The Birth of Utah’s Automobile Tourism

Writing in 1987, Wallace Stegner argued:

“The principle invention of western American culture is the motel, the principal exhibit of that culture the automotive roadside. The principal western industry is tourism, which is not only mobile but seasonal. Whatever it might want to be, the West is still primarily a series of brief visitations or a trail to somewhere else.” (1)

Driving north into Salt Lake City along U.S. Highway 89, one encounters extant architectural remnants of the recent past nestled along the fringes of the roadway in the Siesta Motel at 3100 South State, the Temple View Motel at 3060 South State, the Spiking Tourist Lodge at 2862 South State, the Alta Motel Lodge at 1910 South State, the Zion’s Motel at 1829 South State, the Capitol Motel at 1749 South State, the Wasatch Inn at 1424 South State, and the Uptown Motel at 1181 South State. Some motels developed off main routes into Salt Lake such as the Colonial Village Motel at 1540 South Main Street. These building types represented a new mode of lodging, unquestionably a direct result of the democratization of automobile ownership in America during the post-war years and of the Western zeitgeist as described by Stegner, distance and space, both resulting from Western aridity. (2)

Motels represented a counterpoint offspring to traditional commercial hotels popular through the first World War, which were typically located in congested downtown commercial cores and lacked adequate and convenient parking necessitated with the rise of the automobile. Beginning in the 1920s, automobile travelers and tourist frequently squatted off the roadside and earning the nickname “tin can tourists,” and the phenomenon increased during the depression era years of the 1930s. As a result, and in an effort to prevent uncivil vagrants, municipalities began dedicating areas as “automobile camps,” imposing entrance fees and fees for various amenities. In Denver, for example, the local fairgrounds were converted annually into an immense tent city, called Rocky Mountain Lake Park, to accommodate the automobile tourists. (3) The traveler provided their own accommodations. The automobile camps eventually evolved into cabin camps and, according to Architectural Record in 1933, were “one of the few ‘booming’ building sectors of the Depression.” (4) The cabin camps represented an effort to de-urbanize the nomadic experience by imbuing architectural folklore into the experience. These temporary and often poorly constructed cabin camps eventually gave rise to an upgraded building type which sidled up to the architectural terms “cottage and court,” evoking a sense of quaintness and comfort on the edge of the frontier.

The first cottage courts consisted typically of single story detached structures and were ideally located off of major highways approaching urban or populated areas. The cottages were typically arranged around a U-shaped court with a narrow drive path, a feature derived entirely from functional necessity to facilitate in-and-out traffic. Parking typically was located adjacent to the cottage in an attached garage, although this arrangement eventually evolved, with the individual cottages separated by attached garage units, thus forming a continuous facade. (5) In addition, there was typically a centrally located but separate office building that included a private apartment for the motel manager. “Architecturally, cottages were made to look like little suburban houses in order to enhance their appeal for the middle-class tourists and the traveling businessman.” (6) The continuous façade was a feature that distinguished the motor court from the cottage court. While the cottage courts were joined together, the individual buildings were freestanding and, therefore, the architecture evoked a sense of individuality and home. The motor court was typically a single building under a single roof line with one long continuous porch structure. A yellow page advertisement in 1948 under “Motor Courts” touted the Utah Motor Park at 972 South State and 1901 South Main as featuring “Phone and garage with each cottage” and “Complete privacy.” (7)

The term motel is, in fact, an American neologism, a contraction of the words hotel and motor, which appeared sometime between 1920 and 1925. (8) The alternative term which never really took hold was “autel,” a contraction of auto and hotel. The first official appearance of the motel as a building type was Arthur Heineman’s Milestone Mo-tel, in San Luis Obispo, California in 1926. (9) After World War II, the word motel was used to describe the new motor courts. (10) The motel would continue to evolve, culminating in massive multi-story developments clinging to the edges of America’s Interstate Highway’s, in essence, a suburbanized version of the central city hotel which was in effect the very lodging type that gave rise to the motel in the first place.

Some of the first motel prototypes were found in Salt Lake City, such as the Colonial Village Auto Court, constructed in 1937 at 1530 South Main Street, during the depths of the Great Depression. The Colonial Village was constructed on Salt Lake’s Main Street and, interestingly, not on State Street, the designation Highway 89 assumed as it passed through Salt Lake City. Typically motels would have been constructed adjacent to major arterials entering urban areas, which may have been the case, it just suggests a shift in emphasis to Highway 89 later during the 1940s.

