OVERNIGHT SENSATIONS
As highway traffic grew, so did the dreams of businessmen looking to cash in on the burgeoning travel industry.
One of the ways they did so was the motel, or motor hotel.
It was an innovation that crossed the camping craze of the late teens and early 1920s with the established hotel industry. The first step in the evolution of these roadside fixtures was so-called “auto camps,” which began as little more than parcels of land set aside on the outskirts of town where travelers could pitch a tent and stay the night. It was easier (and cheaper) than driving all the way into the city center and spending the night at a hotel, and it was that sort of convenience that gave birth to a new industry.
Tent camping wasn’t all that convenient, when it came right down to it, and it wasn’t long before owners of the camps began finding ways to make things more comfortable for the highway traveler. They built small cabins to save weary motorists the trouble of setting up a tent at the end of a long day on the road, and to offer more protection from the elements. These could be constructed cheaply and quickly, and the earliest examples were little more than four walls: You could pay extra for such niceties as a mattress, blankets, and pillows, and you might get a bucket of water on the house.
The Motel Inn in San Luis Obispo was the first inn to call itself a “motel” when it opened in 1925.
It was still camping, but it was better than getting stuck inside a sopping-wet tent during a sudden rainstorm.
Further innovations weren’t far behind. Auto camps slowly gave way to more permanent motor courts—with cabins often arranged in a U shape around a central courtyard (hence the name). Additional amenities such as indoor plumbing and electricity were added, and owners began installing carports or even single-car garages alongside each of the cabins—which were often referred to by the more welcoming, civilized term “cottages.”
The Motel Inn was closed for years, and only a small portion of the original complex remained when this photo was taken in 2016, but plans were in the works to rebuild and reopen it under new ownership.
These establishments gave the traveler a middle ground between hotel and auto camp—a Goldilocks zone between the luxury of a high-rise hotel and the economy of a tent, all right by the side of the road. It was left to Arthur S. Heineman to coin the obvious term for such a business, merging the terms “motor court” and “hotel” into a new label for a new age: “Mo-tel.”
“The motel plan eliminates a long walk through dark streets in a strange town between a garage and a hotel,” the Los Angeles Times explained in 1926. “The motorist’s car is where he is, ready for the road for an early morning start.”
That was Heineman’s vision. A Chicago native from a family of six children, he had moved west with his parents as a teenager in 1894 and, a decade later, got involved in real estate. Over a period of five years, he designed a series of bungalows in Pasadena and, in 1909, launched an architectural firm with his brother Alfred—a partnership that would endure for nearly three decades.
Heineman referred to the motel as an innovation “destined to democratize the highways,” but in reality, he had the opposite goal in mind: to monopolize them.
A few years later, the Richfield Oil Corporation would launch an ambitious program with a similar idea in mind: Richfield Beacon stations would be set up at regular intervals along major highways such as 99 and 101, with an eye toward giving motorists a place to stop whenever they needed gas. The initial plan called for these stations to serve as hubs for small highway communities in rural areas outside of town. They were to include a small grocery store (anticipating the convenience stores associated with many gas stations today), a café, and a “Beacon Tavern,” which wasn’t really a tavern at all, but an inn.
This plaque at the site of the Motel Inn was dedicated in 1988.
Had Richfield been able to realize its vision, it would have effectively locked up the highway, freezing out the competition by offering the best service facilities at every important stopping point between the Mexican and Canadian borders. That was the idea, anyway. But the timing was all wrong: The first Beacon stations opened just before the Wall Street crash of 1929, and the Richfield Corporation only managed to complete one of its “taverns” (along Route 66 in Barstow) before the economy grounded the project and the company was forced into bankruptcy.
Richfield’s idea, however, wasn’t new. It had been tried before, by none other than Heineman, who had envisioned a similar series of inns placed strategically along the highway up and down the coast of California. The concept, hatched during a 1924 meeting at Heineman’s Los Angeles office, involved building 18 motor courts between Seattle and San Diego, spacing them 150 to 200 miles apart to serve as “milestones” where motorists could pull over and spend the night after a day on the road. This was the era of the Model T, which topped out at about 40 mph and didn’t go nearly that fast around the myriad twists and turns in the West’s early highways. A 200-mile drive might take eight hours—if your car didn’t break down in the meantime, which was always a danger.
