The Lowdown Guide — Route 66 Through Flagstaff — The Mother Road Audio Tour GPS Audio Tour Transcript --- STOP 1: Flagstaff Amtrak Station — Where the Railroad Met Route 66 Welcome to Flagstaff's Historic Train Depot — and welcome to the beginning of one of America's most legendary roads. You're standing at the intersection of two great American stories. Behind you, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Depot — a 1926 station the National Park Service describes as Tudor Revival- and Queen Anne-influenced — steep rooflines and half-timbered detailing, not the red-tile Spanish look people expect — standing where the railroad first reached town in 1882. In front of you, stretching east into downtown and west toward California, Historic Route 66 — the Mother Road, the road that carried a generation of Depression-era migrants, postwar dreamers, and road-trip romantics across the continent. [SOURCE: https://www.nps.gov/places/railroad-addition-historic-district.htm] The railroad came to Flagstaff on August 1, 1882, and it changed everything. Before the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad laid these tracks, Flagstaff was a modest timber camp on the edge of a vast ponderosa forest. Within a decade, it was a booming supply hub for the whole Colorado Plateau. The depot you see here replaced the original wooden station — this one was built specifically because Flagstaff had grown important enough to deserve something grand. Then came Route 66. Officially commissioned on November 11, 1926 — just months after this very depot opened — the highway was designed to connect Chicago to Los Angeles along the most direct southern route. In Flagstaff, Route 66 didn't just pass through — it used Santa Fe Avenue, which runs right alongside the railroad tracks. The road and the rails became inseparable here. The same passengers who arrived by train could step outside and immediately join the automobile migration west. [SOURCE: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/travelroute66/index.htm] Flagstaff became one of the most important stops on Route 66's 2,400-mile length, and not just because it was the largest town between Albuquerque and Los Angeles. At 6,910 feet elevation, it was one of the highest points on the entire route — a cool, pine-scented relief for travelers who'd just crossed the scorching Mojave. The Fred Harvey Company operated legendary restaurants and hotels up and down this same Santa Fe corridor — including La Posada, 59 miles east in Winslow. Harvey Houses redefined what travelers could expect from food on the road — fresh, affordable, served by courteous staff in starched uniforms. Look at the depot's facade again. Those steep, multi-gabled rooflines and the half-timbered detailing aren't the red-tile Spanish look most visitors expect from a Santa Fe Railway depot — the company built plenty of Mission Revival stations elsewhere on the line, but Flagstaff's is Tudor Revival- and Queen Anne-influenced instead. It's a useful reminder that "Santa Fe style" wasn't one look — the railway varied its architecture town to town. Today, Amtrak's Southwest Chief still stops here twice daily — eastbound toward Chicago, westbound toward Los Angeles. It's the same route, the same tracks. If you want to feel the ghost of Route 66 most directly, buy a ticket and take it sometime. You'll understand why people called this the adventure road. --- STOP 2: Route 66 Neon Sign District — Milton Road to Santa Fe Avenue You're now moving along the neon corridor — the stretch of old Route 66 that still carries some of the best surviving examples of mid-century roadside commercial architecture in the Southwest. Look around. Even the faded, half-dark signs tell you something about who built this town and why. The motel signs are the headliners here. Neon gas-tube signage exploded across Route 66 in the 1940s and 1950s for a simple reason: it was the best way to catch the eye of a tired driver at 60 miles an hour. A good neon sign could be read from a quarter mile away, at night, in rain, through the glare of oncoming headlights. The technology had been around since the early 1900s, but it was the postwar car culture — and the massive migration of Americans who had just bought their first automobiles — that turned roadside neon into an art form. [SOURCE: https://www.nps.gov/articles/postwar-years.htm] Flagstaff's neon era peaked in the 1950s and early 1960s, when this stretch of highway was lined with motor courts, diners, filling stations, and gift shops all competing for the same passing dollar. The motel trade was serious business — Route 66 through Flagstaff saw an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 vehicles a day during peak summer travel season, and every one of those drivers needed somewhere to sleep. The motor court model — a cluster of individual cabins or