There’s no doubt that aging causes us to think this phrase, if not say it, far more often than we’re comfortable with. As I was driving past the now almost completely leveled Hilltop House Hotel, I couldn’t help but wonder if those residents in town who have been so adamant that the place needed to go realize that the Hilltop House really did used to be cool.
Believe me, I’m not arguing with the necessity of tearing it down. The place had become what developers sometimes call a “money pit”. A property that required so much in the way of renovations as to make it financially unrealistic to do anything but tear it down. Not to mention it’s location. This is quite literally the first thing of Los Alamos that many of my real estate clients see. But what if that view had been much different than it has been for the last decade or so? What if it had looked like this?
Perhaps that’s what I’d like the latest batch of Los Alamos transplants to understand. When folks first came to town in the seventies and eighties, the Hilltop House really was welcoming. In the seventies you might have met a friend (or even your Realtor!) at the Hilltop Coffee Shop. By 1979 you’d have been meeting your Realtor at the Real Estate Associates office, which went in where the coffee shop was.
The Real Estate Associates office was eventually moved away from the Hilltop House property. If you’d like to take a peek at it now, you can. In White Rock. The office portion of Herman’s Auto Body might look somewhat different than the rest of the setup. Probably because it began life as the Hilltop Cafe & Coffee Shop!
Once the addition of the second story restaurant was added by 1981, life’s special events were hosted in the Hilltop House Restaurant, later reborn as the Trinity Sights Restaurant. Bridesmaids in frou-frou dresses whirled around the floor with groomsmen wearing matching cummerbunds. Or if you grew up locally here in Los Alamos, you might remember taking your mother to the Mother’s Day buffet at Trinity Sights. This was a premier place to experience Prime Rib Sunday as well.
What so many of us don’t realize is that the Hilltop House is literally soaked in Los Alamos history. The hotel itself was built by the Waterman family. Most of us are familiar with Roger Waterman and TRK Management, but we might not know that the Watermans had quite a long history of hotel and hospitality in Los Alamos. Wendy Hoffman wrote a lovely article in the LA Daily Post earlier this year about the creativity the Watermans brought to their construction business. But if you look at the overhead beams in the photograph of Trinity Sights above and think to yourself, “hmm, how very church like!”, you’d be absolutely correct. Waterman salvaged those lovely beams from a church demo project elsewhere in New Mexico and thought they might make a very classy edition to the restaurant upgrade.
I don’t think we often appreciate the amazing flexibility of the Hilltop House. At one point a movie production company approached the hotel about needing rooms for production crew. At the time the 42 room hotel couldn’t have handled that many people. But quick thinking on the part of the Watermans utilized salvage from other projects to expand the hotel to 92 rooms. The restaurant was enlarged because the existing cafe wasn’t enough to provide for such a large number of guests, and with a lot of can do attitude the hotel made it work!
This wasn’t an unusual occurrence for the Hilltop House. In the mid eighties, the hotel acquired what was called the Hilltop House Annex at 464 Central Avenue. These apartments were furnished and maintained as an extended stay facility for those who needed a place to call home while shopping for a permanent residence, or those who were here in Los Alamos on business for more than a short stint. As a Realtor in the here and now, I certainly wish there was a similar set up now! The annex is now a standard apartment building, but still looks much the same as it did when the Hilltop House ran it.
When Roger Waterman was asked about his feelings on the demolition of the hotel he’d spent so much of his life building and re-imagining, he was practical. He was quoted by Wendy Hoffman as suggesting, “It’s outside of the market, on the edge of town, and there’s nothing left worth salvaging. It would face some remediation issues, so if it can be replaced with something else, that’s OK.” Roger Waterman went on with pride to mention the hotel’s more than thirty years of being an integral part of the community here in Los Alamos.
I’d like to thank the Historical Society for the use of their archive photographs, most of which come from the Waterman collection. You can find even more information about the Hilltop House’s long history here in the archives. Also feel free to check out Wendy Hoffman’s article on the Waterman connection to the Hilltop House here. If you have any additional memories of the Hilltop House Hotel, the restaurant, the flower shop, the gas station, or any other of the dozens of pieces of Los Alamos that have existed at the Hilltop House, feel free to share them in the comments!
And even though my real estate office at Re/Max Associates isn’t located in that cool location at the Hilltop House, come and have a chat when you’re ready to talk real estate in Los Alamos! Give me a call anytime. I’m your home town real estate broker and I love to talk Los Alamos!
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