The milestone concept gave the company its name: the Milestone Corporation. And Heineman’s company lost no time in buying up land in such places as Sacramento, Salinas, San Jose, and Santa Barbara as the first step toward realizing its goal. The first motor court to be built would be at the north end of San Luis Obispo on El Camino Real, which was on the verge of being designated a federal highway as part of a new nationwide network of major thoroughfares. The site was chosen because it was roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, with four other Milestones planned farther south, and the rest of the chain stretching northward.
Heineman bought a little more than four acres of land from a local rancher for $6,000 and announced plans to rent rooms at $1.25 a night—a price he planned to standardize at all his Milestones up and down the coast. The San Luis Obispo inn would include a public dining room, a lobby with a fireplace and a small store, a free laundry, playgrounds, and full-service garage facilities out back. Some of the units would be single rooms, but the standard was a four-room setup, and six-room apartments were available to be shared by couples traveling together.
A premium was placed on comfort—and service. At the outset, travelers didn’t even have to leave their cars to check in: The supervisor on duty would come out and register them for the night “without leaving the car at all,” then provide an escort to show them their rooms.
The cabins were to contain more amenities than could be found at most motor courts, promising the traveler “not only the scenic beauties of the open road, but all the comforts of his own home, while away from home.” There would be electricity, and indoor plumbing (with hot and cold running water) would be provided in private baths and kitchenettes. Telephones, refrigerators, easy chairs, couches, walnut furnishings, and gas ranges were among the features planned for the rooms at what Heineman announced on a roadside billboard would be called the “Milestone Motel.”
The term was so new, however, that it confused passing motorists, who called the sign maker to insist that the word “hotel” had been misspelled on the billboard. So Heineman had it changed to read “Mō-tel,” with a hyphen and a long accent over the “o,” to avoid any further confusion.
The architecture was Mission Revival style, a fitting choice for its location along El Camino Real (and one that the Richfield Corporation would likewise adopt for the southern half of its Beacon chain). The San Luis Obispo location featured curved archways, sloping tiled roofs, and even a replica bell tower—patterned after the one at the Santa Barbara Mission—as its centerpiece.
Indeed, a 1925 piece in Pacific Travel magazine painted the chain as a successor to the fabled Spanish missions: “If Junipero Serra is looking down today on the California he loved so well, he is noting the fact that the King’s Highway, with its old missions a day’s horseback ride apart … there is now being established a chain of remarkable hotels for motorists, which has been given the names ‘Milestone Mo-tels.’ ”
The San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram effused that the new motel was “assured of success” and that it would “soon be known up and down the coast as a unit of a series of the most comfortable, economical and hospitable inns that can be found anywhere in the country.”
Like the Beacon Tavern in Barstow, however, the San Luis Obispo Milestone Mo-tel turned out to be the only one of its kind ever built. Plans for an expansive chain up and down the highway never materialized. Heineman’s failure to realize his vision ultimately doomed the architectural firm that bore his name, which closed its doors in 1933. He later created designs for other projects that owed something to his motel design: Plans for a new Los Angeles Public Library and a Hollywood movie museum both featured updated Mission Revival buildings and U-shaped courtyards, but neither ever came to fruition.
Later owners changed the name of the Milestone Mo-tel to “Motel Inn,” capitalizing on the word Heineman had created. Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe stopped there on their honeymoon in 1954, and Ronald Reagan delivered a speech there during his tenure as California’s governor in the 1960s.
The business remained open until it finally closed in 1991. The garages and bungalows were torn down in 2010, leaving only the office, bell tower, and the front of the restaurant still standing.
But plans to rebuild the inn as a 28,000-square-foot facility—complete with a restaurant, RV parking, and a reflecting pool—were announced in 2015. And, of course, the word “motel” became part of the popular lexicon: It was added to the dictionary in 1950.
THE MAN WHO INVENTED JAZZ
Up and down the highway, you’ll see remnants of an earlier time, when motor courts and early motels seemed to be everywhere. Most of the early ones were built on a shoestring and weren’t designed to last more than a decade or two; the owners either made improvements or sold them, or left them to become rundown “seedy” motels. In places where the old highway was bypassed by a new alignment, new developers often tore them down to make way for new retail or industrial businesses.
A few motel rows remain, such as the one on Monterey Street (Old 101) on the north end of San Luis Obispo, and other old alignments—Broadway in Santa Maria and Spring Street in Paso Robles are examples—contain scattered remnants of that earlier time. The Shady Rest Motel still stands at the north end of San Miguel; it probably dates back to the Great Depression, and it looks pretty depressed today, having been converted into (very) small apartments that serve as home to lowincome workers.