connected rooms arranged in a U-shape around a parking area — was essentially invented for Route 66. Before motels, travelers stayed at hotels in city centers and had to arrange separate garage parking for their cars. The motor court put everything together: you drove in, parked in front of your room, paid cash, and left in the morning. No bellhops, no formality, total independence. It was the democratization of travel. [SOURCE: https://www.nps.gov/articles/postwar-years.htm] Some of the motels along this stretch have survived as working lodgings, some converted to apartments or offices, a few preserved as historic landmarks. The ones worth noting: the 1950s-era neon signs, even partially intact, are genuine artifacts. The Arizona Route 66 Association has been working to restore and document them — if you're the type who appreciates industrial folk art, this is your street. A practical tip for your stay in Flagstaff: several of the historic motels along this corridor offer room rates well below the chain hotels closer to Northern Arizona University. The rooms are often smaller, but the character is unmatched. Check /flagstaff/hotels/ in the Lowdown Guide for reviewed options — we've flagged the ones worth your money. [SOURCE: https://www.historic66az.com/] As you continue east, you'll notice the architecture shifting from pure roadside commercial to a blend of commercial and civic. You're approaching the transition zone where the highway meets downtown — where Route 66 stopped being a strip and became a Main Street. --- STOP 3: The Museum Club — Flagstaff's Famous Honky-Tonk Roadhouse Pull over if you can, or slow down and look to your right. That structure — the enormous log building that looks like it was hauled out of the 1890s Montana wilderness — is the Museum Club. And it is exactly as legendary as it looks. The building's origin story is genuinely remarkable. It was constructed around five living ponderosa pine trees, using their trunks as interior structural columns. The massive logs forming the exterior walls and roof came from the surrounding forest, and the craftsmanship is the kind that doesn't happen anymore. The structure was built in 1931 by taxidermist Dean Eldredge, who wanted a building big enough to house his enormous collection of mounted wildlife — hence the 'museum' name. At its peak, the building held one of the largest private taxidermy collections in the Southwest, including a huge black bear that still greets guests at the entrance. [SOURCE: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/route-66-arizona.htm] Eldredge sold the building in 1936 to Doc Williams, who converted it into a roadhouse and bar — and the Museum Club found its true calling. By the 1940s, it was one of the premier honky-tonks on the entire Route 66 corridor, drawing cowboys, travelers, railroad workers, and anyone passing through who wanted a cold drink and live music. They called it 'The Zoo' because of the mounted animals, and the nickname stuck. The musical legacy is the part that gets you — though treat the specific bill as local lore rather than a verified record. The Museum Club is widely said to have hosted Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Marty Robbins over the decades, the kind of claim every legendary roadhouse accumulates and few can fully document. What's certain is the reputation: during the postwar country music boom, if you were touring the Southwest, the Museum Club was a name touring acts and audiences both knew. The wooden dance floor, the low-slung rafters, the taxidermied bear watching from the corner — it created an atmosphere that Nashville studios spent decades trying to replicate. One important update before you plan around it: the Museum Club closed at the end of October 2025, the building and business have been listed for sale, and its own website no longer serves a site. Do not plan an evening here. The exterior is still worth seeing from the highway, but check its current status with the Visitor Center before counting on anything. Because its future is unsettled, treat any hours or lineup you find online as out of date until the Visitor Center confirms it. Some say the Museum Club is haunted — the story is told of the wife of an early owner who died after a fall on the premises. Accounts differ on who she was and when it happened, so treat it as local legend rather than record. Whether you believe them or not, there's something about the building at night — the way the light falls through those old timbers, the sound of the music carrying out into the ponderosa dark — that makes you wonder. --- STOP 4: Downtown Flagstaff Historic District — Heritage Square & Route 66 Main Street You're in the heart of it now. Historic downtown Flagstaff is one of the most intact Route 66 commercial districts in the Southwest — and unlike some preserved-for-tourists