Museum unveils restored Tucumcari Motel sign

The New Mexico Route 66 Museum in Tucumcari on Monday officially unveiled the restored Tucumcari Motel neon sign.

Here’s a brief Facebook video of the unveiling:

Eight Ball Engineering in Clovis, New Mexico, restored the sign’s paint. Wellborn Sign Company in Amarillo, Texas, restored the neon.

To show you how far the sign has come, look at this shortly after a suspicious fire destroyed the motel in 2014:

The motel never was on Route 66, but roadies often photographed it and its worn-down neon sign after finding it. The motel was a two-story structure at Adams and Smith streets in Tucumcari, and it also contained a few cabins in the back.

This structure dated to at least 1913, making it probably the oldest surviving hotel in Tucumcari at the time of the fire. Known early in its existence as The Antler House, it later was called the Palace Hotel, then Oklahoma Rooms in the late 1940s and finally Tucumcari Motel in the mid-1950s.

The motel sat on old U.S. 54 and was thought to have been on an original alignment of the old Ozark Trail.

The local housing authority owned and used the Tucumcari Motel  for years until a previous fire rendered it uninhabitable. It had sat abandoned since.

(Images via the New Mexico Route 66 Museum via Facebook)

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