Farther south, across the beach at the mouth of Topanga Canyon, is the Topanga Ranch Motel, which still stands on State Route 1—formerly the 101 Alternate. No one stays there now, but the 30 red-and-white bungalows were still standing, silent sentinels alongside the busy highway, as of 2016.
The Shady Rest Motel on old 101 in San Miguel is a remnant of an earlier era.
The motel, once known as the Topanga Beach Auto Court, has an interesting history. For one thing, it might be the oldest motel on the Pacific Coast Highway. Newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst bought up much of the coastal land in the area during the late teens and early 1920s, and according to one account, he built the cottages as beach houses for his friends who wanted a quick getaway to the scenic Malibu coastline. He and his mistress, actress Marion Davies, would hold costume parties there, dressing the part of cowboys and Old West pioneers as they set out on horseback on the trails in the surrounding hills.
Just across the highway was La Esperanza, Greta Garbo’s 5,300-square-foot mansion, and celebrities who stayed at Topanga Ranch over the years included Errol Flynn, Peter Lawford, and Marilyn Monroe. But Hearst sold his Topanga properties to the Los Angeles Athletic Club—which already owned a minority stake—in 1943, and it wasn’t long afterward that it became associated with another famous name from the entertainment industry.
Sometime in the 1940s, the motel came into the possession of Anita Ford and her husband, Jack. They were a mixed-race couple, something unusual for the time: Jack was of Irish descent, and Anita was a Creole from the South who could, nonetheless, pass for white or Mexican. (At some point, she even took on the name Gonzales.) Mrs. Ford was in her late 50s by the time she and her husband bought the Topanga Beach Auto Court, as it was still known at the time, the latest in a series of business ventures she’d pursued in an eventful life.
Born Bessie Julia Johnson back in 1883 in Montgomery, Alabama, she had moved with her family to New Orleans at the age of 5 and had grown up fast. At 17, she became the common-law wife of one Fred Seymour, a relationship that produced a daughter, Hattie, but doesn’t seem to have lasted. A couple of years later, she turned up working as a “sporting lady” (a.k.a., prostitute) in New Orleans’s red-light district, and it was during this time that she seems to have met pioneering jazz legend Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton.
Anita—or Juanita, as she sometimes called herself—came from a family of jazz players herself: brothers Bill and Ollie “Dink” Johnson were both accomplished musicians. Bill, who lived to be 100, is credited with inventing the slap style of double bass playing.
Morton fell in love with Anita and married her, fulfilling his own words of a couple of years earlier: “When I get married, gonna marry a whore.” But Anita’s past didn’t dim his esteem for her: “Personally,” he would say later, “I don’t believe there ever was one born any finer than Anita.” Despite his obvious affection for her, though, Morton and Anita went their separate ways in 1909, when she bought a ticket to Las Vegas and opened the Arcade Saloon.
The next few years were a blur. Morton kept himself occupied on the jazz circuit, playing in Memphis, St. Louis, Detroit, New York, Chicago, and even in Europe for a couple of months.
Jelly Roll Morton, third from left, stands with bandmates outside the Cadillac Café in 1918. Public domain.
Anita’s saloon was a success, and in 1913, Bill Johnson wrote his sister a letter asking her to help pay for a trip to California. When he got there, he was a hit with audiences, and it wasn’t long before his brother wound up in Los Angeles, too. Morton joined them there in 1917 and hoped to be reunited with Anita, but Bill wouldn’t tell him where she was. Eventually, though, he found her mother, who got word to Anita that Morton was in L.A. She sold the saloon and traveled west to be reunited with her husband, and the two of them spent the next four or five years together. Anita bought a hotel in Los Angeles and named it (fittingly) the Anita.
Eventually, though, they broke up again. “I think that I have missed an awful lot by leaving her,” Morton would say. “ ’Course, it was all a mistake, but nevertheless it happened.”
The Anita Hotel didn’t pan out, and eventually, Anita left for Jerome, Arizona, where she renamed herself Annie Johnson and opened a billiard hall/bordello called the Cuban Queen. It was there that her life took an even stranger turn. One of Anita’s borders was a man named Jack Ford, with whom she soon developed a relationship. She also befriended the mayor of Jerome, a saloon keeper named Francisco Villalpando, and his wife, Guadalupe, who gave birth to a son named Enrique in 1923. Only a year later, his father died in a saloon fight, and after that, Guadalupe went to work as a prostitute in Anita’s bordello.
