Motor Court Motel on Former Route 66 in MO

Coral Court Motel, Marlborough Missouri

Date added: September 14, 2024

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The Coral Court Motel is located at 7755 Watson Road in the Village of Marlborough, Missouri and was built in 1941 on Route 66. It is associated with the growth of commerce oriented to automobile travel, which enjoyed a period of brief prosperity before World War II. The architecture of the Coral Court embodies the distinctive characteristics of the Streamline Moderne, one of the sub-categories of the modernistic styles that appeared in the 1920s and became popular in the 1930s.

The Coral Court Motel is outstanding in part because of its remarkable state of preservation, but it was also exceptionally well designed by the standards of its day. Adolph L. Struebig, the architect who designed Coral Court, recalled that John Carr, the motel's owner, wanted something outstanding and was willing to pay for it. In an interview with E.F. Porter, Jr., Struebig said, "Money was no object. Johnnie was willing to go the limit. I used to take my sketch board and we'd sit across from the site on Highway 66, and I'd show him what I proposed to do. We had an open field to work with. I'd show where the trees would go and how the shadows would fall. I'd sit for hours with that man. I just tried to please him and go all-out because I knew he wanted something unique."

Among the notable features of the design are the concrete block construction and the glazed ceramic blocks that cover it. The ceramic blocks incorporate the brown stripes that contribute to the court's Moderne styling, and they have an ever-clean surface. As Struebig said, "All you have to do is put a hose on it." Streamlining is evident in the curving corners. The glass blocks used in the corner windows and as accents are also characteristic of the style. The grouping of the buildings heightens the streamline effect through the repetition of the curved elements. The units have built-in garages, a feature not unusual at the time, but these have direct access to the bedrooms, which gives the Coral Court unusual privacy.

Adolph L. Struebig came out of the large and prosperous German population of south St. Louis. He worked as an architect for Nolte and Nauman from 1926 to 1936, a period in which the firm was active in residential and commercial work. In 1927, they designed the Lambskin Masonic Temple, one of the earliest Art Deco-inspired buildings in St. Louis. After Fred Nauman's departure, Struebig was briefly in partnership with Edward F. Nolte but then went out on his own. In later years, he served as staff architect for the State of Illinois, retiring to Satellite Beach, Florida.

The motor court as an institution was an intermediate phase in the development of hostelries catering to motorists. There were few roadside facilities before 1920. However, the advent of the automobile as low cost transportation generated new travel which, in turn, increased the demand for low cost accommodation. Often private homes offered rooms to these "tourists" or "transients," but many of the earliest motorists stayed in campgrounds. These sites could be upgraded by simple frame cabins, little more than shelters for camping equipment.

As competition increased, however, cabins began to be improved. Indoor plumbing, heaters, inner-spring mattresses, and more substantial construction appeared. The informal cluster of cabins became the cabin court, also called the cottage court, the tourist court, or the motor court. Courtors, as the people who owned and managed these facilities were called, sought to attract passing motorists with architectural themes, mimicking Spanish missions, adobe pueblos, Indian tepees, Dutch mills, and medieval villages. By the late 1930s, the Tourist Court Journal was urging its readers to abandon the older visual metaphors in favor of clean-lined and efficient modern design. At the same time the internal amenities of the courts reached urban standards. As one salesman was quoted, "The motor court of today has everything a good hotel has, with free garage, no tipping, also more privacy.

The Coral Court Motel was a perfect incarnation of these ideals, with its substantial construction, high style, and built-in garages. Privacy was no doubt an important consideration for the builder, John Carr. "Johnnie Carr was a very high-class guy," recalled a friend of 45 years, "very impressive-looking, very charitable … not a con man but a nice guy, a gentleman. Women were naturally attracted to him, which is probably why he was in the business he was in." The privacy assured by the garages and by the management of the motel has contributed to the Coral Court's local reputation, which seems to induce whispered asides and loud laughter.

Constructed in 1941, the Coral Court Motel also benefited from the economic boom which began in 1940. With the upsurge in war-related production, prosperity came to the industry of motor camp and court as well as to most of the American economy. According to James Belasco, the expansion "put more Americans than ever on the road, both for business and for pleasure, and with more to spend." Much of the success of the Coral Court was also due to its location on Route 66, the fabled highway to the southwest. After crossing the Mississippi River, Route 66 followed Chippewa Avenue and Watson Road to the western edge of St. Louis, about three hundred miles or one day's travel from Chicago. Iver Peterson, who retraced the route in 1984, wrote "This is where you started looking for your first night's sleep on the road." Located in Marlborough, on the western edge of St. Louis, Coral Court must have seemed a logical choice for many travelers. In 1942, travel again declined with the imposition of gasoline rationing. However, for the well-located court or camp, such as Coral Court, price controls and 100 percent occupancy guaranteed prosperity.