As one of the first motel building types in Utah, the Colonial Village Auto Court followed the general trend of the Auto Courts, specifically single story structures joined together by attached garages arranged around an interior court with a narrow drive path. The office was located in the first building as one entered the complex of cottages and this deviated slightly from the prescribed plan but was a condition subject to site requirements. The main court area was located in the rear portion of the site in a quadrangle area reminiscent of Jefferson’s Academical Village. Originally this was a landscaped area meant to evoke a bucolic sense of the country.

Later, in the 1950’s, the area was enhanced with the ubiquitous motel amenity, the swimming pool. The Colonial Village Auto Court’s pool featured a deck made to look like a ship at sea, one wonders if weary travelers drunken on Utah’s summer sun ever lost their sense of place, smelling the salty briny air wafting off the landlocked Great Salt Lake, and believed they were at sea. The Colonial Village Auto Court later changed its name and its sign to the Colonial Village Motel. With its white picket fence, the Cape Cod styled residences with quaint colonial revival detailing such as shutters, chimneys, cornices etc, all evoked a romantic sense of home. A postcard published in the late 1930s advertised “Delightful Accommodations for Visitors in Center of Scenic America.”

That sense of home was always the most appealing feature of the Colonial Village Motel. From the back of a postcard postmarked 1951, “36 Modern Colonial Cottages – Quiet – Cool and Shaded,” and the restaurant next door at 1518 South Main, The Doll House, was advertised as “Home Style Food and Homey Atmosphere.”

The swimming pool was eventually taken out and replaced with parking as the motel has transitioned from overnight stays to short-term and weekly tenures targeted at low-income individuals, unfortunately a national trend, to maintain economic viability.

Motels began to gain footing in Salt Lake City in 1944 with the Zee’s Utah Motel at 1301 South State Street. This was the first official motel listed in the Salt Lake City Polk Directory. The inclusion in the Polk Directory signaled the legitimacy of the building type in Salt Lake City as these new forms attempted to distinguish themselves from the traditional urban hotel and from the motel’s close sibling, the motor court. By 1948, there were two listings in the local Polk Directory (Zee’s was omitted for unknown reasons but reappeared in later publications) the “Boulevard Tourist Lodges” at 1457 South Main and two locations of the “Harold F Roberts” located at 411 North 2nd West and 825 East 21st South. By 1949, there were eight listings under Motel and Hotel, and in 1951, twelve listings under Motel. The number consistently increased in subsequent publications and began leveling off in 1960 with ninety-nine listings under Motel. The local trend in Salt Lake followed national trends of booming motel construction between 1928 and 1961, which increased from 3,000 to 60,951.

The early Motels in Salt Lake City were meant to evoke a romantic sense of tourism, sometimes in a cheap and campy manner. The Casa Blanca Motel at 1489 South State Street was designed to mimic a Spanish hacienda, and in the 1949 postcard, it had all the key features of the Cottage Court, a U-shaped drive, central office, individual cottages joined via garages, and a streamlined path for the automobile as evidenced by the artists depiction.

The Mission Motor Lodge at 855 North 200 West was designed in a Spanish Colonial style, one to coincide to the adjacent Warm Springs. The entire ensemble, with its Alamo-esque parapet and stuccoed facades with the clay tile door canopies, was finished out with a veritable bell tower. The garages recalled liveries and so as to not confuse the tourist, however, the American Flag was proudly displayed atop the domed campanile.

The Utah Motor Park at 972 South State, was the epitome of the early motel building type. In a 1948 Yellow Page ad in the Polk Directory the “125 Beautiful Cottages” of the Utah Motor Park featured amenities such as “Phone and Garage with Each Cottage,” “Restaurant in Connection,” “Modern Public Laundry,” and “Playground for Youngsters.” The Utah Motor Park was built sometime in the late 1920s, a postcard from 1929 shows a fledgling landscape around its centrally located Clubhouse with the block “U” atop each gable. The Utah Motor Park was simple in its approach, it was a home away from home. The iconic Wasatch Mountain loom large in the distance.

The Pilot Café at 1726 West North Temple, was located near the airport, and was a later evolution of the early motels. It featured a continuous roof line, yet with individual walk-up entries to each cottage. The bulky mass of the towers at the ends and the center gave it a sense of a pan-opticon prison yard, easily seen and observed from the central tower, where the manager ostensibly was quartered.