In 1927, Guadalupe was found dead in her own bed, killed by a gunshot.
Shortly after that, Anita fled with Ford—whom she later married—and the pair took the young child with them, telling the boy he was their natural son, and resettling in Canyonville, Oregon. (Ford eventually found out the truth in the 1990s, thanks to a phone call from his big sister by blood, Angelina Parra.)
But Jelly Roll Morton wasn’t out of Anita’s life for good. In fact, it was Morton who brought Anita back to Los Angeles. In failing health, suffering from asthma and a heart condition, Morton had fallen on hard times during the Depression. Even though swing-era jazz artists had started to cover the tunes he’d written, he wasn’t receiving the bulk of the royalties. A lawsuit and letter-writing campaigns went nowhere, so Morton went back to L.A. with the idea of producing a new recording. Sadly, however, he was too ill to play at the sessions, and he died before the recording could be completed.
The Topanga Ranch Motel has been closed down but had yet to be demolished as of 2016.
Anita was with him when he died. Even though she hadn’t seen him in years—and was married to another man—she identified herself as his wife at the hospital where he passed away. Morton himself had since remarried, having wed Mabel Bertrand in 1929. Less than two weeks before he died, she handed him a document to sign, a will that stated, “I hereby devise and bequeath all the rest and residue of my estate, whether real or personal property or mixed to my beloved Anita Gonzales, who has been my beloved comforter, companion and helpmate for many years, and whose tender care I sincerely appreciate. This shall include all Ascap royalties, and Southern Music Co., Melrose Music Co., and all property of every kind personal and otherwise wherever located.”
There can be little doubt that Morton loved Anita, having composed at least two songs (Mama ’Nita and Sweet Anita Mine) in her honor. But he was also sending $5 to $15 back to his wife, Mabel, from Los Angeles before he died. Did he willingly leave his estate to Anita, or did she trick him into signing that will? There’s no definitive answer, but the circumstances were certainly suspicious. For one thing, the text above Morton’s signature on the “will” was written by a different hand. For another, Anita’s brother hired the lawyer who crafted the language.
The question is, why would Anita go to so much trouble, considering Morton’s financial state when he died? At the peak of his popularity in the roaring twenties, he’d worn Chesterfield jackets, carried a wad of $1,000 bills in his pocket, and had a penchant for diamonds, with a half-carat stone embedded in his front tooth. But when he died at just 50 years of age, he was destitute. The tax man assessed his estate’s worth at a paltry $7,500, his “wealth” amounting to little more than that diamond, a Cadillac—on which he still owed $295—and his clothes.
The sign outside still marks the site of the Topanga Ranch Motel, but you can’t stay the night anymore: The land was purchased by the California State Parks in 2001.
His income over the last few years of his life had consisted of a few meager payments from ASCAP that topped out at $185 a year. (This was at a time when people like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin averaged more than $15,000.)
Chicago Tribune writers Howard Reich and William Gaines called Morton “the victim of the first great swindle in American recorded music.” His music publisher, they wrote “was picking Morton’s pockets at the very moment the musician believed he had hit the jackpot.” The Melrose Brothers Music Company once sent him a check for $87 … to cover a decade’s worth of work—this for a man who bragged that he had invented jazz and whose music had become a hit all over again for the likes of Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey.
Lots of people were profiting from Morton’s work, and others continued to do so after he died. The executor for his estate drew up a new contract to get more money from the Melrose brothers, who paid Anita nearly $3,000 in 1947. That was the same year Anita and Jack Ford put Henry in charge of their business in Oregon, presumably to take possession of the Topanga Beach Auto Court.
Jack Ford even ended up with the diamond that had been embedded in Morton’s tooth: Some accounts say it was pried loose by someone who had broken into the funeral parlor after his death. Who that person may have been and how the diamond ended up in Ford’s possession aren’t clear.
Neither of the Fords lived long enough to see the lion’s share of Morton’s estate, though. The royalties really started rolling in after they both died—she in 1952 and he in 1956. Four years after Jack’s death, a court ordered ASCAP to restructure its payment system based on how often a song was played commercially rather than on an arbitrary system of “categories.” Henry Ford and Anita’s daughter, Hattie Holloway Eysaman, continued to collect those royalties—royalties that kept on growing—for decades after Morton’s death. By the turn of the 21st century, his estate had earned $1.1 million.
