Desert View Watchtower

1932

A 70-foot stone tower, finished in 1932, built to look ancient

The four-story watchtower on the South Rim at Desert View was completed in 1932. It was designed by the architect Mary Colter to resemble an Ancestral Puebloan watchtower, though its size dwarfs any tower the Pueblan people are known to have built. The base was made to look partly ruined, as if an older structure lay beneath.

70feet high, the stone tower on the South Rim

Mary Colter

She spent six months on research and built a clay model first

Mary Colter was one of the very few female American architects of her day, and for 38 years she was chief architect and decorator for the Fred Harvey Company. For this tower she spent six months researching old building methods, then studied the design in clay. She had a 70-foot platform built to test the views before the design was final.

Kiva Room

Logs from an old hotel roof the room at the base

The main space is the Kiva Room in the base. It is roofed with logs salvaged from the old Grandview Hotel. A large picture window sits directly above the fireplace, where the chimney would ordinarily go, and the smoke is drawn away through an offset, concealed flue. The room still has its original furnishings.

The murals

Rock art copied from petroglyphs that no longer exist

The tower is decorated with bold murals by Fred Kabotie, and with petroglyph-style paintings by Fred Geary. Geary's paintings are copies of petroglyphs at Abo, New Mexico, which have since been destroyed, and they may be the only surviving record of them.

Black mirrors

Mirrors inside show the canyon in a more abstract way

The tower has a number of reflectoscopes, black mirrors that reflect the view of the canyon in a more abstract style, so visitors have another way to see it. Small windows in the shaft let beams of light into the lower space.