Added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 22, 1978

It’s almost unfair how easily the Aztec Hotel stands out on a nondescript stretch of Foothill Boulevard in Monrovia. On the outside, strange beige shapes frame the doorways and sheath the corners and windows. It seems to cover the mint stucco walls like some ancient mold, or an invasive jungle plant, slowly consuming the building.

Those shapes were designed to resemble the decorative motifs and lettering of the Maya, a highly sophisticated civilization that flourished in present-day Mexico and Central America from about 2000 BCE until the late 17th century. Nevermind that the Maya and Aztec were two distinct cultures that existed at different times, occupied different parts of Mesoamerica, and had different languages and artistic traditions. When he designed it in 1924, architect Robert Stacy-Judd believed that the average American was more familiar with the term “Aztec” than “Maya,” so that’s what he went with. 

After decades of financial decline and unsuccessful reopenings, the Aztec Hotel closed to guests in 2011. In the recent past, it’s become the province of ghosts and ghost hunters. Psychics have indicated paranormal activity in room 120, which is supposedly haunted by the ghost of a woman named “Razzle Dazzle” -– described by some as a prostitute murdered by a client, or a newlywed who was shoved on her wedding night, and hit her head on the radiator. Noises and strange phenomena have also been reported in room 129, and the ladies room off the main lobby. 

The Aztec’s Golden Age

There is something ghostly about walking around the shuttered hotel today. It is itself a ghost of a once-successful, architecturally influential building that used to host movie stars and gamblers, tourists and locals, swathed in visual echoes and symbolic signifiers of long-dead civilizations. 

But for a time in the ‘20s and ‘30s, the Aztec Hotel was alive. Just over a year after its opening on September 5, 1925, Foothill Boulevard was designated an official section of Route 66, the famous road that connected Chicago to Los Angeles before the interstate highway system was developed. Motorists stopped by the Aztec on their way cross-country to dance and have dinner, maybe send a postcard back home. Stars like Tom Mix, Clark Gable and Bing Crosby were known to frequent the hotel. 

While its convenient location and the opportunities for imbibement at the basement speakeasy certainly helped lure ‘em in (it was Prohibition, after all), the look of the Aztec Hotel also struck a chord. It earned notices in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, and trade magazines like American Architect and Hotel Monthly. The venerable journal Current History published a 12-page article with pictures. 

Writing in an effusive two-page spread in the Los Angeles Times in 1927, Edgar Lloyd Hampton declared that “[the Aztec Hotel] is the only structure standing on the earth today that embodies exclusively the art, architecture and decorative designs of our prehistoric past. In other words, it is the only building in the United States that is 100 percent American.”

For a brief period In the mid-’20s, you could find Mayan artistic inspiration everywhere, from public murals to textiles, ceramic tiles and statuary meant for the home. But the Mayan revival was especially prevalent in architecture. In the years just before and after the Aztec opened, Frank Lloyd Wright and his son Lloyd Wright created their innovative “textile block” homes in LA, inspired by Mayan temples (see my visits to the Storer, Freeman, Ennis, Sowden and Derby homes). The Mayan Theater in downtown LA opened in 1927, and the style spread across the country, from California to Missouri, Florida to New York. 

This fascinating essay by Jesse Lerner traces how buildings styled after pre-Columbian ruins served a shifting political and cultural zeitgeist of the mid-’20s – and how the Aztec Hotel was a product of this shift. 

Earlier efforts to revive Ancient Mayan building styles in the United States coincided with and embodied the spirit of a period of hemispheric expansion. Following the territorial enlargement resulting from the US-Mexican and Spanish-American Wars, North Americans flocked to exhibitions where they could see something of these recent, distant acquisitions. These included displays of human specimens, antiquities, and plaster casts of archeological curiosities…The replicas of Mayan ruins that constitute the origins of the revival style served as part of the symbolic turf-staking which buttressed this imperialist notion…

In contrast, by the late 1930s, the building of Mayan Revival structures in the US had gained an altogether different political urgency. The repeated US invasions of Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had made Latin America suspicious and hostile to the colossus to the North. Wary of this ill-will, the Good Neighbor Policy of the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations championed policies of mutual respect, cooperation, and non-intervention…Architecture offered an ideal vehicle for this diplomatic move.

…Neither diplomatic offering nor colonial proclamation of ownership, the Aztec Hotel represents a transitional moment in US Neo-Mayanism, poised between the expansionism of the previous century and the diplomatic necessities of the Good Neighbor era.

Jesse Lerner, “A Fevered Dream of Maya: The Readymade Ruins of Robert Stacy-Judd” (Cabinet Magazine, 2001)

Robert Stacy-Judd’s Architectural Atavism

Robert Stacy-Judd was the sun god of the Mayan revival style – or at least its most colorful and ardent proponent. He was a British architect living in Los Angeles at the time, also a self-styled explorer, author and amateur archaeologist. Inspired by John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841), Stacy-Judd developed an abiding fascination with the culture of the Maya. 