Route 66 towns, this one is genuinely alive. The buildings are real, the businesses are local, the restaurants are full on a Tuesday night. The downtown district was added to the National Register of Historic Places, recognizing a concentrated stretch of commercial architecture spanning the 1890s through the 1940s. What makes it special is the density: within a few blocks, you have Craftsman storefronts, early 20th-century brick commercial facades, railroad-era warehouses, and the civic buildings that gave Flagstaff its identity as the economic and cultural center of northern Arizona. [SOURCE: https://www.nps.gov/places/railroad-addition-historic-district.htm] Heritage Square — the open plaza area along Route 66 — functions as the public living room of downtown. In summer, it hosts farmers markets, live concerts, and community events. In winter, there's an ice skating rink. It's the kind of public space that small American cities keep trying to engineer but rarely achieve organically. Flagstaff managed it because the space already existed: downtown always was the meeting point, and Heritage Square just gave it a name. The Orpheum Theater, just east of the square, is one of the anchor institutions of downtown Flagstaff. Its own history page dates it to August 31, 1916, when it opened showing vaudeville acts and early films — a replacement for the neighboring Majestic Theatre, which collapsed under snow load in 1915. It was later converted to a full-time cinema and then to a live music venue. The facade is one of the best surviving examples of early 20th-century theater architecture in Arizona — the ornate detailing and vertical marquee sign are original. Today it books touring acts across every genre: folk, indie, hip-hop, comedy, country. If something is happening in Flagstaff tonight, it's probably at the Orpheum. [SOURCE: https://orpheumflagstaff.com/history/] As you walk or drive through downtown, notice the mountain bikes. Flagstaff has invested heavily in its identity as an outdoor recreation hub, and the downtown area reflects that: gear shops, outfitters, coffee shops with bike racks on every wall. The combination of Route 66 nostalgia and active outdoor culture is distinctly Flagstaff — you won't find it quite this way anywhere else on the Mother Road. Restaurant recommendation from the Lowdown Guide: Brix Restaurant and Wine Bar is a block off the main drag in a converted 1910 warehouse. The menu changes seasonally, the wine list leans Arizona and New Mexico producers, and the space is gorgeous. Reserve ahead if you're coming on a weekend — it fills up. See /flagstaff/restaurants/ for the full downtown dining guide. --- STOP 5: The Weatherford Hotel — Flagstaff's Oldest Grande Dame The Weatherford Hotel has been on this corner since 1900, which means it predates Route 66 by 26 years. It predates Arizona statehood by 12 years. It predates the automobile's mass adoption entirely. When John W. Weatherford opened this three-story, 26-room hotel on New Year's Day 1900, he was building for a town connected to the world by rails, not roads. You will hear it called Flagstaff's oldest continuously operating hotel; the hotel's own published history says otherwise — after the Taylors bought it in May 1975 it ran as a state-contracted residential facility, then from 1978 as a hostel, and only became a hotel again from 1990. The architecture still reflects that deep history. The exterior combines territorial-era design with Victorian detailing — the ground-floor arcade of arched storefronts, the ornate cornice work, the symmetrical window arrangement. This wasn't just a place to sleep; it was a civic statement. Weatherford wanted Flagstaff to have the finest hotel in northern Arizona, and for its era, he succeeded. [SOURCE: https://weatherfordhotel.com/history] Theodore Roosevelt stayed here in May 1903 during his famous speech at the Grand Canyon in which he urged Americans not to 'mar the wonderful beauty' of the canyon with development — a sentiment that led directly to the national park system as we know it. Roosevelt used Flagstaff as his base during the canyon visit, and the Weatherford was the obvious choice. It's the kind of detail that makes a building feel like a participant in history rather than just a backdrop. Today the Weatherford operates as a hotel, bar, and live music venue. Charly's Pub on the ground floor is one of Flagstaff's great institutions — a long wooden bar, exposed-brick walls, and an eclectic mix of locals, hikers, and travelers nursing craft beers and whiskeys in the late afternoon light. The hotel rooms upstairs are small by modern standards but have genuine character: creaking floors, high ceilings, windows that look onto the Route 66 corridor. [SOURCE: https://weatherfordhotel.com/] Upstairs, the Zane Grey Ballroom — named after the Western novelist who visited