The Sycamore Inn

A tavern first stood on this site in 1848, when William Rubottom converted an adobe on the Santa Fe Trail, later Route 66, into the Mountain View Inn. Fire destroyed it, and the current building went up among the sycamores in 1920; it took the Sycamore Inn name in 1939, when it stopped taking hotel guests and kept the restaurant.

Tasting Table and other Route 66 writers tie the inn to two unsolved killings of the 1860s: one account has a confrontation in the dining room in late 1862 that ended in the murder of John Rains, and in 1864 Ramón Carrillo, the ranch manager for Rains's widow Maria, was shot while riding beside her and reached the inn's front steps before he died. Staff are said to describe a ghost in each room, and the Venetian Room's presence is nicknamed "Italian" for the cigar smoke that turns up at random. The Black Dahlia is said to have dined here weeks before her murder in 1947.