Winslow

Winslow is famous for a line it did not write. "Standin' on a corner in Winslow, Arizona" comes from "Take It Easy," the song Jackson Browne started and Glenn Frey finished for the Eagles in 1972, and the town has built a small shrine to it — a bronze figure, a flatbed Ford, a trompe-l'oeil mural — at the corner of Second Street and Kinsley Avenue. It is a monument to a lyric, and it pulls the cars off Interstate 40 by the thousand. It is also, in a way, a distraction from the better story two blocks south.

That story is La Posada, the last of the great railroad hotels. The Santa Fe Railway built it because Winslow was — and remains — the line's Arizona headquarters, and it opened on May 15, 1930, at the worst possible moment, months after the crash. Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter designed every inch of it, from the Spanish Colonial hacienda down to the maids' uniforms, and considered it her finest work; she had already built the Hopi House and the Desert View Watchtower on the Grand Canyon's rim. Passenger rail was already dying as the hotel opened. It limped along until 1957, closed, and came within a signature of demolition before Allan Affeldt and the artist Tina Mion bought and restored it in the 1990s. It is again what Colter meant it to be — La Posada, the resting place.

The deeper history is older than either. Just north of town stand the ancestral Hopi villages of Homolovi, pueblos the clans left as they moved on toward the mesas, and the reason to read Winslow as the southern doorway to Hopi and Diné country rather than a highway curiosity. The Little Colorado runs past on its way to the Grand Canyon.

Winslow sits at about 4,900 feet in Navajo County, an hour east of Flagstaff on the old Santa Fe line. East the road runs to Holbrook and the Painted Desert; west it climbs toward Williams and the pines. Stop for the corner if you must. Stay for La Posada.