Shaffer Hotel, 1923

Starting from the end of the New Mexico trip, which included three nights in the Hyde State Park above Santa Fe, NM, operas and road trip to Taos, stopped in Madrid, we headed south and to the Manzanos Mountains, through little land grants in green valleys to Manzanos and the state park there. Jesuite Missionaries established outposts here to civilize the locals, after Coronado had no use for anthing but gold, and this was no el dorado. Later apple trees were around, maybe planted by the early settlers, and hence the name: Spanish for Apple Tree...

Good Vittles Cafe

These photos show the Shaffer Hotel in little Mountainaire, New Mexico!!! some 50 miles south of Albuquerque, in the foothills of a very green little valley above the familiar desert plains and below the high forests of the Manzano mountains.




Story: Shaffer, a yankee, came there for health reasons and built and hand detailed this place in the 20's. The place has been kept up ever since, and I guess kept secret too. The Albuquerque couple that took over the dining room, called the Good Vittles Cafe, makes great New Mex-Mex food, judging from the huevos rancheros I enjoyed, and Nancy's veggie omelet, with lots of good yummy tortillas, salsa verde etc. (my mouth waters as I write: the simple beans were divine. I am tasting them now!!) We had breakfast there, following a tip from our Manzano State Park Ranger, our last morning leaving New Mexico, and were amazed.

Concrete fence and gate!!!

The cook and owner of the restaurant said he thought old Shaffer must have had a lot of time on his hands because of the extensive detailing. He sure brought together that folk-Mex look of old pottery and blankets, and "moderne" art deco for the ceiling panels, the fire places and the lights in the restaurant: the chandeliers with the stylized coyotes holding lamps with hand painted shades!!! It is startling to see the broken cross, the reverse Swastika, used extensively, but this was before the rise of the Nazis and dates way back to local Indian design.


/The cast concrete fence for the garden beside the place shows a big sense of design and some humor, with the face of devil himself on the gate. I have never seen work like this before!!!

In the lobby, the radiators are placed up high, in hopes to help heat the rooms upstairs in the cold of winter. They remind you of organ pipes in that context..... The art work, paintings etc. are original, now faded and in need of some restoration, perhaps, done in that era when a lot Yankee artists "discovered" New Mexico, with the writers like D. H. Lawrence and painters like Georgia O'Keefe, in Taos and Albiqu working here.. Just what artist love: cheep living and colorful landscapes and Indio/Spanish culture dating from way back. Santa Fe is, after all, the oldest state capitol in the country, if not the oldest town. It had been a thriving city for a century or three before Washington was even designed!!!




Stuffed with breakfast, we head out east on hightway 60. Straight ahead is Clovis and Lubbock:

Straight as an Arrow