It’s time for some more armchair traveling. Or is it ‘armchair lodging’ on this occasion? After all, today’s postcards feature hotels and motels from the ’50s and ’60s, with a smidgen of the ’70s. As normal for the times, the cars are colorful and the buildings even more so. Our first image is from the Cabana Lodge in Sacramento, CA.
Fiesta Village Motel, Fort Lauderdale, FL.
The Holbrook Motel, on Highway 66 East, AZ.
Mission Motel, Phoenix, AZ.
Hawaiian Gardens Motel And Haki Lau Restaurant, Holly, MI.
Harvest House, Motor Hotel, Boulder, CO.
Imperial House Motel, Cincinnati, OH.
West Gate Motor Lodge & Inn, Nyack, NY.
The Lamb’s Inn Motel, Lake City, TN.
Peninsula Motel, Daytona Beach, FL.
Related CC reading:
Nice, brings back fond memories .
-Nate
Before Holiday Day Inn became the default standard, the AAA rating was the next best thing. Also, Best Westerns also had some minimum standards as well. I would image many of these court yard hotels are long gone, especially along the gulf coast in Florida. The property became way too valuable.
Today, most are franchises in various states of service (or disservice).
The Harvest House in Boulder, wow!
Midcentury Modern. Definitely an actual architect involved.
“Mid century mo dern”!!
Unfortunately it has been altered beyond recognition through the years by corporate owners looking for brand uniformity. It will soon be demolished to make way for badly needed student housing. https://www.westword.com/news/boulders-harvest-house-hotel-will-be-destroyed-20657090
I have fond memories of having worked next door at the Good Samaritan Nursing home while a CU student, and then later in one of the HH cabanas which was the first home of KGNU Radio 88.5 FM. Sometimes my red 1970 VW Westfalia could be spotted in the parking lot with curtains drawn while I was catching a nap between work and classes.
Unfortunately I have no memories of attending a Toots and the Maytals concert on the HH grounds other buying the tickets beforehand. After all, it was 1976 in Boulder. Anyone who claims they remember that concert couldn’t have actually been there!
Back in the days when about 90% of cars were full size rwd… good times!
Of course there’s 2 VW bugs in that Boulder pic, nothing has changed. In our first visits there in ’74, ’75, and ’76 it was VW Dashers and Rabbits breeding like, well, rabbits.
Naturally Boulder today is overrun with Teslas and Priuses (Priii?).
It’s a bastion of greenies… not necessarily a bad thing in some respects.
Staged or not, the fabulous Thunderbird in the lead photo, is a perfect stylish accessory to the night time shot of the Cabana Lodge.
Yep, they stand out anywhere, even today.
Next to the “stodgy, green s/w”, the “T Bird looks soo modern and sleek!
(the wagon looks “prehistoric”)
To this day I still search out Ma and Pa type motels but they are getting hard to find.
Found one over by Hixton , Wisc. before the Wuhan Virus, that even had a fire pit outside, with wood, if one chose to sit by a fire.
With a few exceptions, especially the bright green Ford wagon in the first picture, these ‘50’s and ‘60’s cars are pretty monochromatic. Which is how I remember things from my childhood. The Boulder picture for example, lots of white. Lots of folks bemoan the lack of car color nowadays; while there certainly are more grays and silvers now, I’m not sure it’s that much different. But I suspect motel photo’s today would have a lot fewer station wagons.
I love all of these photos. Another coffee table book I would buy…
I was such a lucky kid growing up in the 1950s-60s. Being an Air Force family we moved coast to coast so many times during the 1950s. Those moves were exciting for me but maybe not so for my parents with young children. One time moving from East coast to West coast I had fallen out of a tree and broke my leg the week before, resulting in a cast above the knee and enclosed my foot. The day of the move I thought it was a great idea to store my marbles by pushing them down the top of the cast. I don’t remember if it was pain or frustration when I realized my ill planned packing. Perhaps it was my screaming that stopped the the ‘Mayflower’ moving men from their work loading the truck. Instead of sending me to hospital to remove my cast, one of the moving men bent a coat hanger and fished out all my marbles saving the day. Marbles went into a box and Mom reminded me I was not going to play with marbles in the car (good logic). The men of ‘Mayflower’ finally had most of the truck loaded when Mom realized Smokey our cat was missing. Panic ensued and it was all hands on deck to find the cat. Turned out when my marble incident had distracted everyone, Smokey had jumped into a wardrobe box, box taped, and loaded into the truck. Only then did Smokey voice his displeasure, boxes and furniture removed from the truck, Smokey freed and resumed his rightful place with me in the backseat for the cross country road trip. I think the first night on the road my parents had a few dry martini drinks.
