There’s a stretch of Holbrook, Arizona where the skyline includes fifteen concrete teepees, each one thirty feet tall, and they’ve been welcoming travelers since May 1950. The Wigwam Motel is one of the last mom-and-pop survivors of historic Route 66. Clifton Lewis’s father began building it in 1946, and the family has run it ever since, through the heyday of the Mother Road and the lean years that followed.
Those lean years were lean indeed. When I-40 bypassed Route 66 in the late 1970s, the traffic that had sustained places like this vanished, and the motel closed for a stretch before the family reopened it in the 1980s. Today a night in a teepee runs around $120, and the property shows off vintage cars including a 1952 Ford and a 1956 Buick. Lewis will tell you it’s not a big moneymaker. Keeping it alive is the point.
For those of us on the Suncoast, it’s a story about something familiar: the roadside landmarks and family businesses that give a place its character, the ones that survive because somebody decides they matter. So what’s the spot around here you’d fight to preserve, even if it never turned a profit? Let us know.
