El Rey Court

Every other property in this section was built for someone who had already decided to come to Santa Fe. El Rey was built for someone driving through it, and within a year of opening it lost the traffic it was built for. What happened over the ninety years since is the reason it belongs here.

The Man Who Built for the Road

A twelve-unit motor court opened on Cerrillos Road in 1936, put up by an Irish-born hotelier named Daniel Murphy on what was then the original alignment of Route 66 through the city. In 1937 the New Mexico legislature moved the designation onto a bypass running straight from Santa Rosa to Albuquerque, and Santa Fe was off the route. Murphy built El Vado in Albuquerque the following year, on the road that survived. He built both of them in the adobe vocabulary of the region rather than in the roadside styles going up elsewhere in America, and only one of those two decisions turned out to matter here.

Who Could Stop

Victor Hugo Green, a postal worker in Harlem, published the first edition of his travel guide in 1936, the same year El Rey opened. The two things ran alongside one another for a generation. El Rey appears in the Green Book in editions from 1957 to 1963, listed as a place a Black family driving west could count on a room. In the 1957 edition the name is misspelled. So is Cerrillos Road. That is what the record looks like: compiled at a distance, by people who needed it to be accurate more than anyone has ever needed a guidebook to be accurate, and slightly wrong anyway. It is the most consequential fact about this property, and it has nothing to do with design.

Nine Decades of Additions

The pool went in during the 1950s, along with rooms made by enclosing the carports. Terrell White bought the place in 1973, when it was thirty-eight rooms on three acres, and spent thirty years adding to it: expansions in 1977, 1980, and 1983, a two-story courtyard of ten rooms in 1993, and from 1994 the neighboring Alamo Lodge, a 1950s property next door that brought a sauna, a whirlpool with a handmade fireplace, and walkways through gardens. Five acres now, eighty-six rooms, no two of them alike. None of it was designed at once, which is why none of it reads as designed.

Two Miles Out

Jeff Burns, Matt Comfort, and Jay and Alison Carroll bought the property in 2016, renovated it in 2018, and renamed it El Rey Court. The old breakfast room became La Reina, which has its own entry here and its own crowd. Be accurate about where this sits: 1862 Cerrillos Road, roughly two miles southwest of the Plaza, out in the commercial strip. It is not in the Railyard, whose southern edge is Cerrillos Road, and the guides that place it there are wrong. Meow Wolf is a few minutes further on and La Choza is back toward town. La Fonda on the Plaza and the Inn of the Anasazi put a visitor inside the historic district. This puts you outside it, on purpose.

The Inn of the Five Graces was assembled out of a neighborhood and Bishop’s Lodge out of a hillside. El Rey Court was assembled out of traffic that stopped coming in 1937, and it is still open.

Common Questions

Is El Rey Court on Route 66?

It opened in 1936 on the original alignment through Santa Fe. The New Mexico legislature moved the designation to a bypass in 1937, and the road left. The motel did not.

Where is El Rey Court?

At 1862 Cerrillos Road, about two miles southwest of the Plaza. It is not downtown and it is not in the Railyard, which ends at Cerrillos Road.