La Fonda Hotel
| La Fonda on the Plaza | |
|---|---|
View of the La Fonda hotel from the southwest
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| General information | |
| Location | Santa Fe, New Mexico |
| Address | 100 E. San Francisco Street |
| Coordinates | 35°41′12″N 105°56′16″W / 35.686650°N 105.937804°WCoordinates: 35°41′12″N 105°56′16″W / 35.686650°N 105.937804°W |
| Opening | December 30, 1922 |
| Technical details | |
| Floor count | five |
| Design and construction | |
| Architect | Isaac Hamilton Rapp |
| Developer | Santa Fe Builders Corporation |
| Other information | |
| Number of rooms | 180 |
| Website | |
| www |
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La Fonda on the Plaza is a historical luxury hotel, located at 100 E. San Francisco Street and Old Santa Fe Trail in downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico adjacent to the Plaza. La Fonda simply means "the inn" in Spanish, but the hotel has been described as "the grand dame of Santa Fe's hotels."
The site of the current La Fonda has been the location of various inns since 1609. It is on the El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, which linked Mexico City to Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo and was the terminus of the 800-mile-long Old Santa Fe Trail, which linked Independence, Missouri to Santa Fe and was an essential commercial route prior to the 1880 introduction to the railroad. The Fred Harvey Company established La Fonda as one of its premier Harvey Houses.
An earlier construction of the hotel, called the United States Hotel but nicknamed La Fonda Americana by locals, burned down in 1912. In 1920, the Santa Fe Builders Corporations issue shares of stock to raise funds to build a new hotel. Architect Isaac Hamilton Rapp (1854-1933), the "Creator of the Santa Fe style" was chosen to design the new hotel in the Pueblo Revival style, which drew inspiration from the adobe architecture of indigenous Pueblo peoples of the region. The new hotel was hailed as "the purest Santa Fe type of architecture and ... one of the most truly distinctive hotels anywhere between Chicago and San Diego."
After its auspicious launch, the hotel closed temporarily in the 1920s, until it was purchased in 1925 by the Santa Fe Railway. The new owners commissioned local muralists to paint the interior walls, beginning La Fonda's longstanding support of local visual arts. Mary Colter redesigned the hotel's interior, setting a tone inspired by Spanish and Southwest Native American aesthetics that continues today. Her designs included exposed vigas, or ceiling beams, and Mexican tiles.
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