La Fonda In Old Santa Fe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Featured in the PBS documentary The Harvey Girls: Opportunity Bound The legendary life and entrepreneurial vision of Fred Harvey helped shape American culture and history for three generations—from the 1880s all the way through World War II—and still influence our lives today in surprising and fascinating ways. Now award-winning journalist Stephen Fried re-creates the life of this unlikely American hero, the founding father of the nation’s service industry, whose remarkable family business civilized the West and introduced America to Americans. Appetite for America is the incredible real-life story of Fred Harvey—told in depth for the first time ever—as well as the story of this country’s expansion into the Wild West of Bat Masterson and Billy the Kid, of the great days of the railroad, of a time when a deal could still be made with a handshake and the United States was still uniting. As a young immigrant, Fred Harvey worked his way up from dishwasher to household name: He was Ray Kroc before McDonald’s, J. Willard Marriott before Marriott Hotels, Howard Schultz before Starbucks. His eating houses and hotels along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad (including historic lodges still in use at the Grand Canyon) were patronized by princes, presidents, and countless ordinary travelers looking for the best cup of coffee in the country. Harvey’s staff of carefully screened single young women—the celebrated Harvey Girls—were the country’s first female workforce and became genuine Americana, even inspiring an MGM musical starring Judy Garland. With the verve and passion of Fred Harvey himself, Stephen Fried tells the story of how this visionary built his business from a single lunch counter into a family empire whose marketing and innovations we still encounter in myriad ways. Inspiring, instructive, and hugely entertaining, Appetite for America is historical biography that is as richly rewarding as a slice of fresh apple pie—and every bit as satisfying. *With two photo inserts featuring over 75 images, and an appendix with over fifty Fred Harvey recipes, most of them never-before-published.

This coffee table book covers the history, art, design, food, and hospitality of La Fonda on the Plaza in Santa Fe, NM over nearly 100 years.

For the first two centuries of Santa Fe's history, weary wayfarers were out of luck. Not only did the Spanish authorities enforce a strict travel ban on foreign visitors, but there was also no place to stay in the territorial capital. That all changed in the 1820s. When Mexico gained independence, a flood of traffic cascaded down the Santa Fe Trail, and the Plaza became a hub of hospitality and trade. From the Exchange Hotel to La Fonda, the inn on the corner of San Francisco Street represented one of the most welcome landmarks in the West. Author Allen Steele recounts stories of trailblazing pioneers and the lodging on which their daring depended.

"Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter ... was an architect and interior designer who spent virtually her entire career working simultaneously for the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway."--p. 9.

For the first two centuries of Santa Fe's history, weary wayfarers were out of luck. Not only did the Spanish authorities enforce a strict travel ban on foreign visitors, but there was also no place to stay in the territorial capital. That all changed in the 1820s. When Mexico gained independence, a flood of traffic cascaded down the Santa Fe Trail, and the Plaza became a hub of hospitality and trade. From the Exchange Hotel to La Fonda, the inn on the corner of San Francisco Street represented one of the most welcome landmarks in the West. Author Allen Steele recounts stories of trailblazing pioneers and the lodging on which their daring depended.

“A haunting story about the long reach of the past.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’S Fresh Air “In this intriguing book, [Nordhaus] shares her journey to discover who her immigrant ancestor really was—and what strange alchemy made the idea of her linger long after she was gone.” —People La Posada—“place of rest”—was once a grand Santa Fe mansion. It belonged to Abraham and Julia Staab, who emigrated from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. After they died, the house became a hotel. And in the 1970s, the hotel acquired a resident ghost—a sad, dark-eyed woman in a long gown. Strange things began to happen there: vases moved, glasses flew, blankets were ripped from beds. Julia Staab died in 1896—but her ghost, they say, lives on. In American Ghost, Julia’s great-great-granddaughter, Hannah Nordhaus, traces her ancestor’s transfiguration from nineteenth-century Jewish bride to modern phantom. Family diaries, photographs, and newspaper clippings take her on a riveting journey through three hundred years of German history and the American immigrant experience. With the help of historians, genealogists, family members, and ghost hunters, she weaves a masterful, moving story of fin-de-siècle Europe and pioneer life, villains and visionaries, medicine and spiritualism, imagination and truth, exploring how lives become legends, and what those legends tell us about who we are.