The Topanga Beach Auto Court, meanwhile, would be the scene of one more important event connected to Jelly Roll Morton.
After his passing, the jazz legend’s gravesite at Calvary Cemetery in east Los Angeles lay unmarked and neglected, so in 1950, members of the Southern California Hot Jazz Society decided to do something about it. They planned a benefit concert to raise money for a marble plaque and maintenance on the site, advertising the event on an FM radio station in the area. One of those ads reached the ears of none other than Anita Ford, who promptly called the station manager and protested: If anyone was going to buy a marker for Morton’s grave, it would be her.
Whether she didn’t like the idea of being embarrassed—having not pursued the matter herself in the nine years since his death—or merely felt a sense of responsibility is hard to say. But the radio hosts who were organizing and promoting the fundraiser, Bob Kirstein and Floyd Levin, suggested they meet with her to discuss the matter. The place of this meeting? The Topanga Beach Auto Court.
Anita cooked them up some fried chicken, served them each a bottle of beer, and reminisced about her days with Morton. But when they brought up the subject of the grave marker, her mood soured. She would not, under any circumstances, allow strangers to purchase a grave marker for Morton. In fact, she said, she planned to visit the cemetery the very next day and purchase it.
She made good on her word and did, indeed, purchase a plaque for Morton’s gravesite. A year and a half later, she was buried in the same cemetery.
The Topanga Beach Auto Court, meanwhile, went into decline. Sometime before the 1980s, it was renamed the Topanga Beach Motel and, a few years later, the Topanga Ranch Motel. Jack Ford owned it until he died, then it passed to a succession of owners: Charles and Blanche Gaskins moved in in 1965 and took over management nine years later, eventually buying the place.
“A lot of people think this is a bad neighborhood, but it isn’t,” Blanche Gaskins said in 1982. “The guys that run around, they have long, wild hair. Most of the people around here, a lot of them are surfers. A lot of them don’t work a lot, but most of them, they’re not bad people. They’re just casual. They just don’t like to work too hard.”
In 1985, you could still get a room for the night for $30. It also offered monthly rates, as it had at least since ’51, back when the Fords still owned the business. That’s when Aneta Siegel moved in, although at the time, she payed $30 for an entire month, not just a day. She still lived there in 2004, at which point half of the people staying at the motel were permanent residents. By then, though, its days were numbered.
California State Parks had bought the land from the L.A. Athletic Club three years earlier and had begun plans to evict the motel’s residents. Siegel didn’t want to leave the motel, her home for 53 years, and it must have seemed callous to be served an eviction notice at the convalescent home where she was recuperating from surgery. A veteran of the Women’s Army Corps and former secretary at the U.S. Embassy in London, Siegel said she had nowhere to go and told a reporter that, at the age of 86, she felt like she’d just been eighty-sixed.
The evictions came even though a State Parks official admitted the agency had no specific plans for the property, but added that it wouldn’t be bulldozed because it was eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.
Thirteen years later, the buildings remained, empty of occupants except for a single state park ranger.
Sadly, Aneta Siegel never got to go home again. She died in June of 2004, just four months after receiving her eviction notice.
Movie stars didn’t just flock to Malibu during Hollywood’s golden age, they ventured farther south, as well. San Diego County was a popular destination, with its beaches, sunshine, and of course Del Mar Racetrack, which opened in 1937. Many celebrities stayed at ritzy hotels such as the Hotel Del Coronado out on Coronado island, but others opted for more modest accommodations such as the Log Cabin Apartments on Highway 101 in Leucadia.
Built as an auto court in 1935, the site was refurbished by new owners in 1962 and served as host to the likes of Desi Arnaz Jr., who reportedly spent a honeymoon night in room 7, and flamboyant pianist Liberace. Owner Jeanne Fuller told the San Diego Union-Tribune that Bette Davis once stopped in at the flower shop she opened alongside the motel, adding that she impolitely refused requests for an autograph.
Sammy Davis, the vaudeville dancer and father of Sammy Davis Jr., was a regular visitor to the Log Cabin during horse racing season, and Fuller told the Union-Tribune that Davis used to park his gold Lincoln Continental out behind room 5, his favorite room at the motel. Fuller said the elder Davis would cook macaroni and cheese for the local surfers, and his son would call up to ask how he was doing.
