Hotel · Marfa, Texas · Built 1928–1930
Hotel Paisano
Listed on the National Register as El Paisano Hotel
A white stucco Spanish Revival hotel of 1928–30 by Henry Trost in Marfa, built for an oil boom that never came, and the 1955 headquarters of the cast and crew filming Giant.
History
In the late 1920s Marfa, a ranching town on the high plains of the Trans-Pecos, expected an oil boom. Charles N. Bassett of El Paso backed a modern hotel a block from the Presidio County Courthouse, and El Paso's leading architects, Trost & Trost, designed it. Work began in June 1928 under the contractor R.E. McKee, and the hotel was dedicated in June 1930. The oil never came, but the hotel found steady trade: ranchers who came to town to buy and sell cattle, and visitors drawn to West Texas for the dry desert air. Henry C. Trost, born in Toledo in 1860, had absorbed the Chicago and Prairie School ideas of Adler and Sullivan's circle and blended them with Spanish and Pueblo forms across the Southwest; the nomination counts El Paisano among his better works.
In the summer of 1955 George Stevens and Warner Bros. came to Presidio County to film Edna Ferber's Giant, and the hotel served as headquarters for some six weeks while more than 300 cast and crew members, among them James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Sal Mineo, Chill Wills and Jane Withers, stayed there. A swimming pool was added in the 1950s. Gary and Carolyn Rogers of Houston bought the hotel in 1970 and lived in it with their children; later in the decade a new owner tried to turn its rooms into timeshare condominiums, a venture that ended in a tax foreclosure. Joe and Lanna Duncan bought it at auction in 2001 and reopened it after three years of renovation.
“The El Paisano Hotel has long played a significant role in the historic fabric of the City of Marfa, Texas.”
Architecture
The two-story hotel is built of reinforced concrete finished in white stucco, on a U-shaped plan open to the south. A one-story screen of five arches joins the ends of the U, enclosing a fifty-foot-square courtyard with a fountain, off which the main entrance opens under a projecting two-story bay. A low parapet edged with two courses of half-round orange tile suggests a tiled roof over what is in fact a flat one. On the Highland Street front, an ornate two-story Spanish Baroque frontispiece of cast concrete rises above the parapet, and a pedimented window with a false iron balcony and ball finials marks the southeast corner. Shop bays line the ground floor outside, and the lobby, lounge, dining room and ballroom open onto the courtyard.
What to look for
- Spanish Baroque cast-concrete frontispiece on Highland Avenue
- Five-arch screen enclosing the courtyard
- Courtyard fountain
- Half-round tile edging along the parapet
- Presidio County Courthouse a block away
Setting
The hotel occupies the northwest corner of North Highland Avenue and West Texas Street in downtown Marfa, one block from the domed 1886 Presidio County Courthouse. Marfa sits at about 4,700 feet on the open grasslands of the Trans-Pecos, with the Davis Mountains to the north and the Chihuahuan Desert stretching toward the Mexican border.
Timeline
- 1928Construction begins in June
- 1930Hotel dedicated in June
- 1955Headquarters for the filming of Giant
- 1950sSwimming pool added
- 1978Listed on the National Register
- 2001Bought at auction and renovated
Where sources differ
- The nomination says the hotel had 72 rooms; Wikipedia gives 65.
