The Gadsden Hotel: Douglas's Grand Survivor

Near the United States-Mexico border in Douglas, Arizona, a hotel stands that has witnessed copper barons, cattle deals, border crossings, and one of the most persistent legends in the American Southwest.

The Gadsden Hotel opened in nineteen oh seven, built to serve the cattlemen, ranchers, miners, and businessmen who flooded into southeastern Arizona when Phelps Dodge chose this flat stretch of the Sulphur Springs Valley for its massive copper smelter. The original building was impressive, but a fire gutted nearly everything except the Italian white marble staircase and the marble columns in the lobby. The hotel rebuilt on a grander scale, reopening in nineteen twenty-nine with additions that remain intact today.

What survived the fire became the heart of the new building. The marble staircase sweeps upward past column capitals said to be hand-leafed with gold. At the top of the stairs hangs a stained-glass mural forty-two feet long, depicting the desert landscape of the Southwest in luminous color. It was designed by Ralph Baker, who trained under Louis Comfort Tiffany, and the style is unmistakably of Tiffany heritage.

Then there is the legend. One of the steps of that marble staircase has a chip in it. Hotel staff have always attributed the chip to the hoof of a horse ridden up the stairs by Francisco Villa, the revolutionary general known as Pancho Villa, who allegedly charged up in an act of bravado to retrieve a message from one of his men. There is no documented record of the event. The chip has never been repaired. Whatever made that mark in the marble, the Gadsden has chosen its story, and the story has chosen the hotel.

The Gadsden is still operating as a hotel today, its lobby largely unchanged from the nineteen twenties, a strange and magnificent artifact of the copper boom that briefly made this corner of Arizona one of the wealthiest places in the country.