The Log Cabin in Leucadia, San Diego County, has hosted the likes of Desi Arnaz Jr. and Sammy Davis Sr.
The Log Cabin is still there today, unlike another popular 101 overnight stop, Jimmie Thompson’s Beacon Inn. Branded as a hotel and featuring an illuminated lighthouse tower, it was a little more upscale than the Log Cabin and attracted the likes of Betty Grable, Peter Lorre, Jimmy Durante, and Henry James. Built in 1928, it closed in 1962 after its final New Year’s Eve party.
CANDYLAND IN PEPTO-BISMOL PINK
In its obituary for Alex Madonna, the New York Times described the Madonna Inn as “a fantasy-theme hotel of outrageous excess and enduring California charm.”
According to legend, he designed it on a napkin.
Madonna was used to starting things from scratch. While in high school, he started his own construction company in 1938 with nothing more than a pick, a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and a Model T Ford truck.
Long after he was using sophisticated equipment to pave long sections of highway, Madonna still “liked to talk about the pick and the shovel and the wheelbarrow,” said Clint Pearce, who worked his way up from laborer to project foreman to superintendent and, as of 2016, served as the company president. “Modern equipment could do all kinds of things, but that didn’t mean it made sense. He liked to ask if you were only using a pick and a shovel and a wheelbarrow, how would you do the job? He really brought it back to basics.”
That’s how Madonna started out.
“He would go down to the Santa Maria River and load up sand from the river into his Model T,” said Pearce, adding that, when he started out, Madonna also used red rock, a rocky clay substance found in the region, to do small-scale jobs such as paving driveways.
Then, when he was 18, he got a job with Pacific Gas & Electric to erect three power poles on San Luis Mountain (a.k.a. Cerro San Luis), a nearly 1,300-foot peak in San Luis Obispo that came to be so closely connected with Madonna that many referred to it as Madonna Mountain. There’s even a giant “M” stenciled into the hillside, although it’s in honor of Mission Prep High School, not Madonna.
The Madonna Inn off Highway 101 at French Street in San Luis Obispo in 1962, before that stretch of road was converted into a freeway and French Street got a new name: Madonna Road. © California Department of Transportation, all rights reserved. Used with permission.
Belying his later fame, Madonna’s first professional trip up its slopes didn’t go so well: A hardware store loaned him a new tractor to do the job, but it “somersaulted down the mountain and rolled, doing considerable damage to the machine,” his wife, Phyllis Madonna, wrote in her 2002 book, Madonna Inn: My Point of View. Madonna broke his arm in three places but managed to finish the job anyway.
It was the first of many construction projects for Madonna, who got his first job with the state Division of Highways in 1947 and won three more contracts on the Central Coast the following year. In the years that followed, he not only built the inn that bears his name but also the San Luis Obispo County Regional Airport, also doing work on U.S. 101 itself. His projects included five bridges and pedestrian undercrossings in the Atascadero area, along with significant highway construction on 202 miles of road from Buellton in Santa Barbara County all the way north to Salinas.
“He was really proud of the road he built through San Luis Obispo,” Pearce said, referring to a segment of 101 that ran past the land on which his inn would later sit. “It was his hometown, and everybody was watching him”—some of them expecting him to fail. There was a reason for that: Madonna had won the state contract by submitting the low bid, but it was so low, even the state doubted that he could complete the project.
The state offered to let him out of the contract, but Madonna wouldn’t hear of it.
“He just found ways to get creative,” Pearce said. “He still built it with the right materials and the right specifications, but he just got really creative on how he did his work. He was a risk taker. He would look at any project and he wouldn’t get scared off because it was complex.”
To get a leg up on the competition, Madonna used his connections with suppliers of the raw materials he needed to do his jobs. Even when it seemed as if he might be biting off more than he could chew, he found a way to make it work. Once, for instance, he assigned one crew to work on repaving about 10 miles of U.S. 101 from Greenfield to King City, while another crew worked on a segment of the same highway between Atascadero and Paso Robles.
