As the number of trains operated by Santa Fe and other railroads shrank, the number of hotels and restaurants operated by Fred Harvey also shrank. An ad in yesterday’s 1956 timetable lists ten hotels and restaurants along the Santa Fe route. Today’s only lists nine.

Click image to download a 34.2-MB PDF of this 48-page timetable.

The missing hotel is the El Navajo in Gallup, New Mexico. Santa Fe began planning this hotel in 1914, but by the time it opened in 1918, the world was at war and it mainly served wartime traffic for its first few years. After the war, the hotel served tourists until 1957 when it was demolished to make room for a wider Route 66.

Click image to download a 1.6-MB PDF of this postcard.

As the postcard above shows, the hotel and adjacent train station were designed in a matching Pueblo Revival style. Wikipedia and many other web sites claim the hotel was designed by “master architect Mary Colter,” but this isn’t true. Colter, who wasn’t an architect at all much less a master architect, wasn’t even working for Santa Fe at the time and probably didn’t start working for Fred Harvey until after the hotel was built.

As historian Fred Shaw shows in his book, False Architect, the architectural drawings for the El Navajo were signed by Edward Harrison, Santa Fe’s company architect at the time. However, Shaw believes the true architect was Louis Curtiss, who designed several Pueblo-influenced depots and hotels for Santa Fe. Colter did much of the interior decoration, while Fred Geary did many of the paintings on display in the hotel, including the painting used in the above postcard.