bottoms knocked out. Cement floors were treated to resemble mud, and irregular plaster walls were made to look like adobe. The Hopi builders of Hopi House lived in it as they worked, and when it was finished they continued to live there and demonstrate their crafts for visitors.

To consolidate its domination of tourism in and around the Grand Canyon, the Harvey-Santa Fe partnership added more buildings. Between 1910 and 1912 the railroad built a scenic eight-mile-long road along the canyon rim westward from El Tovar along which tourists could travel in Harveys horse-drawn carriages and later in Harveycars. However, the tourists needed a destination, and Colter, now a full-time employee of Harvey was told to make one. She took her inspiration from Louis D. Boucher, a Canadian, who about 1890 established a camp for tourists intent on riding on horseback into the main canyon. Boucher was considered a hermit, which was Colter's starting point for the building she created: Hermit's Rest. As one commentator wrote: "Like her other designs, Hermit's Rest housed a vague dream world, a material point of departure for visions of rustic frontier life and nature as a sanctuary from civilization."

Approaching travelers passed under an arch of apparently randomly stacked boulders and followed a gravel path first up, then down, to what appeared to be a rock pile. "Overall, Hermit's Rest seems like it simply happened, accreting randomly through the years. Of course, none of it did; the apparent lack of contrivance masks Goiter's exacting artifice." The building was nestled into a small hillside, and its roof was originally covered with earth and planted as an extension of the landscape. Colter's style of building came to be known as "National Park Service rustic" and was practiced until the early 1940s.

Colter was responsible for designing the interior of La Fonda, the Harvey hotel in Santa Fe, which was the enlargement of an existing hotel in the Santa Fe style, inside and out. From its reopening in 1929 it attracted not only visitors, but the haute monde of Santa Fe as well. Among the more improbable visitors was the French writer Simone de Beauvoir, who even more improbably commented that the hotel "resembles an African village with its earthen walls and crenellations." Nonetheless, she thought it "the most beautiful hotel in America, perhaps the most beautiful I've ever seen in my life." Even before the new interior was completed Goiter was at work on plans for La Posada, another Harvey hotel to be built at the Santa Fe depo in Winslow, Arizona. Her springboard this time was the imagined seat of a rich Spanish colonial family of the late eighteenth century enlarged over the generations. She filled La Posada with furniture of apparently great age, which, in fact was created m a workshop in the depot wher e a crew of workers copied antique originals and distressed them "to project an illusion of antiquity." However, as a lifelong student of history architecture, and interiors, the illusions Colter summoned up were based on her large and much used library.