“We had a little hot plant up in Bradley,” he said, referring to a now nearly deserted town along the old alignment of 101 about 20 miles north of Paso Robles. “The equipment was maybe 1950s vintage, and it was held together by haywire. Our competitor at the time, which was Union Asphalt, was really upset that we had gobbled up all this work and were being kind of gluttonous. They didn’t think we could get it all done. They even had a big banner that they held from their plant in Paso that said (sarcastically), ‘Good luck, Alex.’ ”
From left: Connie Madonna, Alex Madonna, Karen Madonna, John Madonna, and Louis Bassi (Alex’s uncle) at a ribbon-cutting in San Ardo after Madonna Construction completed the San Ardo-to-San Lucas section of U.S. 101. Collection of Clint Pearce.
Madonna managed to get both jobs done.
“Alex knew where all the rock quarries were, and he’d just set up a rock-crushing operation right there,” Pearce said.
In all, Pearce estimated that Madonna worked on hundreds—perhaps as many as a thousand—bridges. He also did pavement and/or bridge work on State Routes 1, 41, 46, 58, and 166, including a long, gently curving bridge high over a canyon on 166 that at one time was named the nation’s most beautiful span, Pearce said.
Then, in the 1970s, Madonna’s company completed the final segment of Interstate 5.
“I think his crowning achievement was when he completed I-5,” Pearce said. “He had a 12-mile stretch of I-5 up in Thornton (between Stockton and Sacramento), and when he finished it, they cut the ribbon on the interstate from Mexico to Canada.”
Madonna had come a long way since the hardware store loaned him the tractor to do that job on San Luis Mountain. What ever happened to that store? Well, Madonna visited the place years later and, according to his wife, became irritated when they didn’t have bolts in the size he needed. When the owner asked him if he thought he could do any better, Madonna responded by buying the store.
Such was Alex Madonna’s influence and so familiar was the iconic inn he had created, that in 2006, the state assembly adopted a resolution declaring a stretch of U.S. 101 from Atascadero south to the inn itself the Alex Madonna Memorial Highway.
U.S. 101 today runs just east of the Madonna Inn property.
The Madonna Inn sign features a neon horse and carriage.
But for all his work on highways and other projects, the inn remained by far his most visible achievement. the New York Times writer described it as “reminiscent of the board game Candyland” and noted that it was “doused in Pepto-Bismol pink.” It’s an apt description, but the inn is, in fact a whole lot more.
Many of the themed rooms have rock walls, matching the inn’s rock foundation, and more than a dozen come equipped with waterfalls. Yes, waterfalls. Others have fireplaces or balconies. Some of the rocks used in construction weighed as much as 200 tons.
Themes for the guest rooms range from international (Swiss Chalet, Irish Hills, Oriental Fantasy) to historical (Old Mexico, Sir Walter Raleigh, Ren); from regional (Yosemite Rock, San Francisco) to—of course—romantic (Old Fashioned Honeymoon, Mountain Cabin, Anniversary Room). And that’s just the tip of the iceberg: As of 2015, the inn had 110 guest rooms in all, not to mention a wine cellar, gift shops for men and women, a bakery, cocktail lounge, gourmet shop, coffee shop, and dining room. The last of these features a carved marble balustrade from Hearst Castle, just across the coast mountain range in San Simeon.
“He was the antithesis of cookie-cutter,” Pearce said, recalling Madonna’s rationale in giving each room its own distinct character. “He said, ‘At least this way, I’m only going to make every mistake once.’ I think it was the first theme motel.”
Madonna bought the land on which the inn sits from the city of San Luis Obispo in 1954.
“The ten acres the inn was originally built on, he just bought at a city auction,” Pearce said. “He had his secretary go place the bid. I think he bid $10,000 or $15,000, and he was disappointed because he thought that was so much more than it was probably worth.”
It turned out to be a bargain after Madonna hit on an inspiration of how to use it.
“He’d travel up and down the state doing his highway work,” Pearce said. “In his mind, San Luis really lacked a great place to stay and a great restaurant, and he wanted to build something that was really one of a kind between L.A. and San Francisco.”
The inn began with a dozen rooms—and the first guests got to spend the night free of charge on Christmas Eve, 1958 (the normal rate was $7).
“Together, Alex and I decided on how we wanted to decorate and furnish the rooms,” Phyllis Madonna wrote in her book. “We had so many thoughts and ideas, it was difficult to make one choice for all 12 units. So, we decided that rather than number each room, we would name them and proceeded to decorate each room according to the name.”
Twenty-eight other rooms were soon added: 14 on each side of the original 12.
“It quickly became known far and wide,” Pearce said. “Within a few years, his occupancy [percent] was right up there in the 90s all the time.”