He had experimented with different “exotic” styles before, but the Aztec Hotel was the first in a series of Mayan revival buildings he designed in the United States. In LA, there’s also his headquarters of the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz, and the North Hollywood Masonic Lodge #542 on Tujunga, co-designed with Lodge member John Aleck Murrey. His striking design for the First Baptist Church in Ventura (also on the National Register) used Mayan motifs within a streamline moderne framework. 

Viewed through a modern lens, it’s tough to avoid the interpretation that Stacy-Judd was an egregious appropriator of both Mexican and Native American cultures, serving exotic fantasies to a largely white public. This photo he circulated of himself, decked out as a Mayan lord, doesn’t help that impression. But we need to see this in the context of the 1920s Southern California trend that embraced exotic architectural styles, from Spanish colonial revival homes, to the Egyptian and Chinese Theaters, to the neo-Assyrian tire factory that Morgan, Walls and Clements built out in the City of Commerce (now the Citadel Outlets). 

To his credit, Stacy-Judd did visit the Yucatan in the years after the Aztec Hotel was built – to promote his work, yes, but also to see first hand how modern Yucatecans interacted with the ruins that so inspired him. Contrary to his assumptions that the locals were indifferent to the architectural riches in their backyard, he discovered that Mexican architects and artists were very much involved in their own form of Mayan revivalism. Though unlike his own, their work was charged with social and political meaning inspired by the Mexican Revolution.

In 1924 the Monrovia Chamber of Commerce sold stock in the future Aztec Hotel to drum up enough money for its construction. With the $138,000 they raised, they commissioned Stacy-Judd to do his thing. Bold as it must have seemed at the time, the final design for the Aztec Hotel was much tamed down from his original proposal for a grand “pre-Columbian cliff dwelling.” The interiors featured faux-Mayan murals, mosaics and relief sculptures depicting ancient gods in vibrant colors. Some of the original floor tiles and stained glass windows still remain. 

The Long and Winding Road

After a promising first few years, the Aztec Hotel began a long, slow decline. Route 66 was rerouted in 1931, bypassing Foothill and pulling would-be visitors away. The horse racing mecca Santa Anita Park opened nearby in 1934, and the illegal bookies would hole up at the Aztec. Drug deals and prostitution weren’t far behind. 

The hotel closed for three years in the late ‘30s due to financial insolvency, and by the middle of the 20th century, the Aztec Hotel was in a tailspin, going from boardinghouse to drug den to haven for hookers. New owners cleaned the place up in the ‘80s, opened up a restaurant called the Brass Elephant, but it never found its way back to its former glory. 

These days most of the action on this property takes place in the businesses that come and go in the retail shops on the ground floor. There’s an Aztec Cigars & Lounge on the corner, which still has up the old art glass windows advertising a former tenant, the Aztec Coffee Shop. There’s a barbershop and a hair salon and a cookie/cupcake bakery that promises to open soon. 

There’s also the Mayan Bar & Grill, a watering hole connected to the hotel lobby. When I visited, the son of the Aztec Hotel’s owner was tending bar. He told me they were hoping to reopen the hotel in 2023, after many years’ worth of much-needed renovations. Fixing electrical issues, repairing the roof, restoring murals, expanding the parking options, rehabbing the neon sign out front…that kind of thing. While you’re waiting to find out when you can book a stay in room 120, you can commune with some of the Aztec’s past guests on one of the “haunted by history” tours, given by the hotel’s official historian, Craig Owens.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+Aztec Hotel’s NRHP nomination form

+Lerner, Jesse: “A Fevered Dream of Maya: The readymade ruins of Robert Stacy-Judd” (Cabinet Magazine, 2001)

+Dickey, Colin: “The End of the Hunt” (The Verge, 2014)

+A Look Inside the Strange and Haunted Aztec Hotel of Route 66 (AtomicRedhead.com, 2021)

+City of Monrovia Planning Commission Staff Report: Conditional Use Permit for Aztec Hotel (May 27, 2020)

+Figueroa, James: ”Historic Aztec Hotel in Monrovia could reopen in 2015” (Pasadena Star News, 2014, via route66world.com)

+Roeske, Alison: “After Foreclosure, The Aztec Hotel Faces Uncertain Future” (Patch Monrovia, 2011)

+Rasmussen, Cecilia: “Maya Landmark on Route 66 Became Haunt of Actors, Ghosts” (Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2001)

+The Aztec Hotel, Monrovia, California (Atlas Obscura)

+Hampton, Edgar Lloyd: “American Architecture First: Californians Apply Ancient Mayan Motif to Modern Practical Structures” (Los Angeles Times, April 24, 1927 – accessed via ProQuest)