Architect Mary Colter’s major buildings are enduring forms of art that bring to life a brilliant, idiosyncratic imagination inspired by Southwest history and culture.
Beginnings and New Career
Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter was born in 1869 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the second child of Irish immigrants William and Rebecca Crozier Colter. When Mary was 11, the Colter family moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota, where her parents worked in the clothing and furniture business.Mary graduated from Saint Paul high school at age 14, in 1883. Three years later, her father died unexpectedly of a blood clot in his brain and the 17-year-old boldly convinced her mother to pay for her to attend art school so that she could eventually support the family.
Mary attended art school at the California School of Design, in San Francisco, which offered a four-year program in art and design. In addition to the art and design coursework, Mary apprenticed in a local architect’s office and learned the essentials of the fledgling trade. Around the time that she graduated in 1890, certified architects were uncommon. (California first started licensing architects and creating standards for the profession in 1901.)
In the early 1890s, Colter found herself in Wisconsin, teaching drawing and architecture, and then returned to Saint Paul, where she spent 15 years at the Mechanic Arts High School. She also found time to lecture on architecture.
After visiting a Fred Harvey shop in San Francisco, she was introduced to the Fred Harvey Company, which operated hotels, restaurants, lunch counters, shops and dining cars for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway beginning in 1876.
Buildings and Interiors
Colter’s first commission as architect and designer was in 1902 when she was placed in charge of the decoration of the Indian Building at a Harvey House hotel in Albuquerque. Three years later, the company hired her to decorate the cocktail lounge of the luxurious and costly ($250,000) new El Tovar Hotel at the Grand Canyon and to design and decorate an adjacent Hopi-inspired gift shop.Wishing to pay homage to the early inhabitants of the region, Colter solicited Hopi masons to build the Hopi House, completed in 1905, and it served as lodging quarters for Hopi artisans and exhibitors and their families.
She greatly revered the unique cultural heritage of the Southwest and wandered to the most breathtaking corners of the Grand Canyon in search of Native ruins and artifacts, qualities that fomented the rustic, evocative nature of her work. Lookout Studio, a place to view and photograph the scenic landscape, and Hermit’s Rest—a stopping point for Harvey rail passengers—finished construction in 1914.
With the resolution of World War I, travelers began to frequent the Grand Canyon in increasingly large numbers. According to park figures, approximately 44,000 people visited the park in 1919, and that number jumped to 100,000 in 1923, and then jumped again to 200,000 in 1929. More commissions were to come to Colter after President Woodrow Wilson signed the bill to make Grand Canyon a national park in February of 1919.
Fred Harvey and the Santa Fe were approved to build Phantom Ranch at the base of the canyon and that project was completed in 1922. Initially, the name of building was supposed to be designated in honor of 26th President Theodore Roosevelt, but Colter preferred the more mystifying and shadowy sounding “Phantom Ranch.” Colter’s insistence on selecting harmonizing local materials, like native stone, and her exacting attention to organic detail make the Phantom Ranch a display of vivid natural beauty.
Watchtower, a 70-foot-tall re-creation of an ancient structure, was completed in 1932. Perched on the eastern edge of the park, it was heavily influenced by the architecture of the ancestral Puebloan people of the Colorado Plateau and modeled after the original edifices discovered at Hovenweep and Mesa Verde.
Perhaps Colter’s most ambitious undertaking, the Bright Angel Lodge facilities, which cost approximately $500,000 (about $11.5 million today), included not only a small village of individual cabins, but also a new lodge with shops and restaurants. Colter successfully advocated for some of the cabins to incorporate or integrate logs or other materials from salvaged buildings of historical note. Featuring adobe and natural rock walls, Bright Angel Lodge was finished in 1935.
Colter Touch and Spirit Can Still Be Seen
The Grand Canyon remains the showplace for Colter’s originality, and perhaps even the original blueprint for National Park Service structures. The demise of railroad and passenger train travel, however, made many Colter-related buildings outside of it obsolete. Most of them beyond the park are no longer standing, including the Indian Building, which was torn down in March 1970.Other Colter-designed hotels like the El Ortiz in Lamy, New Mexico was torn down, and the El Navajo in Gallup, New Mexico was dismantled and sold, both in Colter’s lifetime.
In addition to the well-known buildings that grace the Grand Canyon’s south rim, some other gorgeous examples have survived, including the Painted Desert Inn and La Fonda, which is in Santa Fe. Opening during the Great Depression in 1930, La Posada in Winslow, Arizona, perhaps most skillfully embodies Colter’s vision both as an architect and designer. Considered by some to be her “masterpiece,” it is one of the last great railroad hotels and known as one of the fanciest on Route 66, a magnet for movie stars, from Jimmy Stewart to James Cagney, in its earliest days.
Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter died at the age of 88 on Jan. 8, 1958, and was buried in Saint Paul’s Oakland Cemetery. Colter bequeathed her vast, extensive collection of Native pottery and unrivaled Indian, Spanish, and self-designed jewelry collection to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, where it is preserved and exhibited.