In time, motels became more complex, large conglomerates, requiring acres of parking for the hundreds of rooms. The counterpoint to the Colonial Village Motel was Covey’s New America Motel, which occupied an entire 10-acre city block at 500 South Main Street in Salt Lake City, in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City. The motel featured 320 rooms with air conditioning, radio’s and TV’s according to the 1948 yellow page advertisement in the Salt Lake City Polk Directory. As part of the national Best Western motel chain, this eventually became the Little America Motel and in the 1970s, was expanded to an unbelievable 850 rooms by constructing a large multistory tower, and becoming the Little America Hotel, the premier hotel in Salt Lake City and an ironic culmination to the building type that began modestly as a quaint cottage.

As the demand on Utah’s Highway systems increased in the 1930s, both for transient families en route to a better life in the west, and for those adventuresome Americans experiencing the new phenomenon of automobile tourism, in the “Center of Scenic America” the roadside lodging developed in parallel with the developing road systems, and a new economy emerged. Utah’s major automobile route ,US 89 was originally created in 1926, and entered the state at its southern border through Kanab and winding northward through various pioneer colonies such as Orderville, Panguitch, Salina, Gunnison, Ephraim, Manti, Mt. Pleasant, Fairview, Nephi, Springville, Provo, Pleasant Grove, Lehi, through the Salt Lake Valley and Salt Lake City, and then finally through Bountiful, Centerville, Farmington, Ogden, Brigham City, and Logan to name a few before exiting Utah and making its run through Idaho to the Canadian border. It was along this major automobile route that the motels developed most abundantly from the 1930s through the 1940s. While other routes in Utah were key in the development of motels across the state such as Highway 6 through Price, Highway 189 through Heber City, Highway 40 through Vernal, and Highway 191 through Moab and Price, US 89 was the spine on which all other highway systems were built.

 Motels along these routes were numerous. Kanab, being adjacent to the Grand Canyons north rim, was home to a large population of motel development, and came to be known as “Little Hollywood.” Parry Lodge was founded in 1931 by three brothers: Whitney, Chauncey, and Gronway Parry and has hosted some of the biggest names from the golden age of Hollywood including John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Olivia De Havilland, Gregory Peck, Maureen O'Hara, Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Robert Taylor, Anne Bancroft, Dean Martin, Lana Turner, Clint Eastwood and Barbara Stanwyck, to name a few. The Parry Lodge was a typical Cottage Court motel with the central office (Parry Lodge) and surrounding cottages set in a quaint and comfortable setting. Surprisingly, these are the very features that make it a viable business today.

Some motels have remained vital, still drawing on the relatively unchanged landscape of the early highway system and its modest traffic flow to and from western attractions. These motels have remained somewhat immune to the competition at the larger interstate motel developments. A drive along the southern path of Highway 89 attests to that. However, elsewhere, motels are demolished, abandoned, or reused as transient short term lodging, typically for lower income individuals as demand diminishes for the quaint off-road attractions, replaced by larger national chains which obliterate the economic viability of the mom and pop motel. Most of the roadside motels have had to assume new uses. The Springville Motel at 282 North Main Street in Springville, for example, has altered it business scope and is now the Springville Motel and Apartments. Unfortunately, it’s lost the quaint feel and instead evokes a sense of difficulty and deficiency.

The Seagull Motel at 325 North 200 West (US 89) in Salt Lake City is a good example of the future fate of the building type, although it is not an optimistic one. In 2007, construction was initiated to adapt the motel into ‘urban condos,’ however the 2008 recession jolted the project to a halt and the site is in now abandoned and falling into serious disrepair with little or no hopeful future.

Notes:

1.  Stegner, Wallace. The American West as Living Space. p. 23.
2.  Stegner, Wallace. The American West as Living Space. p. 27.
3.  Jakle, John A., et al. The Motel in America. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1996. 31-35.
4.  Quote taken from Jakle, John A., et al. The Motel in America. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1996. 39.
5.  Jakle, John A., et al. The Motel in America. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1996. 42-43.
6.  Jakle, John A., et al. The Motel in America. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1996. 43.
7.  Polk Directory, Salt Lake City, 1948. Buyers Guide.
8.  Merriam Webster’s College Dictionary, 1991 Edition.
9.  Jakle, John A., et al. The Motel in America. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1996. 18.
10.  Jakle, John A., et al. The Motel in America. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1996. 45.
11. Polk Directory, Salt Lake City, 1944. Zee’s Utah Motel at 1301 South State Street, Tel. 6-0802 was the first listing for a Motel.
12.  Jakle, John A., et al. The Motel in America. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1996. Table 1.2 p. 20.
13.  http://www.parrylodge.com/

© 2010 Steven D. Cornell