El Rancho Hotel in Gallup, New Mexico, is getting a $6 million makeover where the establishment’s owner is carefully considering how well the face-lift work matches the hotel’s historic character.
Details of the work being done on the historic Route 66 hotel are in the current print issue of New Mexico Magazine. (The story should be posted online in the coming days.) The story is part of the magazine’s “Hotels with History” feature.
Shane Ortega, grandson of longtime El Rancho owner and operator Armand Ortega who died in 2014, bought out his aunts’ and uncles’ share of the property in 2018. Shane Ortega previously owned Ortega National Parks concessions, which restored stores, restaurants and hotels at several national parks.
The magazine details the multimillion dollars’ worth of completed and coming changes to El Rancho:
He’s already transformed El Rancho’s rooms from a garage-sale mishmash of light fixtures, furniture and art into cohesive, chic lodgings. Bathrooms now feature floor-to-ceiling white subway tile, walk-in showers, and 1930s-style fixtures. Bedrooms relieved of their popcorn ceilings feature live-edge wooden headboards, Southwest linens, leather occasional chairs and flat-screen TVs.
A restaurant makeover will return it to its original spot in the Andalusian room, most recently used as a ballroom. Herringbone floors, a historically appropriate backbar, and an outdoor seating area are planned. A custom mosaic-like window will divide the restaurant and the 49er Lounge, where Hollywood star Errol Flynn is said to have once ridden his horse into the bar.
Western motifs play out over the bar’s original stained-glass wall hanging and appear on the motel’s refreshed facade, where horseshoes are part o the windows’ ironwork. By summer, Ortega plans to expand the hotel’s small retail space and refresh the long-neglected pool and pool deck.
Having stayed at El Rancho a few times, these renovations probably are overdue. An 80-year-old building such as that one is going to need pretty serious work and freshening up every few decades.
R.E. “Griff” Griffith, brother of the famed movie director D.W. Griffith, opened El Rancho in 1937. The Griffiths encouraged filmmakers to shoot movies in the Gallup area, and the hotel benefited by having a bevy of stars — including John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck and Humphrey Bogart — stay there during productions up to the 1960s.
The hotel started to decline, especially when Interstate 40 bypassed Route 66 in 1980. But Armand Ortega, who always dreamed of owning El Rancho, bought it in 1986 after it went into bankruptcy and was threatened with demolition.
According to an Associated Press story in 1989, Ortega bought the property for $500,000 and spent another $500,000 restoring it. It was reopened in May 1988 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places that year.
(Image of El Rancho Hotel in Gallup, New Mexico, via its Facebook page)
Good luck to Shane Ortega and the renovation project. Actually, I thought that the mish-mash was part of the charm but only a place like El Rancho could pull it off. The danger being that guests feel like they’ve wandered into a garage sale. I understand that an aesthetically cohesive decor can assert a statement about brand. I look forward to staying at El Rancho again on my next triup west.
I like it just the way it is. No changes are needed. Save your money.