Can a New Mexico city save its old hotel?

Story and photos by David Pike / July 26, 2002

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Wires crisscross the 70-year-old Hotel Clovis

Everything about the Hotel Clovis was grand, even its nickname: Skyscraper of the Plains. Soaring nine stories over the southeastern New Mexico city of Clovis, the hotel was once the tallest building between Albuquerque and Dallas.

Snubbing the Depression, the hotel operators opened the Clovis' elegant doors on October 20, 1931. Architect Robert Merrill combined art-deco exterior ornamentation with southwestern Indian motifs and tilework inside. Each of the 114 rooms had a modern bathroom with hot and cold running water, a telephone, and an overstuffed Murphy bed. The elevator was the first in southeastern New Mexico; the lower floor housed KICA, the first radio station in town; and the post-Prohibition ballroom welcomed Louis Armstrong, Glen Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Hank Williams.

The opulent hotel inspired its share of lore, like the story about movie star Ronald Reagan, who waited in the lobby for a train instead of at the nearby depot. Or the one about a local cowboy named Jeff Goode, who one night rode his horse through the lobby, into the ballroom, then dismounted and punched a man waltzing with his wife.

"I ruined two knees dancing in that place," recalls Clovis City Commissioner Gloria Wicker. One recent afternoon, Wicker spent a few hours reviewing the hotel's old documents: the original blueprints, drafted on linen, not paper; a newspaper story announcing the opening of the hotel, next to the headline "Capone Seeks New Hearing"; and a ledger entry for July 3, 1982, documenting a one-night take of $2,967.81.

The hotel, closed for 20 years.

Not long after that entry, the Santa Fe Railroad discontinued passenger trains to Clovis, and the hotel closed its doors. Neglect, dusty grassland winds, and vandals have since contributed to the demise of the roomy old hotel. Now it sits idle, abandoned, a monument to faded superlatives. "It's a tragedy that the hotel has been allowed to fall into the disrepair it has," Wicker says. "I want it back."

The Hotel Clovis once brought life to the town, and now Clovis, pop. 32,700, hopes to return the favor. In May 2000, the city launched a community-development effort to revitalize downtown, an undertaking that includes the hotel. Ideas abound: office space for the state government, a children's museum, a retirement home, low-income housing, or a very large bed-and-breakfast.

The private Hispano Business Council, which has owned the property since 1995 but can't afford to renovate it, wants to sell it to a local developer who's offering $250,000, according to a city official. The council expects to receive a written offer this month from Don Trull, who wants to renovate the hotel for office space and a gospel radio station. "We hate to sell it," says council chairman Sammy Cordova, "but we just hope that the building is used."

City officials say if no private investors acquire the hotel, they'll probably make an offer. "We're just waiting to see what will happen [with Trull]," says Claire Burroughes, assistant city clerk.

In the meantime, the city installed metal barriers over the windows in June to prevent further vandalism. "Every time I've been to the hotel," says Wicker, "I see something else that has been destroyed—a door, a window, something."

A new owner will face the daunting task of bringing the building up to fire and safety codes, which involves asbestos removal. Padlocks strangle the lobby door, and broken windows give the building a fractured appearance. Inside, spray-painted gang symbols and graffiti expletives form a coarse run-on sentence across the lobby walls. The rusted-metal floor indicator above one of the two Otis elevators has stalled between the first and second floors. Empty rooms, once the province of traveling salesmen, livestock buyers, vacationing families, and railroad workers, now offer comfort to pigeons and the occasional trespasser. The only sounds are the fluttering of wings from the upper floors and the dull hum of traffic from the street. In one room, vandals have smashed a porcelain toilet and sink into book-sized chunks.

From the roof, though, the view of Clovis illustrates its history. Just across the street to the west is the Norm Petty Studio, where Buddy Holly and the Crickets recorded hits like "Peggy Sue" and "That'll Be the Day." To the south is the train station, once the lifeblood of the city, and to the north is the courthouse and a large carved stone tablet in the courtyard listing the Ten Commandments.

One of the roof's seven Indian-head busts

Clovis officials hope vandals will follow the eighth holy directive and not make off with what may be the most prized parts of the hotel: seven resplendent stone Indian busts atop pedestals along the roof. One has already been defaced; vandals have spray-painted its features black.

"It's an awesome project," Burroughes says of the financial and political effort that will be involved in bringing the hotel back to life. "We're just going to take it one step at a time. That's how you get through it."

At least one member of the City Commission anticipates a successful outcome. "When I get sick and tired of keeping up my home," says Wicker, "I'm going to move into the Hotel Clovis."

David Pike's book about traveling in New Mexico will be published this fall.

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