There are some things that you take so deeply for granted that you don’t ever stop to think about why or how they started. For julietremaine, the thing she's always taken for granted is motels, the iconic American roadside accommodations.
But those long stretches of driving between stops ingrained in me the deepest possible love of road trips, and the unexpected places, and people you’d otherwise never meet, you find along the way. So when I learned that there really was a first-ever motel, and that it was in San Luis Obispo, only a few hundred miles from my house, I had to get in the car and go.
Here’s how the story goes: In 1925, Arthur Heineman, an architect from Pasadena, had an idea. “He wanted to put these motor hotels from Los Angeles all the way up to Seattle,” says Sean Nolan, general manager of the Apple Farm Inn, who also teaches hospitality at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo. “The idea was that you could actually drive your car straight up to the room and park and have a good meal and get back on the road.
Rooms cost anywhere from $1 to $3, depending on the size, and were considered modern, if not as fancy as luxury hotels. Each room had a telephone, Nolan notes, which was unusual for that time. There was also a steakhouse and a bar on the property that was popular with locals and with tourists, and an afternoon “smorgasbord,” as the motel called it, offering enchiladas for lunch.
Despite all good intentions of preserving the buildings, it proved impossible. “A lot of the building itself was made out of literally cardboard blocks that were wrapped up in chicken wire with stucco over it,” Nolan says. “There were some plans to try to bring it back to where it was and make it nice again, but it just never came to fruition. The buildings, as dilapidated as they were, just started crumbling.