Hotel La Fonda watercolor by Chandler O’Leary
I’ve always loved La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, pictured above, because of its dance floor, now much reduced in size because we dancers don’t drink and seldom eat and so we don’t contribute our dollars to the hotel. But I only recently learned the story of its architect, Mary Jane Colter, who in the early twentieth century, at a time when U.S. graduate schools of architecture didn’t accept women, designed this hotel and many others, often in collaboration with well-known male architects like John Gaw Meem.
In a post on Fred Harvey and Mary Jane Colter, travel writer and artist Chandler O’Leary describes how Colter collaborated with Fred Harvey when he constructed the first restaurant chain in the U.S. decades before McDonald’s. His hotels were strung along the old Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe rail line, long since abandoned; his hotels fed and housed tourists from the East Coast who were led on “Indian Tours” in the mammoth cars of the 1920’s, creating the craze that has only accelerated since. And Mary Jane Colter was his “right hand man.”
She based her designs on the architecture she’d seen in Native communities in the Southwest, modified with details from the Arts & Craft movement, European architecture and even North African traditions, creating the “look” that has dominated and preserved most building projects here in Santa Fe. She also hired Native artists and craftspeople to work on her buildings which no one was doing at the time. She often collaborated with Hopi painter Fred Kabotie who contributed many details at the four buildings she designed at the Grand Canyon.
She must have possessed a special gift for collaboration in addition to her own gifts as architect and designer.
Chandler O’Leary, her biographer, graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and now lives and works in Washington, D.C. She travels all over this country and has recorded details of her trips in a serious of illustrations like the one at the top of this post; she’s been traveling and drawing for more than twenty years. Her next book will be published by Sasquatch Book in March, 2023.
There’s nothing to equal to results of our ability to collaborate, and to remember and record our foremothers whom the powers that be usually neglect.
Mary Jane Colter watercolor by Chandler O’Leary
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