THE WOMAN WHO BUILT THE GRAND CANYON

    THE GRAND CANYON — This timeless wonder draws eyes outward, downward to the layers of time below.  Bluffs and buttes seem alone, isolated, as if no humans have ever lived in the canyon or ever could.  Yet here on the south rim, several structures seem as if ancient architects had carved them from the cliffs.

    Mention American architects and the usual pantheon arises.  Men, all men.  Mary Jane Colter never makes the cut yet a century ago, she captured native traditions in stone and made the Grand Canyon seem like home to some five million annual tourists.

    Generations of tourists came and went without ever hearing her name.  One Western writer dismissed Colter as “an incomprehensible woman in pants.”  But this singular architect, a fan noted, “transcended the kitsch of a burgeoning tourism industry to capture the mystery and romance of the American Southwest.”

   From the bottom of this canyon, where she designed Phantom Ranch, to the south rim where her creations range from a Tolkien-esque 70-foot stone tower to a fabulous platform overlooking it all, Colter put her personal stamp on America’s great gorge.  And her stamp said less about a Midwestern woman than about the native cultures she found so fascinating.

   Born just after the Civil War, Colter was the daughter of Irish immigrants, her father a merchant, her mother a milliner.  Leaving Pittsburgh, the Colters briefly visited Colorado and Texas before setting in St. Paul.  There an uncle gave the 11-year-old Mary several drawings from the local Sioux.  It was the beginning of a lifelong affair.

   Colter kept the drawings even when a smallpox outbreak among natives had her mother burning all Indian artifacts in the house.  So at 20, when Colter attended the California School of Design, she was ripe for talk of sculpting a new architecture for the West.

   “Architecture should speak of its time and place,” said Frank Gehry, “but yearn for timelessness.”  Yet in Colter’s early time and place — America’s Gilded Age — a woman with an urge to build could only yearn, then settle for teaching.  Colter spent a dozen years teaching design back in St. Paul before a friend opened the door.

   In 1902, savvy marketer Fred Harvey had just begun to court tourists riding the Santa Fe railroad through the Southwest.  Harvey wanted his hotels to blend into the low, amber landscape.  His daughter, Minnie, suggested he hire her friend Mary Jane, who was always talking about native design.

   Colter’s work on a Harvey hotel in Albuquerque led to more commissions.  Then in 1904, without yet visiting the Grand Canyon, she began designing Hopi House on its south rim.

   The still-standing house drew on traditional Hopi style.  With a ceremonial kiva shrine upstairs and several Hopi craftsman in residence, Hopi House became a living museum.  By the time Colter finally visited Hopi House, she was Fred Harvey’s full-time architect.

   From 1910 until her retirement nearly 40 years later, Colter blended native style — mostly Hopi and Navajo — with her own love of the burgeoning Arts and Crafts movement.  Harmonizing the ancient with the modern, adding ample on-site materials, Colter designed 21 hotels and public spaces, including the half dozen canyon structures that are now National Historic Landmarks.

   Following Hopi House, Colter created Hermit’s Rest, a stone cabin overlooking the canyon, as if home to some lone mountain man.  Next came Phantom Ranch, an earthy structure at the bottom of the canyon where only tents had been allowed.  When park officials said her design would be called “Roosevelt’s Cabins,” Colter grabbed her blueprints and said, “Not if you are going to use my work!“

   Chain smoking, wearing her Stetson, riding the canyon rim on horseback, Colter herself came to seem carved out of rock.  She had assistants, of course, but she could, one observer noted, “teach masons how to lay adobe bricks, plasterers how to mix washes, carpenters how to fix viga [wooden beam] joints."

   Colter did more than draw her buildings — she dreamed them.  She traveled to native ruins, Mesa Verde, Hovenweep, and others, to see how natives built.  Then for each building, she imagined a backstory.  Of hermits or traders or Hopi lives grown from the soil where she worked.

   Today, some accuse Colter of “appropriation,” yet many Navajo and Hopi craftsmen thank her for hiring native artisans to add paintings, weavings, and other artifacts to what she called her “re-creations.”  Navajo architect Geraldene Blackgoat credits Colter “for using her privilege to acknowledge and pay tribute to Native American vernacular design."

   By 1950, when railroads were giving way to cars, Colter’s creations seemed sadly dated.  When the hotel she called “my masterpiece” — the La Posada in Winslow, AZ — closed, she lamented, “There is such a thing as living too long.”  When Colter died in 1958, several of her works were on the brink of demolition.

   Luckily, only a few  — and none in the Grand Canyon — were destroyed.  Come the 1980s, old Colter hotels were purchased for a song, restored, and revived.  Today, visitors to Winslow, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, L.A. (above), and of course, the canyon, can see how a single architect re-shaped the Southwest in its own image.

   “What we have here in the Grand Canyon is a jewel,” one park ranger said.  “And something that will never be recreated.”