Remembering man who put women to work in West
Fred Harvey’s railroad hotel chain had major impact on tourism history of New Mexico
LAS VEGAS, N.M. — The early afternoon train slowed and then came to a stop at the railroad station, some 100 paces away from La Castañeda Hotel.
A few of the workers preparing the hotel’s dining room for its grand opening this weekend paused to look as a few passengers, bags in hand, got off the train and headed toward the Castañeda and points beyond.
More visitors are expected at the Las Vegas hotel for the 10th annual Fred Harvey History Weekend, which began Friday and runs through Monday at venues in Las Vegas and Santa Fe. The celebration includes an array of talks, art events and meals designed to place a historical spotlight on Harvey’s legacy.
Many consider Harvey — who developed a string of Harvey Houses along the railroad in the late 1800s and into the 1900s — as the creator of the model for chain restaurants and hotels.
He also helped advance female workers’ rights when he introduced the Harvey Girls: young, single women hired as servers in his restaurants and hotels, who first debuted in the Raton-based Harvey House in the 1880s.
Harvey, his houses and his “girls” left an indelible imprint on New Mexico — which is one reason, said entrepreneur Allan Affeldt, who bought and restored La Castañeda, that interest in the Harvey story continues to grow long after his operations declined following World War II and ultimately died out in the 1960s.
“New Mexico was the epicenter of Harvey’s world,” Affeldt said. “There were more Harvey Houses in New Mexico and more Harvey restaurants in New Mexico than most other states, and it’s where the Harvey Girls evolved. Harvey’s legacy has survived in New Mexico, whereas it’s been wiped out in some other states.”
Harvey didn’t own any of the hotels along the rail line — the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway did, and it built hotels such as La Castañeda to provide passengers with lunch, dinner and overnight lodging options, which Harvey oversaw.
The railway built La Castañeda in 1898 as a flagship model for an architectural fleet of similar facilities, and contracted it out to Harvey (1835-1901), an Englishman who moved to America in the 1850s to seek his fortune.
With humble professional beginnings as a dishwasher in a New York restaurant, Harvey had taught himself the restaurant, hospitality and railroad business by the time he was 40, and created some 150 operations along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe track. Among them were 17 in New Mexico, including a dining operation at the Albuquerque airport and a newsstand in Las Cruces.
Many were hotels — Harvey Houses — that served as fortresses of civility for a West still running wild with cowboys, cavalry and range wars. The railway built eight of those hotels in New Mexico, six of which are still standing, according to author Stephen Fried’s Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West — One Meal at a Time.
Fried opens his book with an account of some rowdy New Mexico cowboys trying their best to shoot up a Harvey House before being put in their place by Harvey himself.
Fried, who was preparing to be in New Mexico this weekend for the Harvey events, said in a phone interview that Harvey’s company harbored a lot of ambitions beyond “making sure you got excellent service.”
Those dreams included teaching people proper manners or, as Fried put it, “how to eat in restaurants,” as well as developing a tourist trade and appreciation for Native American culture and art. Travelers also learned, via Harvey and his associates, about the settling of the West, Western customs and the environment of the Southwest.
“Harvey [the company] taught tourists who came to the Southwest what the real history of the area was,” Fried said. Harvey created “a prism to see Santa Fe history, New Mexico history, the history of the Southwest.”
As a result, many people today are still enamored with the Harvey story, Fried said, because they consider it “a way of seeing larger issues of living in the West.”
Harvey, Fried said, was a pioneer of branding and merchandising, and a bold employer when it came to staffing his restaurants and hotels with women — a move that helped brand the Harvey franchise. As Fried notes in his book, feminist scholars saw the move as “a crucial turning point for American women” in the workforce.
Longtime Santa Fe residents Bernette Jarvis and Beverly Ireland — twin sisters who worked as Harvey Girls at La Fonda on the Plaza in Santa Fe in the 1950s — agree.
The two left their family’s dairy farm in rural Minnesota to drive to Santa Fe in the summer of 1955 without knowing what lay ahead. By that November, they had landed jobs as Harvey Girls at La Fonda, where Bernette worked for three years and Beverly four.
They loved their colleagues, the clean, starched and ironed white uniforms they wore every day and the job of serving locals, legislative leaders and movie stars. Beverly still gets starryeyed recalling the way actor Glenn Ford looked at her when he was in town filming the 1958 movie Cowboy.
Good jobs were not easy to come by for women in those days, they said.
“Fred Harvey’s legacy is all about the Harvey Girls,” Ireland said. “He helped liberate women by offering them jobs.”
Jarvis said many of these young women, like she and her sister, came from rural or impoverished backgrounds where there seemed to be little chance of employment, travel or opportunity.
“Harvey would hire girls who had never worked before and bring them out West where they could grow,” she said.
As a result of all his initiatives, Harvey ultimately remains in memory in a way that Howard Johnson — who broke into the dining and hotel business in the mid-1920s, when Harvey’s world was still vibrant — does not, Fried said.
“When we were growing up, Howard Johnson was everywhere,” Fried said. “We don’t know who he is today. He was not a cultural phenomena … and also architecturally speaking, the Harvey hotels are beautiful.”
Those hotels dotted the desert landscape of New Mexico in such towns as Belen, Clovis, Deming, Las Vegas and Santa Fe. In Arizona, they were located on the Grand Canyon and in Winslow, where Affeldt and his wife, artist Tina Mion, restored and now operate the La Posada Hotel, which opened as a Harvey House in 1930 and closed by the late 1950s.
Architect Frederick Louis Roehrig designed La Castañeda, which was named after Pedro de Castañeda, who chronicled Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s 1850s expedition through the territory.
Having successfully reopened the La Posada Hotel in Winslow — leading to a business revival for many downtown entities there — Affeldt and Mion bought the 25,000-square-foot building in Las Vegas in 2014 for $450,000.
Much of the furniture in the hotel came from the La Fonda, which also served as a Harvey House. Andrew LaPointe, the project manager for the ongoing construction at La Castañeda, said much of the original building’s ceilings, walls and stairwells — including the servers’ staircase — remain intact.
As he watched the afternoon train start up and lumber down the track toward Lamy after its Las Vegas stop, LaPointe said he thinks the train itself plays a role in keeping Harvey’s memory alive.
Because a lot of people today, he said, want to hold on to a part of the American West of old, which trains and Harvey Houses represent.
“The train — and this hotel — still offer a romanticized idea of what the American Southwest should be,” LaPointe said.
“The train — and this hotel — still offer a romanticized idea of what the American Southwest should be.” Andrew LaPointe, project manager for construction at La Castañeda