Hotel · Flagstaff, Arizona · Built 1898; hotel addition 1899–1900
Weatherford Hotel
A three-story red sandstone hotel on Leroux Street in downtown Flagstaff, begun in 1898 as John W. Weatherford's store and home and enlarged into the town's leading hotel, opened on New Year's Day 1900.
History
A run of fires in 1897 led Flagstaff to require brick, stone or iron for new buildings downtown, and the next year brought a small building boom. John W. Weatherford, a Texan who had driven cattle in New Mexico, supplied mining camps around Tombstone and in Mexico, and settled in Flagstaff as a merchant in 1886, began his building on April 16, 1898. Herman Deitzman laid the local red sandstone. The two-story block held a general store below and the family's rooms above. In March 1899 Weatherford started a three-story addition costing $10,000, and the hotel had its grand opening on January 1, 1900. For about three decades it was the city's leading hotel; Thomas Moran and William Randolph Hearst stayed, and Zane Grey, who sometimes took rooms here, described it in The Call of the Canyon.
Remodelings in 1907 and 1920 brought the hotel to some fifty rooms with steam heat and running water. Then a family quarrel undid it. After Weatherford renewed the lease of the popular manager Lulu Hall, his wife, who wanted the hotel for their son Hugh, challenged it in court; she won before a jury, Hall won on appeal in 1927, and the townspeople took sides. Clubs moved elsewhere, the couple separated, the building was mortgaged, and a fire in 1929 cost it the balcony and cupola. The lender took it in 1933, and as highway motels drew trade away it passed through several owners, serving at times as a wartime dormitory and housing a radio station in the basement. The Taylor family, Holbrook hotel people, bought it in 1975 and began a long restoration, reopening the third-floor ballroom in 1997 and rebuilding the porches from 1999.
“The Weatherford, for three decades the leading hotel in the city, exemplifies the rise and decline of old downtown Flagstaff.”
Architecture
The hotel is brick faced with coursed, rough-faced red sandstone above a lighter stone foundation, on a lot falling so steeply that the basement stands nine feet clear at the rear. The original block measured 30 by 100 feet; the 1899 addition widened it to 50 feet. Third-floor windows have stone labels on one front and round arches with radiating voussoirs on the other, and pilasters divide the openings of the old building. At the east corner a third-floor oriel has round colored windows above one-over-one sash, with fish-scale shingles between, and once carried a steep conical cupola. The three-sided balcony with turned posts and spindlework, the cornice and the date and name pediments were removed after the 1929 fire.
What to look for
- Coursed red sandstone walls
- Corner oriel with round colored windows and fish-scale shingles
- Arched third-floor windows with radiating voussoirs
- Rebuilt wraparound balcony on Leroux Street
- The small 1900s telephone building beside the hotel
Setting
The hotel stands at Leroux and Aspen streets in Flagstaff's downtown historic district, a block north of the Santa Fe tracks and old Route 66. The 1888 Bank Hotel stands in the same block, and the San Francisco Peaks, where Weatherford built the first road toward the summit, rise to the north of town.
Timeline
- 1898John W. Weatherford begins his store building on April 16
- 1900Three-story hotel addition opens on January 1
- 1920Remodeling adds 17 rooms
- 1927Arizona Supreme Court rules in the Hall lease dispute
- 1929Fire leads to removal of the balcony and cupola
- 1975Bought by the Taylor family
- 1997Third-floor ballroom reopened
Where sources differ
- Wikipedia says Zane Grey wrote The Call of the Canyon in the third-floor ballroom; the nomination says only that he sometimes stayed and described the hotel in that novel.
- The neighboring telephone building is dated about 1912 in the nomination and about 1909–10 in Wikipedia.
- The nomination names no architect or style; the Queen Anne classification here rests on the oriel, fish-scale shingles, cupola and spindlework balcony it describes.