Flagstaff frequently in the early 1900s — hosts regular events. Grey's descriptions of the Arizona landscape in novels like 'Riders of the Purple Sage' helped form the popular imagination of the Southwest, and some of that mythologizing happened right here, in the Weatherford's bar and dining room. This is a mandatory stop if you have any interest in Flagstaff history. Have a drink at Charly's. Look at the photographs on the walls — they document the town's transformation from a timber camp to a railroad city to a Route 66 institution. The building itself is a primary source. --- STOP 6: Flagstaff Brewing Company & Leroux Street — Where Old Route 66 Meets New Flagstaff This stop is about a different kind of Flagstaff story — not the one about Route 66 nostalgia, but about what happens when a city finds its next identity without losing its original one. Flagstaff Brewing Company, one of Arizona's oldest craft breweries, opened in 1994 in a downtown space that had been serving the Route 66 trade since long before anyone used the term 'craft beer.' The building's bones go back to the early 1900s — exposed brick, timber ceiling, the kind of industrial-vernacular interior that breweries in other cities spend millions recreating. Here it's just the original structure, and it looks exactly right. [SOURCE: https://www.flagbrew.com/about] Flagstaff has something like a dozen craft breweries now, a staggering number for a city of 80,000. The brewing culture here is intertwined with the outdoor recreation identity — after a day of hiking the Inner Basin Trail or mountain biking at Schultz Creek, you end up in a downtown brewery with your mud-caked boots and a pint of something amber and cold. That particular culture didn't exist on Route 66 in 1955. It's genuinely new. And it's one of the reasons downtown Flagstaff feels alive rather than preserved. Leroux Street, intersecting with Route 66 here, runs north toward Northern Arizona University and south toward the tracks. It's one of the oldest commercial streets in Flagstaff, named after trader Antoine Leroux who explored this region in the 1850s — decades before the railroad. The street has been continuously commercial since the 1880s, and the building stock reflects it: a palimpsest of storefronts updated decade by decade, each generation of owners adding their layer. [SOURCE: https://www.nps.gov/places/railroad-addition-historic-district.htm] What strikes me about this intersection is the continuity. The Mother Road was never just about nostalgia — it was about movement, commerce, and the American drive to build something new. The brewing culture, the outdoor gear shops, the coffee roasters who've set up in old Route 66 storefronts — they're doing exactly what the motor court operators and diner owners did in 1948. They found a place where travelers stopped and gave them a reason to linger. If you're building an itinerary, this block rewards a slow afternoon. Get a beer at Flagstaff Brewing, walk south on Leroux to the tracks, and watch the Southwest Chief roll through. The railroad, the road, and the new Flagstaff, all in one view. --- STOP 7: East Route 66 — Santa Fe Avenue Stretch, Motor Courts & Open Highway You're on East Santa Fe Avenue now, and the city is loosening its grip. The dense downtown streetscape gives way to longer blocks, wider lots, and the low-slung commercial strip architecture that defines Route 66 east of downtown Flagstaff. This is the transition zone — where the city ends and the highway begins. This stretch tells a different story from downtown. Here you find the motor courts, drive-in businesses, and roadside commercial buildings that served a different kind of traveler: not the tourist stopping for a drink and a meal, but the long-haul driver who needed a hot shower and eight hours before pushing on to Winslow or Gallup the next morning. The scale of everything is calibrated for speed — wide driveways, ample parking, signage designed to be read from a moving car. [SOURCE: https://www.nps.gov/articles/postwar-years.htm] Some of the original motor court buildings survive along this stretch, though most are operating as budget motels or storage businesses rather than the kitschy treasures they once were. The economics of Route 66 preservation are complicated: the buildings have historic value, but they were built cheaply for a transient trade, and maintaining them is expensive. The ones that have survived are mostly the ones that found alternate uses. A few things to watch for: the old drive-in theater site is marked on the eastern edge of town — the screen is long gone, but the property's unusual depth and concrete speaker-post scars in the gravel are visible if you know what you're looking at. Drive-in theaters were one of the signature institutions of Route 66 culture, and Flagstaff's version served generations of date-night crowds