When the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway opened its line from Williams, Arizona to the South Rim on September 17, 1901, the Grand Canyon stopped being a rumor and became a destination. The Fred Harvey Company moved in behind it. Charles Whittlesey designed El Tovar — Oregon pine, twenty feet from the edge — and it opened in January 1905, running continuously ever since. That same year, Mary Colter completed Hopi House, a multi-story sandstone building modeled on pueblo structures at Oraibi, where Hopi artist-demonstrators lived upstairs and sold work below. Colter kept building: Hermit's Rest in 1914, Bright Angel Lodge in 1935, and the Desert View Watchtower in 1932 — a 70-foot stone tower she designed only after six months studying Ancestral Puebloan architecture. The canyon made Flagstaff matter. These structures are why the canyon still has a human story worth telling.
