Lament for the White Haven Motor Lodge

I have been staying at the White Haven Inn in the greater Kansas City area for twenty years. I was checking out today and I told the proprietor I would see her when the snow flies next time around, and she told me nope, she had sold the place. This after 51 years in business and 4 generations of the same family running it: -- is someone going to keep it open, I asked her. She told me the buyers were going to knock it down. It’s really a shame because the place is an icon.

I once told another sales rep about how I always stay at the White Haven, and he replied, “Oh, Eric, you’re so old-school!” That’s what the place was, my friends, a real throwback to the 1950s. It features real keys with the room number etched in on a copper plate; walk-in closets; Rococo furniture and antique fixtures; leaded glass windows in every room; a grandiose neon sign in the front that belongs in a book about kitsch; free coffee and donuts in the morning for 5 cents; a swimming pool; a gazebo in the back courtyard; rooms of various sizes, but all the rooms were oversize; and the friendliest service you’ll ever expect to get anywhere. They know me by name, and all I had to do was call up and say I was coming, and they made me welcome with no credit numbers necessary.

Someone told me that the White Haven Inn was one of the original motels in the Kansas City area. The place is a compound with two sprawling buildings and two parking lots, located on Metcalf Avenue and 80th Street in the City of Overland Park, Kansas. A really fine location, on a main drag: -- some of the houses around the joint are built in the same style, and were clearly constructed at the same time. There’s a permanent sense to the place, and it shocked me that it was going to be knocked down. I lingered at breakfast this morning in the gazebo and wondered at how progress can sometimes be bad.

I’m sure the place is really hard to maintain. You don’t ever get a break, the proprietor told me. Christmas, New Year’s, Thanksgiving you are always on call; people staying all the time. She was looking forward to freedom, and she said the next time she sees me she wants it to be in a bar! But I’m going to miss this place, and after October 1, 2008 it’s going to be toast.

There was another place that I had less of a personal connection with, but I thought also had great character: the New Tower Inn on Dodge and 72nd Street in Omaha, NE. It was almost a village onto itself, and I remember the swimming pool was in a separate building in the front parking lot. The rooms had outside entrances going all along two sides, and there may have been other buildings on the grounds as well. There was also an incredibly long hallway with poor lighting, and you could reach the rooms from the inside in the winter. The breakfast place was funky, and it had some wonderfully eccentric neighborhood characters in there every morning. The motel was pretty rundown in spots, but had a real urban feel to it that I really appreciated.

The thing that was most memorable about the place was the bar called the Crystal Tree. It had the original crystal tree from the Hollywood set of the Julie Andrews Hour on ABC TV in 1972. I remember I really liked that show when I was in high school. It was a really cool place to have a drink late at night. It was delightfully cheesy, and it was located in its own building next to the pool. http://www.tv.com/the-julie-andrews-hour/show/6816/summary.html

I never used to make a reservation whenever I want to Omaha. The New Tower Inn was so huge they always had rooms, and I would show up at any hour and I was always accommodated there. One time I went and the place was razed! I remember it was during the day and I drove around and I just couldn’t believe it. They built another strip mall there. Just what the City of Omaha needed, another strip mall!