A Luhrs That Was Lost: The Downtown Hotel That Almost Became a Movie Studio

The Luhrs name adorns the twin skyscrapers that have anchored Downtown Phoenix along Jefferson Street since the Roaring ‘20s. The 10-story Luhrs Building was recently transformed into the hip Moxy Phoenix Downtown hotel. A decade earlier, the ground-floor cocktail bar Bitter & Twisted, which is not affiliated with the Moxy, had brought fresh life to the building, which is connected to the 14-story Art Deco Luhrs Tower via an arcade. 

Two other prominent buildings once bore the Luhrs name. The Luhrs Central Building, located at the corner of Central Avenue and Madison Street, was demolished in 2014. Earlier, the Luhrs Hotel was lost, but not before it almost found a second life as a unique film studio.

The Luhrs Hotel’s backstory begins in 1867, when 20-year-old George H.N. Luhrs emigrated from Germany to Phoenix. In 1882, the year after the city was incorporated, he and his business partner, Newell Herrick, founded a wagon manufacturing company.

Four years later, they opened the 20-room Commercial Hotel at 49 S. Central Ave. The two-story, wood-frame and brick hotel was expanded in 1887 to three stories and included a restaurant, bar, and billiard room on the corner of Central and Jefferson.

In 1890, Luhrs bought out his partner and added to the hotel in 1909 and 1912. In 1924, it was renamed the Luhrs Hotel and modernized.

“The Luhrs Hotel was an important part of Downtown Phoenix for most of its life,” says Michael Crane, a fifth-generation Luhrs family member. “I lived on the second floor, on and off, from 1962 to 1967, and used to walk to stores such as JCPenney’s, J.J. Newberry’s, and Woolworth’s.”

Crane, a retired firefighter, saw a lot from his room in the northeast corner of Central and Jefferson and met many famous people, both good and bad. “As a kid, I often walked across the street to the Luhrs Building, Luhrs Tower, or Luhrs Parking Garage and ran into Italian-American crime boss Joe Bonanno or convicted felon Ernesto Miranda, known for the Miranda rights.”

When Crane lived at the hotel, it primarily attracted men who stayed in budget-priced single-room-occupancy (SRO) rooms. The Luhrs family sold its other downtown properties in 1976, when Crane was a high school freshman, but kept the hotel.

“The plan was for my cousin and me to earn our undergraduate degrees in hotel management and take over the property,” Crane says. “The Arizona film industry was booming in the 1970s, and we wanted to convert part of the hotel into studio space for film crews to rent for period movies and television.”

Crane says that the Territorial-era hotel still had antique fixtures, including pull-chain toilets, wooden ceiling fans, candlestick phones, and steam radiators.

But it was not to be. When the Luhrs sold the hotel in 1979, it lost its distinction as Arizona’s oldest family-owned business. Plans by the new owners to refurbish the hotel didn’t come to fruition, and the building was razed in 1981. The property remained vacant for decades until the Kimpton Hotel Palomar was built and opened on the site in 2012.

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Douglas C. Towne is the editor of Arizona Contractor & Community magazine, www.arizcc.com