We are reminded just how much more pleasant the train is than driving. That’s especially true for me, since I’m always the one behind the wheel, so I see everything and nothing at the same time. Diane also likes the train for another reason. Whenever she opens the door and sticks her head out of the cabin into the corridor, everything resembles an unfolding scene from a Hitchcock movie.
As we cross through Fort Madison, Iowa, and into northern Missouri, there is still nothing of Fred Harvey for us to see. While some of these small stations once had Harvey newsstands, this section of the Santa Fe was the speedy “airway” to Kansas City. It was where Fred Harvey had its original dining cars, so it seems appropriate that we go visit the rolling Amtrak diner to see what kind of standard is being maintained.
There aren’t enough tables for couples to dine by themselves, so we are forced to buddy up with another couple—initially somewhat irksome, but they turn out to be terrific conversationalists, reminding us that before cars and planes travel was once a much more pleasantly social proposition. I recall the words of a Fred Harvey busboy from Emporia, Kansas, lamenting the rise of the automobile: “When the railroad connected towns and was the only reliable way to travel, I think people were friendlier. The country lost something when the railroad went; it seems a lot of history was left behind—the pioneer history and feeling … There was a lot of connection between people on the trains.”
But connecting with charming people doesn’t make unexceptional food delicious. The meal is a little better than the Amtrak snack-bar fare on the eastern-corridor trains, but far from noteworthy. I keep expecting the ghost of Fred to appear and yank the tablecloth—except there are no tablecloths.
Kansas City is the first major Fred outpost on the Chief. Union Station itself is majestic, its restoration in the late 1990s remarkably successful. The main Fred Harvey dining room in Kansas City, which was renamed the Westport Room in the 1940s and remained extremely popular well into the 1960s, is gone but the old ladies’ lounge has been transformed into a fine private restaurant called Pierpont’s, with good steaks and seafood. Next to it is the old Harvey lunchroom space, which has been well preserved—the ceilings and walls pretty much intact—and currently houses the “Harvey House Diner.” The old Fred Harvey offices on the second floor are now used by a law firm that has kept much of the original wood paneling. Ford Harvey’s old corner office is still there, its Indian-head mantel intact and the old National Regulator thermometer on the wall.
Fred’s hometown of Leavenworth isn’t far from Kansas City—unless you use the MapQuest directions as we did, which take you along the same old, crooked country road Fred’s horse-drawn carriage probably used in the 1860s. By highway it’s just half an hour or so away, and worth visiting because so much of Fred’s stuff is there. The Harvey mansion itself is being lovingly and meticulously restored by local folks who have been slaving away at the job for years. In the restored stables, they have started a modest museum, which includes a real Harvey Girl uniform and a small collection of artifacts. As I’ve learned over years of research (and eBay surfing), there are an enormous number of collectible items with Fred Harvey’s name on them: multiple patterns of signature dishes, silverware and stemware, books, postcards, photographs, playing cards, Indian curios, bottles, coffee cans, candy tins, liquor bottles, Harvey Girl statuettes. But so far, many private collectors have more and better stuff than this museum in progress.
Down the street, however, is the best collection in the country of Fred and Sally’s actual housewares—kept at the Leavenworth County Historical Society in the old Carroll Mansion for safekeeping until the Harvey House has been fully restored. Fred’s rolltop desk is on display, along with his shotgun and a lot of the dishes and silver from the house. Tucked away in file cabinets is an extensive collection of family photographs and many of the moving letters that Ford received from Fred during his declining years.
For Fredophiles, this is a thrilling collection—although its highlight is also its biggest tease. They have three of the Edison Cylinders Fred used to communicate with his family from England, hand labeled “Father’s Voice.” Unfortunately, two of the cylinders are cracked like Turkish Taffy, and the third one plays with so much surface noise that you can’t hear his voice. I know this because I once carried the cylinder, by hand, from Leavenworth to a highfalutin lab in New York City specializing in incredibly old-tech transfers. They couldn’t get a sound off it except crackling.
