The front facade of the Aztec hotel in Monrovia in 2006.
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Courtesy Living in Monrovia via Flickr Creative Commons
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Topline:
The Aztec Hotel in the San Gabriel Valley had a big birthday this month: 100 years old. The iconic spot is known for its distinctive Mayan design, but its life has been plagued by bad luck.
How it began: During the post-World War I boom, a group of Monrovia business owners were interested in improving the city. On the list was a new hotel, which would eventually be funded by Monrovians.
Why Aztec instead of Mayan? The hotel is called the Aztec, while the design is Mayan. That was an intentional choice by the architect who felt one civilization would be more recognizable than the other.
How it performed: The Aztec Hotel opened in 1925 with a lot of attention for its unique look, but that didn’t always translate to big business.
Read on ... to learn about the hotel’s ups and downs.
The Aztec Hotel in the San Gabriel Valley hit a milestone this month.
The famous yet quirky Monrovia building turned 100 years old. Placed right in suburbia, it’s likely the first Mayan-style modern building in the United States. Here’s a look at the historic spot’s heyday and origin.
Why the special look?
The Aztec Hotel started as the brainchild of Monrovia business owners. The city was in the midst of a post-World War I boom, and leaders were looking for a way to build on that success.
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A hotel inspired by Mayan architecture named The Aztec turns 100 this month in Monrovia. We give you its history
The Aztec Hotel complex also has spaces for retail businesses.
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Courtesy Don Barrett via Flickr Creative Commons
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The local Chamber of Commerce commissioned a survey to explore options, which recommended the building of a new hotel.
A committee was formed to fund and plan out the project. The original idea was to model it after Riverside’s Mission Inn, according to Craig Owens, the hotel’s resident historian and author of Haunted by History.
That turned out to be too expensive. Then, the idea changed to an Indigenous-style hotel on a hill just outside of Monrovia. People would have had to access it by ladder.
“ This proved to be completely impractical, but they liked the Pueblo Indian motif,” Owens said.
With the look decided, the committee got connected with someone who could bring it to life. That was Robert Stacy-Judd, an English architect who had just moved to Los Angeles. However, he’d recently bought a book about Mayan architecture and had become enamored with the style. So he poured his efforts into creating a new look for the hotel — while not ignoring the existing concept.
“He actually produced two separate designs,” Owens said. “One was Pueblo, the other was Mayan Revival. He really pushed the Mayan Revival version to the people that hired him.”
A community effort
Mayans and Aztecs
The Mayans and the Aztecs were separate civilizations.
The Mayans lived in Mesoamerica and had their peak between the years A.D. 250 and 900.
The Aztecs lived in Mexico between the 1300s and 1500s.
The committee eventually went with plans for what would be called the Aztec as a 100-room hotel. (That’s despite it using a specifically Mayan design; Stacy-Judd felt the public would be more familiar with the Aztecs than the Mayans.)
With such a large project, significant investment was needed. “They had to get 95% of the money raised before they were allowed to even find a location to build on,” Owens said.
Plans were presented publicly in January 1924 and city residents bought into the vision — literally. A funding campaign raised nearly $140,000, according to Monrovia city historian Steve Baker. (That’s around $2.6 million today.)
It wasn’t enough, however. Owens said the problem may have had something to do with how it was promoted.
“ There was a very aggressive push where they were saying, ‘You’re either for Monrovia or you are against it. If you don't invest in this hotel project, you are among the parasitic class,'’’ he said.
“I imagine that rubbed everybody wrong, except for those that had already put in their money.”
They had to cut the project practically in half. What resulted was a smaller hotel, with 44 rooms, although it still had an elaborate design.
The interior lobby. Robert Stacy-Judd painted the murals on the walls and designed the stencil for the ceiling.
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Robert Stacy-Judd
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UCSB ADC Omeka
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The furniture and wall accents were designed by Robert Stacy-Judd. The staircase led to the private dining rooms for the restaurant.
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Robert Stacy-Judd
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UCSB ADC Omeka
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Construction was completed in August 1925, and the hotel opened the next month. The hotel quickly drew attention for its geometric exterior patterns, stand-out colors and interior murals and mosaics.
“A daring architecture attempt,” assessed the L.A. Times. “The first building to be completed in the Mayan style in the United States,” said the New York Times. The local Monrovia news went further: “The only structure like it in the world,” it trumpeted.
The owners advertised it as a place where no two rooms were alike. Among the amenities in the complex were a Mayan restaurant and the Aztec Cafe and Coffee Shop.
The grand opening was a dinner dance event. Among the celebrities was Sid Grauman of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. The menu that night included items called the “Salad Montezuma and Fancy Ice Cream Aztec.” They also offered curbside service to drivers.
After opening, however, the Aztec Hotel struggled to attract customers. Owens said it was a bust partly because it was like a piece of artwork, where people would come to look but not stay. It also had the bad luck of losing its location on Route 66, a prime travel corridor, when the thoroughfare was re-routed — and changes of the name of the street by officials.
“ There was some confusion as to what the real name was,” he said. “The fighting got so bad that if you look at some of the very early advertisements for the Aztec, they don’t even have the address where you can find it.”
Just two years later, the Aztec Hotel faced foreclosure. With no profits to pay bills, the main builder put a lien on the property — and even Stacy-Judd had to sue for his last payment.
A vintage postcard shows the Aztec Hotel.
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Monrovia Public Library
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via Flickr
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There were some good times, however. The opening of the Santa Anita racetrack brought in business and a celebrity clientele. However, that vanished after Pearl Harbor, when the track was used as a Japanese incarceration camp assembly center.
Since then, the hotel has primarily been a revolving door of shutdowns and reopenings — and a place of haunted tales. It’s rumored to have been a speakeasy during prohibition, and Owens said it even served as a brothel in the 1940s.
“ They got in trouble by the military, and one of [the] branches forbid their people from going to the Aztec Hotel,” he said.
Despite its challenging history, it’s believed to have influenced other buildings across the country, including the Mayan Theater in L.A. However, the design trend quickly fell out of popularity.
