Resort hotel · Tucson, Arizona · Built 1928–1931; pool rebuilt 1937
Arizona Inn
A walled garden resort of pink-stuccoed cottages and villas in central Tucson, built in 1930–31 by Isabella Greenway, later Arizona's first congresswoman, to Merritt Starkweather's designs and run by her family since.
History
Isabella Greenway, a widow who had come to Arizona from New York society and a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt since girlhood, bought fourteen acres on the south side of East Elm Street in 1927, then a dirt road at the edge of Tucson opposite the Santa Catalina Ranch where the first Fiesta de los Vaqueros rodeo had been held. In 1928 she built herself a two-story stucco house at the corner of the lot. Tucson's tourist trade was outgrowing its hotels, and Greenway, already running the Arizona Hut workshop where disabled First World War veterans made furniture, conceived a different kind of hotel offering a limited number of guests what she called privacy, quiet and sunshine.
Paying for it herself as the Depression began, she had the Tucson architect Merritt Starkweather design a main building, four garden casitas, six private guesthouses and five villas, built in 1930 and 1931 and furnished partly with Hut furniture. The dining and meeting rooms took themes from her collections, including George Catlin prints and art she brought home from Africa in 1931. The inn was an immediate success with visitors and with Tucson residents, who used it for weddings and civic gatherings. Greenway went to Congress in a 1933 special election and served until 1937. In 1937 the pool was rebuilt with tufa walls and two pool buildings added. The Rockefellers and the Roosevelts were among the guests, though the inn kept a policy of not naming them. The Greenway family kept ownership, and the inn was listed on the National Register in 1988.
“Mrs. Greenway's dominant idea was to build small houses set around a garden.”
Architecture
Starkweather and Greenway took their cue from Spanish villas she admired and from Tucson's old Mexican quarter: plain, angular stucco masses with gently sloping tile roofs, painted a deep pink with blue trim on doors, shutters and grilles. Rather than one large block, the inn is a set of small houses around lawns and courtyards, the villas stepped up the gently rising ground so they read like a hillside Spanish village. Brick-paved paths, low pink walls and tall oleander and privet hedges enclose the grounds and shut out the street. Inside, white plastered walls, corbeled arches between major rooms and beamed ceilings frame the main dining room, the Catlin, Audubon, African and Safari rooms, and a cocktail lounge Frank Lloyd Wright is said to have admired.
What to look for
- Deep pink stucco walls with blue trim
- Villas stepped like a hillside village
- Corbeled arches in the main building
- Catlin prints and African collections in the themed rooms
- Isabella Greenway's 1928 house at the northwest corner
Setting
The inn occupies its original fourteen acres on East Elm Street in a residential district north of the University of Arizona, now well inside Tucson. The Santa Catalina Mountains rise to the north. Hedges and walls keep the gardens, planted largely with native species by James Oliphant, private from the surrounding streets.
Timeline
- 1927Isabella Greenway buys fourteen acres on East Elm Street
- 1928Greenway's own house built on the site
- 1930Main building and garden casitas built; inn opens
- 1931Five villas and six private guesthouses completed
- 1933Greenway elected to Congress
- 1937Swimming pool rebuilt and pool buildings added
- 1988Listed on the National Register on April 5
Where sources differ
- Wikipedia says Greenway became Arizona's first congresswoman in 1932; she won a special election in 1933.
- Wikipedia dates the pool to 1937; the nomination's resource list includes a 1931 pool, rebuilt in 1937.
- Frank Lloyd Wright's admiration of the lounge is reported in the nomination without a source.