Back on the train, our Amtrak first-class porters have literally turned down our beds while we were eating, transforming our cabin into a bunk-bed cocoon for two. My wife insists she will never be able to get to sleep with all the train’s rocking and rolling, but within minutes those very movements have lulled us both into deep, rewarding slumber. We pass towns in the night that could make the unabridged, director’s-cut Fred Harvey–tour itinerary. In Topeka, there’s not much left to see of the depot, but the state historical society holds all that is left of the corporate files of the Santa Fe railroad. In Florence, part of the old Clifton Hotel building still stands, and the local historical society puts on periodic Harvey Girl reenactment dinners that are reportedly quite tasty. For this trip, however, we decide to stay on the train until morning and get out at Dodge City.
You can’t rent a car at the Dodge City station (which is true at too many western train stations, unfortunately, and makes train travel more challenging than it ought to be). So we remain in our compartment until the next stop, Garden City, where you can arrange to have a rental car waiting: It’s the same little depot where Truman Capote and Harper Lee disembarked when they visited Holcomb while researching In Cold Blood. We get a car, take the long, flat drive back to Dodge, and realize we made a mistake. Everything in the charming little town is so close to the depot we probably could have done the visit on foot.
Dodge City’s main street has been nicely preserved—a little touristy, but it has its charms. The Boot Hill Museum is a hoot. I’m not sure how authentic the cemetery is, with the toes of plaster boots sticking out of the ground, but it does cause all those old cowboy movie images to stir in our minds. Inside the museum there is some amusing vintage furniture for which a great many cows and buffalo gave their lives, and a small collection of Fred Harvey memorabilia.
But the cornerstone of the Boot Hill Museum complex is the Hardesty House, which was the actual home of Fred’s in-laws: rancher Jack Hardesty, his wife, Maggie (Sally Harvey’s sister), and their daughter. It appears as if nothing has been moved since they died in the early 1900s: It is a little eerie, actually, with the rooms sealed off behind plexiglass walls. But these are probably the last rooms left that look exactly as they did when Fred and Sally Harvey and their kids last visited.
The highlight of Dodge City, however, is the old Fred Harvey hotel, the El Vaquero, which has been brilliantly restored, albeit in a rather surprising way. It is now a dinner theater; probably America’s most historically significant dinner theater. For a town with such an outlaw reputation, Dodge City is actually quite friendly and progressive, with a robust arts community. A local theater maven was able to get $5 million from the federal government to turn most of the El Vaquero into a state-of-the-art theatrical facility, with a full digital recording studio. The Depot Theater Company also restored the original hotel lobby space to its absolute Mary Colter–ish perfection: Every piece of her original handmade furniture has been rebuilt from scratch. The juxtaposition of the old hotel lobby and depot with the new dinner theater is a little odd, but it beats the alternative: In many Fred Harvey cities, the old hotel buildings have been torn down.
We board the train the next morning for the long ride into New Mexico, but separate at the La Junta, Colorado, station because I have an opportunity I can’t pass up—an invitation to ride with the engineer. One thing about writing a book about Fred Harvey is that you meet a lot of “trainiacs”—an affectionate term for the locomotively obsessed, whether they are historians, modelers, or actual
railroad employees. One of the most helpful and generous trainiacs is Brenda Thowe, a longtime personnel executive with the Santa Fe (and now BNSF) and a Harvey Girl enthusiast. Because Brenda has pulled some strings, I climb up into the engine car in La Junta and ride with the engineer, his assistant, and a BNSF supervisor (who is there to make sure I don’t hijack the train) all the way through Colorado, up through the Raton Pass, and into New Mexico. It is a thrilling ride, with fascinating running commentary about railroad accidents and all the celebrity ranches we’re traversing: “Oh, this is Ted Turner’s land, and then down past here is Don Imus …”
There’s nothing much to see at the old Raton depot, where the Harvey Girls made their debut, but at the next stop in New Mexico, Las Vegas, there are major blasts from Fred Harvey’s past. The first is bittersweet: The Castañeda, the Santa Fe’s original Mission Revival Fred Harvey hotel and the site of the Rough Riders’ reunion, is still there, but just barely. The building and its surrounding structures have been featured in many Hollywood films, going back to old Tom Mix Westerns and, in the color-film era, everything from the parade scene in Easy Rider to exteriors for the Oscar-winning 2007 Coen Brothers movie, No Country for Old Men. But no matter how sturdy the construction of the graceful Castañeda, its shell—one of the nation’s top endangered landmarks—can’t survive forever.