Back then no Interstate and we would typically take 2-3 weeks to get from base A to base B. See the USA watching the scenery, looking at cars, drawing cars and houses, fighting with my older brother, and keeping the cat from napping at the break pedal. So many motels and we all had input which one to stop for the night. Had to have a swimming pool and color TV was a plus. No fast food lunches, had to stop and have a proper cheeseburger and fountain strawberry milkshake.
The road trips got even better in the early 1960s when we moved from CA to GA and Dad was Air Force base commander. Dad loved baseball and golf in that order. Our home backed up to a golf course 13th hole putting green and every year we would go to Florida for baseball Spring training. Dad came from a poor family, had gone to university on a baseball scholarship before WWII, later he became a pilot. The war changed the lives of so many young men. By this time older brother could take care of himself being 15-16 years old so he could stay home and take care of cat by his choice. I was age 12, we had a new 1963 T-Bird, and off on a road trip to Florida for two weeks. I would get out of school with two weeks of homework and I could always invite my best friend on the road trip. I thought our new 1963 T-Bird was the most beautiful auto on the road. By this time our motels had to have a swimming pool, close to a beach, plus must have color TV. Dad would spend his days going to baseball games, Mom went shopping, myself and friend would swim, go to movies, etc. We would always have a nice restaurant dinner together, then parents would go night-clubbing. Friend and I would never stay in watching motel color TV, we would go exploring. Just get back to the motel before parents came back.
By todays standards none of this would be acceptable. But in the 1960s, not an issue. The first pic of a motel with a 1963 T-Bird in front triggered all my wonderful memories. Thanks for the thread.
Lovely memories!
I love all of these!
The West Gate Motor Lodge & Inn (Nyack, NY) is still there and functional. I recognize it from the last time I was working in Nyack. They have quite the website – http://www.westgatelounge.com/
I suspect that most of the buildings in these shots have not done as well as the West Gate.
So, here’s a question that maybe someone here will know the answer to… Does anyone (who might have actually visited these sorts of motels in the 1960s and perhaps early 1970s) recall the little coffee/tea service units that many motels had mounted on a small-ish metal shelf usually in the bathrooms? I recall that most came with a package or two of instant coffee and a teabag and sometimes those plastic Solo cups…the white cone-shaped things that snapped into the brown plastic holder. I believe that some of these (most/all?) had some kind of device for heating the water to make the coffee or tea. I was absolutely fascinated by these units when I was little and actually looked forward to staying at those motels (usually for my family on trips to New England from the mid-Atlantic) that I knew had them.
These things seem to have been lost to time and I’ve never located a photo of one. I don’t even know how to describe them (other than what I just did above…but that remains un-Googleable). Anyway, that’s one of my Internet quests (and/or flea market searches) that I’ve never fulfilled. Just thought I’d ask. 🙂
These photos bring back the sense of wonder and excitement of the whole ‘highway pageant’ of the 1950’s from a kid’s point of view.
Motels seemed almost the equivalent of Disneyland, with their over-the-top neon signs and promises of the wonders of a swimming pool and multi-channel TV in every room (the 1950’s were still the one-channel era in New Brunswick, Canada).
Then there were highway attractions whose presence were announced with ever larger signs as you got closer. Kids’ sharp eyes started noticing increasing numbers of bumper ads – in the pre-sticker era, they were attached by thin wires to the bumpers of every car in the parking lot while you were experiencing the ‘attraction’.
There’s a great book from the late 70’s, ‘Motel of the Mysteries’. It’s the breathless story of a fictional archeological excavation, two thousand years in the future, of a typical mid-20th century North American motel. Needless to say, they misinterpreted everything they saw. 🙂 A pdf version is available online.
https://dtc-wsuv.org/dmyers19/DTC%20356/dtc356-macaulay-motel-mysteries.pdf
The Hawaiian Gardens Resort in Michigan has apparently been gone for a quarter of a century, but it does have a nice write up here: https://mytiki.life/tiki-bars/hawaiian-gardens-resort Unfortunately, there’s no mention of the geodesic dome that shows up in the photo above.
