Route 66: New Mexico Places

The Tewa Motor Lodge opened in 1946 to welcome motorists along the Mother Road. Other motels, many of them also using regional Indian names to evoke the Southwest, would soon appear in this area.

Today, fewer than 40 pre-1955 motels remain. Among these is the Luna Lodge. Built in 1949, the motel was one of the easternmost motels along Albuquerque’s commercial strip.

In 1939, Ralph Jones, prominent local businessman and president of the Route 66 Association and the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, commissioned the construction of a gas station, a car dealership, and service station along Route 66 in Albuquerque.

Built in 1927 to show both motion pictures and stage productions, the KiMo Theater has an important place among the elaborate palatial dream-theaters of the 1920s. KiMo, in the language of the nearby Isleta Pueblo, means “king of its kind,” and the name is certainly well deserved.

Located in the heart of downtown Albuquerque, Maisel’s Indian Trading Post has been selling Southwestern and Mexican curios for over 65 years.

The Barelas-South Fourth Street Historic District near downtown Albuquerque is a linear corridor running along South Fourth Street-Historic Route 66-through the heart of one of the city's oldest areas, the Barelas residential neighborhood.

An abandoned building in a small, quiet town does not cry out tourist attraction to everyone, but behind the quiet façade of this humble building is a little known and important story of Lebanese immigration and mercantilism along historic Route 66.

Carpenter W.A. Huggins began construction on the Blue Swallow Motel prior to the outbreak of World War II, and Ted Jones, a prominent eastern New Mexico rancher, opened the motel in 1942. Facing Route 66, the Blue Swallow offers access to motorists from both the highway and a side street.

Located in the high, scrub desert north of Bluewater the Old Crater Trading Post stands as a quiet testimony to the booming trading post and curio shop industry that once lined the Route 66 roadside.

Roy T. Herman’s Garage and Service Station in Thoreau is one of the oldest remaining gas stations along Route 66 in New Mexico and one of the State’s earliest examples of franchise service stations with its style, plan, and materials.