Preservationists hop on board to save Harvey Houses

Story from the archives by Mary Beth Klatt / Jan. 23, 2004

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El Garces, Needles, Calif. (From the National Historic Route 66 Federation Collection, www.national66.com)

Legend has it that railroaders in the early 20th-century would clamber atop the rail cars during late afternoon stops at the El Garces Harvey House in Needles, Calif. If the men were lucky, they could spot the women who served meals at the train hotel relaxing in their nightgowns outside their dormitory.

Those women, called Harvey Girls, are long gone. While trains still stop at El Garces, a wire fence now cordons off the train depot and its four palm trees, the only greenery to flourish in recent years. The trees were shrubs when the building's lunchroom served passengers 70 years ago; now they're taller than the two-story Greek-revival structure.

In 1900, the tired and hungry railroad masses were pampered at 84 Harvey establishments. Less than a third of the original Harvey Houses survive, but preservationists are eager to save them. As part of a national trend to restore Harvey Houses, preservationists would like to reopen the lunchroom at El Garces and restore the train depot. The city of Needles has secured $5.7 million from the state's department of transportation for a partial restoration.

"Harvey Houses deserve to be saved for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the buildings are not worn out and useless," says Sacramento resident Dick Friedman, who created a Web site on the subject. "Often the railroad was the worst enemy," Friedman says. "After the Harvey House closed at any given location, the Santa Fe either moved into them for railroad purposes or abandoned them. Others were too remote for vandalism but just rotted away."

Harvey Houses were the airport hotels and restaurants of their time, serving meals to sooty passengers lugging wood trunks and hatboxes. English immigrant Fred Harvey opened a chain of restaurants, lunchrooms, and hotels in the late 1800s along the Atchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. Harvey's establishments were clustered in the Southwest, but others sprouted wherever there was a terminal, including Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Illinois, and Ohio.

Harvey came to the U.S. as a 15-year-old in 1850 and began working in the restaurant business. In 1870, he met with Charlie Morse, president of the fledgling Santa Fe Railway, to talk about a new idea to serve food and provide overnight accommodations for railroad passengers, until that time accustomed to poor food and lodging.

The first Harvey House was established in 1876 in a depot in Topeka, Kan. Within seven years, 16 more opened. When the Santa Fe decided to add dining cars in 1889, the move could have spelled disaster for Harvey's businesses, but the entrepreneur also won the contract to serve food in the dining cars.

Praised for his generous first-class meals, Harvey also was lauded for his staff, the black-and-white-uniformed Harvey Girls. At a time when the only jobs available to women were as house servants or teachers, Harvey recruited young women "of good character, attractive and intelligent," according to newspaper ads. He favored women from the East Coast whom he saw as more refined and would help civilize the men of the Wild West.

Harvey died in 1901, but his descendants took over and operated the company through the 1960s. As automobile travel began to affect the train-related businesses, the company adapted by offering tours of the Southwest's Native American villages and the Grand Canyon.

During World War II, the Fred Harvey Co. supplied meals on short notice to trains carrying troops. By the 1950s, railroads, including the Santa Fe, consolidated service, eliminated trains, and closed depots, so the Harvey Co. refocused on national parks, acting as a concessionaire to run hotels, restaurants, and stores there. In 1968, Amfac Corp., a Hawaii hotel chain, bought the Harvey Co.

Though the Harvey Co. is gone, along with many of its buildings, the second Harvey House, built in 1878 in Florence, Kan., is still standing. It's now a museum, where employees dressed in traditional Harvey Girl uniforms, complete with white aprons and caps. serve five-course meals prepared from original recipes. (A typical gut-busting breakfast during the height of the Harvey House era was steak, eggs, hash browns, wheat cakes with maple syrup, coffee, and apple pie.)

Casa del Desierto (Route 66 Mother Road Museum)

Another Harvey House, the 1911 Casa del Desierto, was restored in 1996 by its owner, the city of Barstow. It still serves as a bus and rail depot, and the Western American Rail Museum and another museum dedicated to Route 66 occupy the building.

The last Harvey Hotel to be built was La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Ariz., which opened in 1930. The building had been closed for 40 years and in 1997 was threatened with demolition when preservationist Allan Affeldt bought it. He reopened it later that year with just five rehabbed guest rooms, but it took five years and $10 million to restore the hotel to its former glory. Now Affeldt plans to restore the hotel's garden, the only one that La Posada's architect, Mary Colter, designed in her career. Affeldt has raised $500,00 of the estimated $1.5 million funds necessary to bring the grounds—including a maze, orchard, and greenhouse—to life.

La Posada "was designed as if it were a private estate that got converted into a hotel, creating an ambiance like staying in a great European estate or like the paradors (palaces) in Spain," Affeldt says. "The Depression hit in the middle of construction, and that was pretty much the end of the great era of railway hotels," he says.

Colter designed the hotel in the Spanish colonial revival style, with Native American touches. La Posada, the only project for which she was able to design everything from the furniture to the landscape, was the only Harvey House with a unique Harvey Girl costume: a colorful Mexican-style blouse and skirt.

In 2000, the Great American Station Foundation in Las Vegas, N.M., wanted to purchase another Harvey House, La Castaneda, an 1898 Mission revival hotel also in Las Vegas and a haven for Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders reunions. But owner Marie Eldh last year rejected the foundation's $700,000 offer, and there have not been other offers to date. "La Castaneda is going to fall in on itself before anyone will repair it," says Julianne Fletcher, executive director of the New Mexico Heritage Preservation Alliance, which listed the building on as one of the state's most endangered places last year. The roof needs repairs, along with the electrical and plumbing systems. Eldh couldn't be reached for comment.

The El Vaquero Harvey House in Dodge City, Kan., has had better luck. The 1885 Richardson Romanesque depot and hotel was restored to the tune of $10 million, funded mostly by the Kansas Department of Transportation, and will reopen this summer. The Boot Hill Repertory Theater will occupy most of the 45,000-square-foot facility, the rest to be used as office space.

El Vaquero was much like El Garces for a long time, boarded up for 50 years after the Santa Fe railroad relocated its offices in the late 1940s. At El Vaquero, the Harvey Girls reportedly had a pact with the railroad crew, which would blow its whistle to warn passengers to return to the train just as the passengers were sitting down to eat. The passengers, mostly men, would rush off to the trains, and the Harvey Girls would serve the same meals to the next group of train passengers.

These kinds of stories intrigue Friedman. "Someone asked me once why I was interested in saving something that pretty much disappeared by the time I was able to vote," Friedman says. "My answer was that I like good food and trains. This satisfies both, and helps me understand more about the history, geography, culture, and people of the Southwest."

This story was originally published on Preservation Online on Jan. 31, 2003.

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