I miss “Polynesian” restaurants. They were totally hokey, but were also tremendous fun. In college, we used to frequent another Huki Lau (ours spelled Hu ki with an e at the end) that featured a floor show with hula dancers and fire eaters, a gigantic faux thundershower and volcano eruption every hour, and flaming sterno pu pu platters…which got quite interesting at a table full of college kids after a few (or more…often many, many, more) rounds of drinks. Our Hu Ke Lau lasted all the way until 2018, but all that’s left now are the glasses.
whoops, the photo.
Fred Barton, who built the Hawaiian Gardens was the inventor of “Bars Leak” automotive chemical.
I’m amazed how high the roof looks on the ’56 Ford wagon in the first photo. There seems to be an incredible amount ot crown to the roof – so much height of metal above the doors. I know people used to wear hats in those days, but still….
The differently-coloured doors on the rooms in the first photo brings back memories – I think that was an early-sixties fad. Lovely photos. Back when buildings had style, not just cheap-looking boxes in different shades of grey. And cars were more interesting too.
That was only on the wagon roof, and for a good purpose: to create adequate headroom for the forward facing third seat, which was mounted high directly over the rear axle/differential. This was a fairly common thing on American wagons back then.
It’s the same reason why the Olds Vista Cruiser got that raised rear roof section.
Didn’t think of that, Paul. Makes perfect sense though; I didn’t think of actual people sitting way back there. I had considered how the late Mark II Zephyr had some of the crown taken out of the roof to produce the famed “lowline” Zephyr, and thought it may have been a sort of Generalized Fifties Ford Fault.
Looks like the The Lamb’s Inn Motel building in Tennessee is still a motel and restaurant. The motel name has changed (now the Rocky Top Inn… actually the whole town changed its name to Rocky Top ten years ago.), and the restaurant is Mexican, but otherwise it looks pretty similar to a few decades ago.
Then-and-now images below:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/VbqBndL7bqUkpagP9
Not only is the West Gate in Nyack, NY alive and well, it has a well-known Sunday Brunch, Saturday Night Latin Music from 11:00 PM on, excellent and pricey cheesecake made by one of the second generation of the current owners, and a fine location right off I-87/I-287 in Nyack. I live about 1 1/2 miles north of the West Gate.
Looked carefully. Can’t find a “convertible” in any of the parking lots! Amazing for that period in “automotive history”.
In photo #7 taken at the Imperial House Motel there appears to be a little sports car convertible. I can’t make out what it is, possibly a Triumph Spitfire, or a Corvette?
Prepare to spend a lot of time here:
https://lileks.com/motels/index.html
I love seeing the oddball cars, like the Stude Hawk (Fiesta Village) and the 60 Mercury (Harvest House).
Also love the pair of hardtops at the Lamb’s Inn – the AMC Ambassador and the 70(?) Torino with poverty caps. And is that the same yellow Plymouth wagon in both photos at the Lamb’s Inn?
There was once a motel in Longueuil (a Montreal suburb) named Motel Oscar from 1947 to 2017 who had once kept the “kitsch” look and some various movie scenes was filmed there. Closed in 2017 it was left abandonned until he was demolished in 2023.
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/2055413/motel-oscal-longueuil-demolition
Here a old news report from 2007 about that motel.
Where is the one I was looking for-the Bates Motel?
Grew up in Southern California, Newport Beach. We had a ‘56 Ford Fairlane two door hardtop and a ‘53 Chevrolet truck ( 5 window). My Dad’s side of the family still lived in Western Kansas, so every summer we put the camper on the truck, loaded up and with my brother and I safely in the camper, rolled alon Route 66 from California to Oklahoma then went north into Kansas. I recall seeing those motels along the highway with ads for air conditioning, pools and coffee shops. We never stayed in a motel since we had the camper. Dad would find a camp ground or just someplace safe to stop for the night. Lower the tailgate, fire up the Coleman cook stove and Mom figured something out for dinner. Since we were out in the country, my brother and I could explore a bit. Out around the Navajo and Hopi reservations we would see creeks with cottonwood trees and willows along the banks. Red rocks and boulders to climb. Few, if any motels there.
All of those places are long gone (except for the obvious). My family, Route 66, the vehicles and a safer world where two boys could explore alone have faded away. But for me and those of us from the post WW ll generation the memories are very real.
Thanks for posting the pictures.
Every December 26th in the 1970’s we would drive to Florida from Maryland for an 8 – 10 day vacation in the station wagon. I remember how air would come in through the door handles and we would have to block the air with our coats. It was no big deal though. You got used to it. We had fun! Mark M. (from Maryland)