El Tovar Hotel

The Fred Harvey Company opened El Tovar on the South Rim in 1905, built of local limestone and Oregon pine at a cost of nearly $250,000 and long called the most elegant hotel west of the Mississippi; Theodore Roosevelt, Albert Einstein and Zane Grey all stayed. A small flat stone in the parking lot reads "Pirl A. Ward, 1879–1934". Local telling makes Pirl a Harvey Girl or a passing cowboy; the likelier account is that Ward was a workman who stayed on at the hotel for years, and the stone is a memorial rather than a grave, with no one buried beneath it. A black-caped figure is described leaving the front steps, pausing near the stone and drifting off behind Hopi House. The third floor and the kitchen carry most of the hotel's reports, and some staff say Fred Harvey — who died four years before it opened — turns up at the annual Christmas gathering.