before succumbing to the same economics that killed drive-ins everywhere. The railroad tracks still parallel this stretch of the highway. That spatial relationship — road and rail running side by side, competing and complementing each other — defined the Route 66 experience in Flagstaff more than anywhere else on the Mother Road. Flagstaff was simultaneously one of the busiest rail stops in the Southwest and one of the most heavily trafficked highway towns. The two systems fed each other: rail freight brought goods, highway travelers brought dollars. [SOURCE: https://www.bnsf.com/news-media/railtalk/heritage/flagstaff-railroad-town.html] As you reach the eastern edge of town, notice the terrain opening up. The ponderosa forest thins, the volcanic field that created the San Francisco Peaks drops away, and you start to see the high desert grassland that stretches toward Winslow and the Painted Desert. You're at the edge of one of Route 66's most dramatic landscapes. The road ahead runs straight and fast through terrain that hasn't changed since the Dust Bowl migrants drove it in the 1930s. --- STOP 8: East Flagstaff Gateway — The Open Road and the Winslow Detour This is where Flagstaff ends and Route 66 opens up into the high desert. You're at the eastern gateway of the city — the point where travelers leaving Flagstaff would have felt the town release them into something much larger and more ancient. Look east. The highway runs almost perfectly straight for miles, following the path of least resistance across the Colorado Plateau. The elevation here is still above 6,500 feet. The air is thin and dry. In summer, afternoon thunderstorms build over the Painted Desert to the northeast and roll in fast — the kind of electrical storms that Old Route 66 guidebooks warned travelers about in ominous terms. In winter, this stretch can close with blowing snow, the same problem that made the road notorious for stranding travelers in the pass east of Flagstaff. [SOURCE: https://www.weather.gov/fgz/] From here, Route 66 heads east toward Winslow — 59 miles of open highway across high grassland and volcanic desert. You probably know why Winslow is famous: the Eagles lyric, 'Well I'm standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona' from 'Take It Easy,' written in 1972 by Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey. The town embraced it, built a park called Standin' on the Corner with a life-size bronze statue of the hitchhiker, and has been collecting Route 66 pilgrims ever since. [SOURCE: https://standinonthecorner.org/] Is the Winslow detour worth 118 miles round trip? Honestly — it depends what you're after. The Corner itself is compact and cheerful rather than grand, and you'll want about 30 minutes there. But the drive through the high desert between Flagstaff and Winslow is genuinely beautiful in a severe, open-sky way that's different from anything west of here. Take one of the marked exits between 211 and 225, park well clear of the travel lanes, and stand outside for five minutes — never stop on the interstate shoulder for a view, it is for emergencies only. The silence is profound. The scale of the land will recalibrate your sense of proportion. Near Winslow, La Posada Hotel is a mandatory stop if you have any appreciation for great architecture and Depression-era craftsmanship. Planned just before the 1929 crash and opened in May 1930, it was Mary Colter's masterpiece for the Fred Harvey Company — a sprawling hacienda built to look like a centuries-old Spanish land grant estate. When passenger rail declined, the hotel fell into disrepair and was nearly demolished. A restoration project beginning in the 1990s brought it back, and today it operates as one of the most atmospheric hotels in the Southwest. The restaurant, the Turquoise Room, is excellent. See /flagstaff/hotels/ for booking options on the full Route 66 circuit. [SOURCE: https://www.nps.gov/places/la-posada-historic-district.htm] You've now completed the Route 66 Flagstaff corridor — from the train depot where the railroad and the highway converged, through the neon strip and the honky-tonk roadhouse and the craftsman downtown, to this open-sky eastern edge where the Mother Road reclaims its true character as a vehicle for distance and possibility. Route 66 was never just a road. It was a promise — that the country was navigable, that movement was its own reward, that somewhere on the other side of the next horizon was something worth driving toward. That promise is still legible here, in Flagstaff, at this specific stretch of pavement between the ponderosa pines and the open desert. Thank you for touring with The Lowdown Guide. Explore more of Flagstaff's stories at /flagstaff/ — we'll be adding more tours throughout the year. --- Generated for WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility compliance.