Built to resemble a mission, the first – and only — Milestone Mo-tel in San Luis Obispo is a new kind of lodging designed for California’s motorists that’s somewhere between a hotel and the rustic auto camps that blossomed along roadside gas stations a decade earlier.
Designed by Pasadena architect and developer Arthur S. Heineman and built at a cost of $80,000, the Milestone Mo-tel is located beside Highway 101, the state’s main north-south transportation artery. San Luis Obispo is selected as the site because the Central Coast city lies roughly 200 miles from Los Angeles and the Bay Area – about a day’s drive in 1925.
Mo-tel is Heineman’s truncation of “motor hotel,” which several accounts say is too wordy to fit on his sign. Arranged around a central courtyard with swimming pool and palm trees are white stucco, red-tile roofed two-room bungalows with toilet, shower, washbasin and beds. Some have kitchenettes. Extra kids sleep on foldout cots.
There’s parking in front of the bungalow where a wrought iron Spanish lantern glows next to the door. Out back is a public kitchen, a laundry and a playground. Facing the street is the lobby as well as a dance hall and dining room. An overnight stay costs $1.25, according to most accounts. There is one phone and one radio. A three-story tower inspired by the Santa Barbara mission rises above the mo-tel. Clusters of red peppers hang from wood beams. Waitresses wear Mexican dress.
Heineman and his business partners envision a chain of Milestone Mo-tels stretching from San Diego to Seattle, each roughly 200 miles apart, with easy access on and off the main highways along the Pacific coast. A 1925 article in Pacific Travel announcing the construction of the Milestone says:
“If Junipero Serra is looking down today on the California he loved so well, he is noting the fact that King’s Highway, with its old missions a day’s horseback ride apart, has become a thoroughfare for teeming millions, and that along this shining pathway through an earthly Paradise there is now being established a chain of remarkable hotels for motorists, which has been given the name ‘Milestone Mo-tels.’ “
The Great Depression not only prevents construction of more Milestone Mo-tels, it leads to foreclosure of Heineman’s prototype.
In subsequent decades, the Milestone morphs into the Motel Inn, closing in 1991. Most of the structure is bulldozed in 2006 but the tower and a few buildings are left standing at 2223 Monterey Street.
TOP PHOTO: The former Milestone Mo-tel, 2005. Photo credit: Omar Omar / CC BY