Painted Desert Inn

Painted Desert Inn is a lodge in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. It was built in 1937–1940, on the site of an earlier lodge, the Stone Tree House. It was designed in 1937 by National Park Service architect Lyle E. Bennett and others from the Park Service Branch of Plans and Design. Construction was carried out by Civilian Conservation Corps labor. After updates by Mary Jane Colter, it was operated by the Fred Harvey Company from 1947 to 1963, when it closed. Demolition was proposed in the mid-1970s, but after public protests the building was reopened for limited use in 1976. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987. The old Inn buildings were extensively rehabilitated, and reopened as a museum and bookstore in 2006.

Read more about Painted Desert Inn:  Murals

Famous quotes containing the words painted, desert and/or inn:

    The truth is, as every one knows, that the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man—that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman.
    —H.L. (Henry Lewis)

    Is there any religion but this, to know, that, wherever in the wide desert of being, the holy sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me? If none sees it, I see it; I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of the fact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and suspend my gloom, and my folly and jokes.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.
    Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962)