Lobby of the Hotel Pattee
A story on MSNBC.com this morning about the world’s quirkiest hotels caught my eye. My husband and I travel a lot and have stayed in some pretty interesting places. One particular hotel comes to mind and it’s smack dab in the middle of Iowa. The Hotel Pattee, located in Perry, Iowa, a small agricultural and railroad town 35 miles northwest of Des Moines, was originally built in 1913. This grand hotel was the center of the town’s activity, the place where the milestones of Pattee’s resident’s lives were celebrated. By 1993 the hotel was in a state of disrepair and was purchased by Howard and Roberta Ahmanson. Roberta Green Ahmanson, a Perry native, had a real vision of what the hotel might become again. It reopened in 1997 with forty newly appointed rooms reflecting the history, culture and the people of the community. Phil and I stayed in the Alton School Room which is decorated with vintage school furniture and artifacts, quilts, and photos of the original building. My favorite aspect of our visit was the ability to peek into unoccupied rooms. Every day a list of rooms to view is posted on the lobby desk. Check the out the rooms and see which one you’d like to reserve for your visit to his historic and artfully decorated hotel.
Of course with me every story leads back to postcards. There are some quirky and wonderful hotel postcards right here in the Curt Teich Postcard Archives and I will readily admit that they are some of my favorites. Who wouldn’t love to sleep in the belly of an elephant? Lucy the Margate Elephant was built in South Atlantic City known as Margate by James Lafferty in 1881, though moved to her present location in an effort to preserve the landmark. There is some speculation that this particular example of zoomorphic architecture built by Lafferty was not used as a hotel and that it was the Elephantine Colossus at Coney Island that actually hosted overnight guests. You can get the idea, though, looking at the postcards of Lucy as to how much fun it would be to spend the night in her tummy. Today Lucy is on the National Register of Historic Places and is a beloved tourist attraction.
Have you slept in a wigwam lately? That’s the motto of the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, Arizona, a prime example of pop or programmatic architecture. The individual wigwams that comprise the property are self-contained sleeping units made to look like the teepees of the Plains Indians. The cozy units, complete with their own bathrooms, are laid out to resemble an Indian Village. Today the totally updated Wigwam Motel is still owned and operated by the family of Charles E. Lewis, the man who originally built the motel as the Wigwam Village in 1950. I can attest that this is a great place to visit. A colleague of mine stayed there on a cross-county trip with her family a number of years ago and she said it was a blast. One of these days I’m going to see for myself.
In the early 1990s my Archives colleagues and I ventured on a whirlwind road trip to Washington D.C. to receive a prestigious award for the Curt Teich Postcard Archives. On our way home we made a quick side trip off the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the Lincoln Highway to find a hotel we had all fallen in love with via postcards from the collection. The S. S. Grand View Point Ship Hotel must have been a site to see in its heyday, perched on the side of a mountain overlooking “three states and seven counties.” Check out the story of the Ship Hotel and view some vintage interior postcards on these tribute webpages hosted by Doug Pappas. I can just imagine the place on a moonlit night in the summertime, the deck filled with people enjoying the cool mountain breezes blowing across the valley as music played in the background. When the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened in October of 1940 the twisty, mountainous stretch of the Lincoln Highway that passed by the pleasure ship became a road less traveled. By the time our little band of historians saw what was once a grand structure, it had fallen into ruin. We peeked in the windows and walked around the property but there was nothing lustrous about the Grand View any longer except for the still spectacular view of the Allegheny Mountains . We were truly saddened when we heard that the S. S. Grand View Ship Hotel had burned to the ground in October, 2001, though for us she still lives on in her original splendor through the postcards here at the Teich Archives.
So many of these quirky and wonderful hotels and motels built in the twentieth century are long gone, demolished and totally removed from our landscape, and now only a memory. Fortunately many of them still live on as the subjects of the vintage postcards stored here. The Curt Teich Postcard Archives preserves these images and makes them available to the public so we can all remember what it was like, “in the old days.”
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