The Hotel Paisano was built for an oil boom that never arrived. Marfa raised the money by subscription, Trost and Trost of El Paso drew the plans, ground broke in October 1929 days before the crash, and the hotel opened on 30 June 1930 into a region whose expected petroleum fortune had not turned up. What sustained it instead was cattle: through the 1930s and 1940s the lobby was where ranchers, buyers and drummers did the business of the Marfa plateau. Its second life made it famous. In the summer of 1955 Warner Brothers took the Paisano as headquarters for the filming of Giant, housing three hundred cast and crew for six weeks while George Stevens screened the daily rushes in the ballroom. Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean each had rooms at the start and moved within a fortnight into rented houses in town, but they went on eating, drinking and watching dailies at the hotel throughout. What followed was less glamorous. A later owner carved the rooms into timeshares and abandoned the venture, Presidio County foreclosed for unpaid taxes, and by 2001 the building was boarded up with daylight coming through the roof. It sold that March on the courthouse steps for about a hundred and eighty five thousand dollars, and the buyers spent three years bringing it back. It changed hands again in July 2026 and closed for phased renovation, with the bar due first.
Getting there
30.3123, -104.0223
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