Mary Colter's Desert View Watchtower

Most architects studying Ancestral Puebloan sites in the nineteen twenties and thirties took notes and moved on. Mary Colter moved in. The Chicago-born designer who worked for the Fred Harvey Company spent years visiting cliff dwellings and pueblo ruins across the Southwest before she was commissioned to design the Desert View Watchtower at the canyon's eastern rim. She did not want to build a building that looked like a tower. She wanted to build a tower. The distinction mattered to her enormously.

The Desert View Watchtower was completed in nineteen thirty-two. Colter insisted on structural masonry that would read as genuinely ancient. She ordered workers to leave portions intentionally unfinished, to distress the stone surfaces, to resist the impulse to smooth and seal. The exterior looks like something that has been standing for centuries because Colter designed it to look exactly that way.

For the interior, she did not simply select a Southwestern aesthetic. She commissioned Fred Kabotie, a Hopi artist of considerable reputation, to paint the interior murals with imagery drawn from Hopi ceremonial traditions. Kabotie's kiva mural and the migration narrative panels are not decorative approximations. They are work by a Hopi artist, in a building commissioned for a commercial hospitality company, placed at a site the Hopi consider ancestral.

The arrangement was not tribal sovereignty. The Fred Harvey Company was a corporation. Colter was its employee. But in an era when Indigenous design was routinely lifted and diluted without acknowledgment, her insistence on commissioning an actual Hopi artist for actual Hopi imagery was methodologically distinct from what most of her contemporaries were doing.

The tower stands seventy feet above the rim. The Colorado River is visible from its upper windows, a thin ribbon more than three thousand feet below. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Fred Kabotie's murals are still inside.