Just six miles outside of town, however, is one of America’s most astonishing preservation miracles. The shell of the Montezuma—which was used as a seminary from 1937 to 1972, and then sat vacant for nearly a decade—was purchased by billionaire Armand Hammer’s foundation in 1981. It became a hulking Victorian backdrop for the new buildings of the American campus of Hammer’s pet project, United World Colleges (UWC), an ambitious international program for high school students, now prominently supported by Queen Noor of Jordan, Prince Charles of England, Nelson Mandela, and other world leaders. Then in 2001, the UWC spent $10.5 million to dramatically restore the old building and make it the cornerstone of the educational retreat. You can arrange to tour the hotel’s luxurious public spaces, although the creaky third-floor turret, which offers a breathtaking view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, is off-limits to anyone but the staff and the occasional student who sneaks up there. After the tour, we wander to the outskirts of the campus to dip our feet in the hot springs, which bubble up in small outdoor pools (and the occasional hot puddle) in several places near the hotel building. It’s a popular place for students from the nearby New Mexico Highlands University to come on dates.
Back on the train, we continue on to Lamy station, where we disembark for our short trip to Santa Fe. While there is a daily train, we take the shuttle bus service to the city—or, in our case, to a rental car center.
Our first stop is La Fonda hotel, which has been in continuous use since the company first opened it in 1926. La Fonda is still very much part of the center of town, although it looks a little different than in its heyday. It was run by Fred Harvey until the 1960s, when it became so unprofitable that the company sold it to a colorful, wealthy, menschy New Yorker named Sam Ballen. He rescued La Fonda financially—and helped Santa Fe through its growing pains in the 1960s and 1970s, just as Fred Harvey did in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. But in the process, Ballen allowed parts of the hotel’s elegant first floor to be hacked up to create retail spaces. Some of Mary Colter’s finest public rooms didn’t survive—the famous bar, La Cantina, is now a crepe shop—but the skylighted main dining room is still there, and many of the guest rooms still have the furniture and wall hangings Colter put there. Ballen and his wife, Ethel, both died in 2007, but their daughter now runs La Fonda. I’m pleased to report that the hotel’s main dining room, La Plazuela, is still one of the best in Santa Fe—which, considering how many amazing eateries the city has, is quite a testimony to maintaining the standard. Chef Lane Warner’s soups are particularly scrumptious (especially the classic sopa de tortilla and the white bean soup with roasted garlic), and the menu still includes New Mexican favorites originally adapted by chef Konrad Allgaier starting in the 1940s.
For years, the only other major repository of Fred Harvey–ana in Santa Fe itself has been the Museum of International Folk Art, which holds all the Spanish colonial art collected by Herman Schweizer and John Huckel. The Harvey collection there includes over four hundred paintings, sculptures, silver pieces, textiles, bells, and furniture, some dating back to the early 1500s. But the long-awaited New Mexico History Museum, which opened in the spring of 2009 right in the middle of downtown Santa Fe, has a small but growing Fred Harvey display and collection, to which several prominent family members have already pledged their substantial holdings.
Visitors to Santa Fe still take pretty much the same day trips as they did when Fred Harvey began the Indian Detours in the 1920s. You go to see Taos—driving along the “High Road,” a scenic, curvy highway that was once the only road to the pueblo. (For some, the drive is more fascinating than the destination—especially if you stop for lunch, as we do, at Rancho de Chimayo, which has life-altering fresh sopapillas and New Mexican favorites.) And you go to see the Anasazi cliff dwellings at nearby Bandelier National Monument, which is just below Los Alamos (which you can’t really “visit,” except for its small, intriguing Bradbury Science Museum). The forests around Bandelier are growing back after the wildfires in 2000—triggered when government workers lost control of a planned burn—but the dwellings were spared; the more rugged ruins nearby at Puye, where Ford’s wife, Judy, had her stroke, are still closed.
