The Alvarado Hotel and the Harvey Girls

The building that opened on May tenth, nineteen oh two, on First Street in New Town Albuquerque, was the largest hotel the Fred Harvey Company had ever built. One hundred rooms, later expanded to one hundred twenty, all designed in the Mission Revival style by architect Charles Whittlesey, with a long arcaded facade that recalled the Spanish colonial buildings it was meant to evoke. The Alvarado Hotel. Named for a Spanish conquistador who had ridden through this valley in fifteen forty-one with Coronado's army. The irony was not noted in the opening coverage.

The Fred Harvey Company had been running hotels and restaurants along the Santa Fe Railway since eighteen seventy-six, and it had developed a formula. The restaurants were staffed by young women recruited from the Midwest and East, trained in a specific standard of service, and required to live in supervised dormitories. They were called Harvey Girls. In a region where women's employment options were extremely limited, the Harvey Girl position offered wages, mobility, and a degree of independence unusual for the era. Thousands of women took it.

The Alvarado also housed the Indian Building, a curated space where Native artisans, many from local pueblos, demonstrated and sold their craft work to railroad passengers. The Fred Harvey Company understood that southwestern Native art was a commodity that railroad travelers would buy. The Indian Building was a commercial enterprise dressed as cultural appreciation, and it helped drive the market for Pueblo pottery and Navajo weaving that still shapes the Southwest's art economy today.

The railroad demolished the Alvarado on February second, nineteen seventy. A city preservationist later called it the most serious landmark loss the city had sustained. The site became a transit center. The transit center opened in two thousand two, one hundred years after the hotel it replaced.