Route 66 was designated in 1926, a year after the first U.S. highways were numbered. It extended from Chicago to Santa Monica, through the heart of America's southwest. In the 1930's, it became the path of migration from the Dust Bowl to the fields of southern California, a phenomenon raised to epic proportions in the writings of John Steinbeck and the photographs of Dorothea Lange. More pertinent to the Coral Court, Route 66 also became "an asphalt monument to the American entrepreneurial spirit." In the 1940's, it carried more out-of-state traffic than any other highway in Missouri. Lined with independently owned and operated businesses catering to the needs of these travelers, it was assiduously promoted by the Highway 66 Association, so that by the time Bobby Troup's song "Route 66" was recorded in 1946, the name had already become a household word. The television series which ran from 1960 through 1964 consolidated that reputation.

The construction of the interstate highway system marked the end of Route 66. The new limited access roads (Interstates 55, 44, and 40) were built directly on top of the old right-of-way to a greater extent than was true of most other U.S. highways. Where business and population centers proved obstacles, they were bypassed. By December, 1972, Chippewa Avenue, Watson Road, and the Coral Court Motel had been bypassed by a newly completed section of Interstate 44. By 1981, only two segments along the original 2200 mile route retained their original designation and, in 1984, the last section in Williams, Arizona, was also bypassed.

During this same period, the motor court gave way to homogenized franchised motel chains, with bedrooms arranged all in a row under one roof instead of in separate buildings. Moderne gave way to International Modern, and even the term "motor court" gave way to "motel." The passing of Route 66, then, symbolized the end of a whole era in the evolving culture of the road. Organizations such as the Society for Commercial Archaeology began to study roadside America as they would an ancient civilization. The survival of the Coral Court in the midst of all these changes is nearly miraculous. It was noted in 1984 by Iver Peterson in the nostalgic trip he took down the surviving, renumbered sections of Route 66 for Rolling Stone. Talking about the attractions of the merging motor court to the early motorist, he wrote, "The best of them, the Coral Court Motel, is still there, all glazed tile, glass block, and serpentine walls, nestled discreetly among the oak and walnut trees."

In recent years, the survival of the Coral Court has been threatened. John Carr died in 1984 at the age of 83, leaving his interest in the motel corporation in equal parts to his widow Jessie and the housekeeper Martha Shutt. The property is currently owned by Mrs. Carr, who is now the wife of Robert G. Williams. While maintaining the motel to its usual high standards, they have twice in recent years optioned it to shopping center developers.

Site Description

The Coral Court Motel occupies a tract of 8.5 acres at 7755 Watson Road (formerly U.S. 66) in the Village of Marlborough. It is a complex of thirty buildings, most of which are one story high with flat roofs and clad in yellow and brown glazed tile streamlined in the modernistic style of the '30s called Art Deco or Moderne. Many of the windows are made of glass block, including the cylindrical center window of the office, which dominates the street front of the complex. Most of the buildings house two or four bedroom-bathroom units, each with its own built-in garage. Three structures to the rear have hipped roofs accommodating second-floor units. Two frame houses and a frame storage building are located in inconspicuous positions off to one side of the complex. To the rear of the site is located a pool complex (pool and small pool house) which also does not appear to be original to the motel complex. Buildings in the complex are set back at least fifty feet from the road and more than two-hundred feet from the residential neighborhood behind, and the grounds are meticulously landscaped with lawns, shrubs, and towering oaks contemporary with the buildings. Along the road, the grounds are set off by chains supported by squared fields tone piers, which are also contemporary with the buildings; both the landscaping and fence contribute to the historic character of the complex. A large aluminum and neon pylon-type sign stands between the office and the fence. The Coral Court is virtually unchanged from its original condition, and its very high level of maintenance makes it a showplace of roadside architecture.

The basic unit of the Coral Court is the two-unit building. In these small structures, the two units are separated by a pair of garages, each with its own remote-control door. The pedestrian doors are set into a curving wall, and each room has a second curving wall of glass brick that supplements the more conventional three-part louvered windows.

