The Depot Theater Company is a major tenant in the building and the crown jewel of the Southwest Kansas theater scene.
Department of Transportation via the TEA-21 reimbursement program and the Kansas State Historical Society, as well as private donations gathered by the Boot Hill Repertory Company (now the Depot Theater Company) and funding from Dodge City. From 2000 to 2003, the depot and the El Vaquero/Harvey House restaurant were renovated with funding through grants from the Kansas Department of Transportation, U. The Santa Fe Depot, the largest depot still standing in the state of Kansas, has been completely rehabilitated to its early appearance and is today 100 percent occupied. In 1996, BNSF Railway donated the depot to the city, and it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.
Portions of the hotel structure were used thereafter as railroad offices, while other areas were boarded up with all the furnishings and fixtures left in place. Drawing on these traditions, the railroad and Fred Harvey created resorts replete with a bit of exoticism that drew tourists from across the United States and even abroad.įaced with a decline in passenger rail traffic, many Harvey Houses were shuttered in the 1940s and 1950s–including El Vaquero, which closed in 1948. The buildings often adhered to fanciful designs that looked to the region’s American Indian and Spanish past. The food was generally of poor quality until Fred Harvey revolutionized the offerings starting in the 1870s.īy the turn of the 20th century, the ATSF and Fred Harvey had begun to build a series of trackside hotels in the Southwest that were meant to attract tourists and help generate money for both companies. In the days before dining cars became common, passengers had to detrain in order to eat a meal at a trackside restaurant. The “Harvey Houses,” as they were known, dotted the ATSF tracks across the West. Occupying almost two blocks, the building included a passenger depot and railroad offices, as well as a hotel and eating house run by Fred Harvey. The Amtrak stop in Dodge City is located at the former El Vaquero Harvey House and depot, a two-story red brick Richardsonian Romanesque style structure that was built in 1898 by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (ATSF) and subsequently enlarged and altered.
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