One thing Madonna apparently neglected to include in his grand creation, however, was a system of fire sprinklers—an oversight that would prove costly less than eight years after the uber-motel’s grand opening. The inn’s location on relatively open land, far from city fire hydrants, made matters worse when, in May 1966, some newlyweds staying at the opulent inn decided to pile some bedclothes against a wall heater. What they were doing without their bedclothes can be left to the imagination, but considering it was their honeymoon, one can safely conclude they were having a hot time. They could not, however, have predicted how hot it would get.
The Madonna Inn entrance and office.
At 2 in the morning, those bedclothes caught fire, and the flames quickly spread to a dozen units, forcing a full-scale evacuation. No one was hurt, but a number of guests found themselves without bedclothes, dress clothes, or any other kind of clothes when their belongings went up in smoke during the fire.
With the only available source of water a three-inch pipe in front of the inn, firefighters found themselves badly outgunned. One fireman lamented that, had they had access to a hydrant, the fire would have been contained to at most three units. But even so, firefighters managed to keep the blaze from spreading to the dining room, the lobby, and other sections of rooms.
Alex Madonna showed his own determination by picking up a loose fire hose and aiming it at the burning structure. Then, when it was all over, he displayed it once again in rebuilding what had been destroyed and adding to it with a pool and expo center—where his wife, Phyllis, continued to stage her annual fashion show a decade after his death in 2004. (Phyllis Madonna herself has performed regularly at the event, which began in 1987 and benefits those affected by child abuse and domestic violence.)
The company Madonna had founded stopped building roads shortly after he died, turning its attention to real estate and running the inn, but Alex Madonna’s imprint remains indelible on both the inn and the highway that now bears his name in San Luis Obispo County.
“He was very creative; he was very headstrong and persistent,” Pearce said. “He was highly intelligent, and he had a great sense of humor, and he kind of mixed those things together.… He was just one of a kind, and he was a pleasure to work for. I’ll never forget it.”
If the Madonna Inn set the standard for themed motels, it certainly wasn’t the last. Drive south about 48 miles on 101 and you’ll find another in the Victorian Mansion at Los Alamos.
The Mansion is like a miniature version of the Madonna Inn, minus the pink décor. It’s got six themed rooms: A Gypsy Suite and ’50s Suite at ground level, Roman and Egyptian suites on the second floor, and French and Pirate suites up top. There’s also a boat out back that was hauled to the site three decades ago by the former owner, who had the notion of converting it into suite 7. The boat, which belonged to the king of Denmark, was shipwrecked and remains a gutted hull—but the idea of someday using it as a guest room (despite its odd shape) remains alive.
The mansion is one of several buildings along the old alignment of U.S. 101, now signed as State Route 135 from the north end of Santa Maria south to Los Alamos, where it rejoins the modern freeway. But appearances can be deceiving: The mansion and a vintage gas station next door aren’t native to Los Alamos: They were both brought in from elsewhere in the 1980s by then-owner Dick Langdon, who wanted to make the town more of a tourist destination.
The two buildings were meant to complement his other property, which is very much a part of Los Alamos’s history. The 1880 Union Hotel next to the gas station got its name because it was, naturally, built in 1880 as a Wells Fargo stage stop.
Sort of.
Actually, the structure that stands there now isn’t quite that old. The original burned down in 1893, and a new building went up on the site in 1915. That’s the one that’s there today, hotel general manager Pearl Chavez explains. The hotel originally had 21 rooms, just two of which had private baths; today things are a little more private: nine of the 14 rooms currently operating have their own bathrooms.
The original Union Hotel in Los Alamos opened in 1880, but the present building, seen here, dates to 1915.
Everything in the front desk area looks vintage, from the antique telephone to the old switchboard. If the place looks a little familiar, it may be because Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson filmed the music video for their 1983 collaboration Say, Say, Say there. And the two colorful chandeliers in the bar? They were used in Gone With the Wind. Actor Kurt Russell has been among its famous visitors.
A few doors down is a building occupied, as of 2016, by a tasting room operated by Malibu-based Casa Dumetz Wines. The building itself is a lot older, though, and was originally used as a general store.
“It had a big sign up front saying, ‘Coffins,’” said manager Emily Phenicie, who added that the store carried just about anything Los Alamos residents might want. “It was a general store, and it just happened to be a need that needed to be met in the community.”
