Blue Swallow Motel

W. A. Huggins, a Tucumcari carpenter, built the Blue Swallow Court in 1939 of hollow tile and stucco, an L of rooms around a lot on Route 66, and it was open with a café by 1941. Most rooms had their own garage alongside, the mark of the tourist courts of the 1930s, and most of those garages still stand, which has become rare.

In 1958 Floyd Redman bought the court as an engagement present for Lillian, a former Harvey Girl whose family had come to New Mexico in a covered wagon in 1915. They renamed it a motel and, around 1960, put up the big neon sign of a swallow promising TV and 100% refrigerated air. Floyd died in 1973. Lillian ran the place on her own, through the years after Interstate 40 drew the through traffic away, until she sold it in 1998; she died the next year at 89. Her Blue Swallow Benediction, a blessing for travelers, still hangs in the rooms.

Later owners restored the neon, kept the rooms in period and run it still, mainly in the warmer months. It has been on the National Register since 1993, and the sign's refrigerated-air promise reappeared on a motel in the 2006 film Cars. Passing drivers stop at dusk to watch the neon come on.