What was La Posada?
Ask Valley natives of a certain age about lost resorts and the Safari gets respect, Mountain Shadows gets reverence — but La Posada gets longing, and the longing has a shape: a swim-up grotto bar behind a waterfall. Opened in the 1970s on 34 acres of Lincoln Drive’s resort belt, La Posada was hacienda-style hospitality in the corridor’s garden tradition — arches, tile, lawns — wrapped around the most beloved pool complex the Valley has ever built: a lagoon with slides, waterfalls, and the cave you swam into, through the water curtain, to order a piña colada in dripping bliss.
That grotto did cultural work no marble lobby ever managed. Through the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s — the later decades under the DoubleTree flag — La Posada was the corridor’s approachable resort: staycation central, birthday-party headquarters, the place grandparents booked when the whole family came. While neighbors chased stars (Camelback Inn) and status, La Posada banked joy, and three generations banked the memories.
The ending was the corridor’s standard math executed at scale. In 2004, developer Robert Flaxman’s Crown Realty paid $31 million for the tired property, floated restoration, then chose the graders: everything came down, and the $335 million Montelucia — Andalusian, exquisite, grotto-less — opened on the acres in 2008. Fair trade? The Montelucia is objectively the finer resort. But nobody’s childhood happened there yet.
Why La Posada mattered
It democratized the corridor’s magic. Lincoln Drive’s resorts ran exclusive by design; La Posada ran inclusive — mid-market rates, family programming, a pool built for cannonballs. For countless Valley families it was the only corridor address they ever checked into, which made it the corridor’s ambassador to its own city.
The grotto invented the local pool arms race. Every waterfall wall, swim-up bar and lagoon complex in the market — Gainey’s water playground, the Princess’s slides, the whole genre — competes with a memory of La Posada’s cave. It established that in a desert market, the pool could be the brand.
It proved the staycation economy. Decades before the industry named it, La Posada ran on locals — summer deals, holiday buffets, the metro’s own families filling rooms tourists left empty. The playbook every Valley resort now runs in July was written at 4949 E Lincoln.
Its mourning changed the conversation. The 2004 demolition drew none of the Safari’s preservationist fury — the architecture was unremarkable — but the grief was broader, and it taught the market something subtle: heritage isn’t only buildings. The reborn Mountain Shadows resurrecting its rituals rather than its walls, three years later, suggests somebody was listening.
The people’s resort on millionaires’ row
La Posada’s 1970s birth filled a structural gap. The corridor’s first generation (Camelback Inn, Casa Blanca, Mountain Shadows) served wealth; the coming generation (the Plaza, 1976; the Registry, 1977) would serve corporate scale. La Posada aimed between: hacienda charm at family prices, on Lincoln Drive frontage that was still — briefly — cheap enough to justify it. The lagoon-and-grotto investment was the masterstroke: capital poured into play rather than prestige, at the exact moment the baby boom’s children needed somewhere to swim. The result was a market position no competitor contested because none could — the land under any imitator already cost too much for mid-market math.
The DoubleTree decades (flag economics arriving, as everywhere on the corridor, in the ’80s–’90s consolidation) sustained the formula while quietly starving it: brand distribution filled rooms, but renewal capital flowed to the chain’s growth markets, and La Posada aged in the specific way beloved family resorts do — carpet by carpet, invisible to regulars, glaring to appraisers. By 2000 the corridor’s land-value curve had gone vertical (the Montelucia’s eventual $335 million budget measures the delta), and a mid-market operation on 34 prime acres was an arbitrage waiting for its developer.
Flaxman’s 2004 purchase-restore-pivot-demolish sequence — identical in shape to the era’s Smoke Tree and Mountain Shadows plays — closed the book. What distinguishes La Posada’s afterlife is the texture of its memory: not architectural mourning but sensory nostalgia — chlorine, waterfall thunder, the grotto’s echo — preserved in Valley social-media threads with an intensity the grander losses never attract. Historians of leisure would recognize the pattern: the sites of childhood joy outrank the sites of adult status in a city’s emotional archive, every time.
The final irony is geographic. The Montelucia sells transportive fantasy — you are in Andalusia — on ground whose previous tenant sold the opposite: you are home, and home has a grotto. Both are honest products. Only one of them still takes reservations, and only the other one still takes up space in ten thousand Valley memories of being eight years old in August, swimming through a waterfall toward a Shirley Temple.