The Aztec Auto Court, a weird conglomeration of Pueblo-inspired and Spanish Mission architecture (called "Southwestern Vernacular") that 60 years later turned into a folk-art project, was built in 1932, before the official designation of Route 66.
By 2010 the building was unsafe and had been yellow-tagged by the City of Albuquerque, meaning that it was unsafe for human habitation. The motel was demolished in 2011, but the sign remains.
In 2022, the sign has been reported gone.
From Route 66 news: (
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"The historic Aztec Motel along Central Avenue (aka Route 66) in Albuquerque is being torn down, although its restored neon sign will remain indefinitely, said the property’s co-owner.
The tear-down started just a few days ago, judging by posts on the Duke City Fix, a collective blog based in Albuquerque. One of the blog’s contributors also reported the motel being “yellow-tagged” by the city on April 1 as unsafe for occupation.
The motel, originally called Aztec Auto Court, was built in 1933, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993. In 2003, the motel earned a cost-share grant from the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program to restore its neon sign. The Aztec also was listed as a registered historic place by the City of Albuquerque, but that designation gave it little protection.
Matthew Terry, co-owner of Nob Hill Development Corp., which owned the Aztec, said during a phone interview that the motel had “outlived its useful life” and was so dilapidated that no good alternative use could be found for it. He said the motel had been closed to guests for months, and vagrants were breaking into the rooms.
Terry said he and his partner are “exploring all options” for the property. He said the restored neon sign would remain for the time being, and likely would be adapted for re-use in any redevelopment project.
Longtime Aztec Motel residents started decorating the motel with plastic flowers, paintings, and other items during the 1990s, making the building a sort of an Albuquerque art landmark and one of the most photographed on the Web. Terry said some items were saved from the motel, but that souvenir-hunters stripped much of the building in the days before the razing.
It should be noted that Terry’s group has been dedicated in preserving other historic Route 66 properties in Albuquerque. It re-adapted the Nob Hill Motel into an office complex and is remodeling the Premiere Motel into extended-stay lodging, despite a setback from a fire.
UPDATE 6/10/2011: This report by KRQE-TV indicates how grim the motel’s condition was:
The Aztec’s owner, Jerry Landgraf, said it would have cost $1 million to restore it to its glory.
“Everything just kept falling apart to the point where we were spending more trying to maintain it than we were getting any kind of income out of it,” said Landgraf.
Soon after he bought the building five years ago, Landgraf realized it couldn’t be saved.
“There were floor joists sitting on sewer pipes underneath the foundation to the extent there was a foundation,” he said."
From the Albuquerque Journal: (
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By Leslie Linthicum / Of the Journal
UPDATED: Friday, June 17, 2011 at 9:16 am
PUBLISHED: Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 2:15 am
History Takes a Lick on Route 66
“I never imagined living at a motel,” Phyllis Evans told me back in 1999 when I decided to drive the length of Route 66 in New Mexico and write about the people who lived along the Mother Road. “By some miracle, I ended up in this one.”
Evans, a retired Michigan State University professor of social work, was renting a room at the Aztec Motel on Central Avenue in Albuquerque and serving as the motor court’s grande dame and artistic muse.
Back then, this is how I described the genesis of what would become a beloved local folk art installation:
“Several days into Evans’ stay, she found an empty whiskey bottle outside her door in the morning and stuck a flower in it. The whiskey bottles kept showing up. And Evans kept filling them with plastic flowers and setting them around the motel.
“Street people started dropping off bottles, flowers and other objects they had found on the street – broken plates, statues, a hobby horse, a Buddha – and Evans continued to build on her outdoor artwork.
“Five years later, the Aztec is festooned with gardens and a traffic-stopping display of folk art.”
Until a couple of weeks ago, that last sentence remained true. The Aztec, the first tourist motel built on Central Avenue and the longest continually operating Route 66 motor court in New Mexico, was decorated with haphazard gardens set off by booze-bottle borders, little windmills, old signs, broken tiles, bundles of plastic flowers, battered lawn furniture, and touches of whimsy – a lost-looking mannequin or a stuffed animal perching on a broken toilet.
Today, you can count the Aztec as the latest piece of Route 66 history to bite the dust. Bulldozers have spent the better part of two weeks demolishing the 79-year-old motel.
Standing on the hot sidewalk one afternoon this week, all I could see was the Aztec Motel sign with its big neon arrow and piles of rubble.
Nob Hill Development Corp. bought the motel several years ago, and the company’s co-owner Jerry Landgraf told me he and his partner, Matthew Terry, had the best intentions. They had purchased the Premiere Motel, a motor court across the street from the Aztec and renovated it. They did the same with the Nob Hill Court a bit to the west.
But the Aztec turned out to have serious problems that would make renovation costly, Landgraf said, while its size (20 small rooms) would make it impossible to recoup the investment. They hired architects and engineers to look at renovation strategies (boutique hotel, short-term housing, office suites, retail), but couldn’t make any of them work for the bottom line.
When the developers asked the city for a demolition permit earlier in the spring, the city’s historic preservation planner, Ed Boles, got involved to see if there was any chance of saving the building.
Although the building wasn’t especially architecturally significant, Boles said, it was an important piece of vanishing Route 66 history, as well as a local landmark.
If it’s important to keep Albuquerque quirky, Boles said, “It was about as quirky as they come.”
But even though the building is on the national and state historic registers, that affords no protection from demolition. In the end, the city granted the permit.
Landgraf knows he tore down a part of Albuquerque history and a piece of irreplaceable outsider art, leaving many in mourning.
“We hated to see it go, too,” he said. “That wasn’t our intention.”
With the economy what it is, Landgraf said there are no immediate plans for building on the site.
There’s a bit of good news in this tale. Whatever the developers decide to build on the property, they will incorporate the motel sign. And many of the objects that festooned the property were salvaged by people with a soft spot in their hearts for the Aztec. As the demolition plans unfolded, neighbors and former residents came by to salvage pieces of the outsider art installation.
As for Evans? She was already gone. She moved to a home she owned in Hawaii shortly after Nob Hill Development bought the Aztec."