The syncopated rhythm created by the repetition of these unequal curves is given further complexity by the irregular placement of the two-room units on the site, as well as by slight variations in the unit plans and the patterns of the glass brick. Some patterns step down to the left, some to the right; others narrow at the top like mosaic Christmas trees. Additional glass bricks are used for small windows over the garage doors and, in some of the units, as a frieze in the striped band below the parapet.

The ceramic tiles are really hollow blocks, 3 3/4 inches thick. They were supplied by Architex Ceramics, Inc., of Brazil, Indiana. The tiles are veneered over standard concrete block, making the wall a foot thick. Two shapes of tiles are used, a conventional horizontal shape for the flat surfaces and a more vertical one for the curved. Shaped tiles are used for the window sills and surrounds and for the roof parapets.

The office building, located at the front of the complex, has seven bays overlooking the highway. The center three break forward with curving corners, and the center bay itself is a projecting semicylinder of glass block with a tile parapet a foot or two higher than the rest of the building. At the east end of the building, the basement level is exposed between two stone retaining walls and accommodates a two-car garage.

The center three bays of the entrance side of the building break forward under a metal canopy. These corners are also rounded and have glass block windows. At the west side of this block is a large chimney, and a second, smaller chimney rises from the east side. The street front of this building has been slightly modified by the insertion of air-conditioning units in the wall.

Three larger buildings with hipped roofs and large frame dormers stand at the northwest end of the complex. The front elevations of these buildings are simpler versions of the earlier buildings, with central garage doors and corner windows. Above the garage doors and in the corresponding position to the rear are wide shed-roofed frame dormers. On the side elevations, similarly detailed dormers extend to the edge of the roof, giving them a height sufficient to accommodate two doors as well as two windows. The doors are reached by metal staircases; those on the east building and at the west end of the west building are freestanding, but between the west and center buildings the staircases are joined into one elaborate composition.

At the southwest corner of the property are three smaller tile buildings with low hipped roofs. One is a single motel unit. A second building has three front bays and one side bay, while the third building has two front bays and two side ones, with a chimney rising from the north wall; both of these are service buildings. All these buildings have darker buff surrounds around doors and windows and brown stripes forming a frieze just below the overhanging roofline.

Where the ground drops at the north edge of the property are three freestanding frame buildings and a small frame addition to one of the tile structures. The smallest of these is a storage building of square plan with a pyramidal roof. The larger ones, with hipped roofs, are residences. The largest one has its main floor at the upper level and a partly exposed basement against which is a hipped roof supported by corner posts. These two buildings do not contribute to the overall character of the Coral Court Motel, but because of their secluded positions, they have little impact on the overall appearance of the complex.

The pool complex to the rear of the property also appears to be a later addition. The pool house is constructed of vertical corrugated metal in pink and pale yellow, with a corrugated metal roof. The pool itself is set ona grassy plateau above the level of the nearby drive and thus the pool complex makes little visual impact on the motel, except for a chain link fence surrounding the pool and pool house.

The landscaping of the complex contributes to the significance of the district and is a major component in the motel's historic appeal. Lawns surround the complex on all sides and the landscaping is unimpaired because the garages connected with each unit directly remove cars from sight. The narrow strips immediately in front of the units are graveled and accented with low Japanese yews. Along the highway a row of pfitzers mark low pylons of squared rock-faced limestone capped by ashlar squares. Heavy chains hang between the pylons, creating a fence, which is original to the complex. At the two main entries taller pylons support pylon-shaped deco-style lights. The entire complex is sheltered by a canopy of pin oaks that have been pruned over the years to enhance their height.

The main sign is a tall pylon with flag-like banners of ascending size cantilevered from it. The lowest banner is a marquee-like billboard, backlighted and with movable letters. The narrow middle banner says "Moderate Rates," while the pink or coral-colored, neon-lighted top banner says "Coral Court Motel." The main pier of the sign is fluted aluminum. The similarity of this sign to the Holiday Inn "Great Sign," which was designed in 1951 by Eddie Bluestein, suggests that this sign too dates from the early 1950s.

The owners of the Coral Court Motel have, over the years, adhered to the highest standard of maintenance. Even the asphalt driveways, resealed annually, have an exceptionally clean black appearance. On a clear summer day not a leaf is out of place in its extensive plantings. The green of the lawns, the yellow and brown of the tiles, and the blue of the sky combine to lift the spirits of any lover of America's commercial archaeology.