Visitors also continue to go to the active Indian pueblos nearby to watch the dances, shop for arts and crafts, and indulge in the sweet Indian fry bread. Some also drive to Abiquiu, where Georgia O’Keeffe lived and fans still make pilgrimages to her studio and Ghost Ranch—a sprawling retreat and conference center where O’Keeffe had a small home. But the true highlight, honestly, is just motoring along the highway and being constantly blown away by the geologic formations that clearly inspired O’Keeffe’s paintings. It’s like driving through God’s early sketches for the Grand Canyon.
After a few days in Santa Fe, we drive an hour and a half southwest to see one of the last intact Fred Harvey depots in New Mexico, in tiny Belen (although you can now actually get there on the convenient new Rail Runner regional train). Local residents have done a terrific job restoring their tiny Fred Harvey eating house and turning it into a charming Harvey and Santa Fe museum. It’s a little trainiac treasure, leaving us with almost enough warm feeling to counteract the existential nausea of then driving to one of the more depressing sites in Fred Harvey’s America—the Albuquerque parking lot where the Alvarado Hotel and Indian Museum used to be.
Preservationists fought like hell to keep the Alvarado from the wrecking ball in the late 1960s—in fact, it was one of the first highly publicized historical preservation fights in the country—but they failed, and on February 13, 1970, it was demolished. Amtrak built a modest wooden train station that burned down and was replaced in 2002 by a new transportation center, which, ironically, mimics the Alvarado’s facade. The new building is mostly for buses and regional rail lines. The only Amtrak train that stops here is the Chief, which arrives once a day in each direction and, even today, is still greeted by Indians trying to sell their crafts.
The sunset view from the Chief as it heads west from Albuquerque is amazing—especially if you take it in from Amtrak’s special observation car, which features extra-high arching windows, a glass ceiling, and comfy swivel seats. (For kids immune to nature’s charms, the observation car also has TV screens playing children’s movies nonstop.) As the solar light show ends and the stars begin to shimmer, the Chief pulls in to Winslow, Arizona, just in time for a late supper—and we get our first glimpse of Mary Colter’s masterpiece, La Posada, the way it was meant to be seen: from trackside. It is one of the most welcoming experiences available in American travel. While Colter may have been right about people living too long—she died in 1958 at the age of eighty-nine—she
would be thrilled to know that her artfully miscellaneous hacienda, shuttered for nearly forty years, is enjoying a marvelous second life.
In 1997, a thirtysomething couple from L.A.—entrepreneur Allan Affeldt and his wife, artist Tina Mion—bought the crumbling La Posada complex, which the railroad had been using as a block-long storage closet. Affeldt’s thoughtful restoration has been remarkable considering that he did not have Armand Hammer’s dollars. He brought La Posada back to life one room at a time—and when it was partially done, he reopened, allowing the first customers to enjoy (and fund) the work in progress. All the guest rooms have now been restored, and named after the most famous guests who stayed in them—although it is unlikely that Truman’s or Einstein’s quarters originally had Jacuzzis.
La Posada’s Turquoise Room restaurant comes as close to capturing a modern vision of Fred Harvey’s gourmet comfort food as any place in the country. If I could eat chef John Sharpe’s Arizona Green Chile Eggs (with creamy polenta, tomatillo sauce, roasted corn salsa, and warm corn tortillas) every day for breakfast, or start every dinner with his signature paired potage (cream of corn and black bean soup side by side in the same bowl), I’d be a very happy man. (He recently published a Turquoise Room cookbook.)
From Winslow you can take the train to Williams—where some restoration work has begun at the old Fred Harvey Fray Marcos hotel—and then catch the train to the Grand Canyon, which runs once a day. We want the freedom of driving, because this part of Arizona has several treasure troves of Fred Harvey–ana not so easily accessible by rail. So we rent a car in the hip little college town of Flagstaff. Two hours to the north is the Grand Canyon, the nation’s best-known Harvey location. But two hours in the opposite direction is Phoenix, which not many people realize is now home to the priceless Fred Harvey company Indian art collection.
Appetite for America Page 47