Feb. 16–………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

SANTA FE — The man behind a spectacular renovation of one of the historic Harvey House hotels, those railroad way stations that opened the door for tourism in the Southwest, may soon work his magic on the long-forlorn La Castaneda Hotel in Las Vegas, N.M.

“I am in escrow to purchase the Castaneda” with 60 days to close, said Allan Affeldt, who transformed and reopened La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Ariz.

“I am guardedly optimistic; it’s very complicated because the building has to be rebuilt,” Affeldt said in a telephone interview Thursday.

The Mission Revival-style Las Vegas hotel, completed in 1898 and the first built by Fred Harvey — and which hosted Teddy Roosevelt’s first reunion of his Spanish-American War Rough Rider troops the next year — has not operated for about four decades, although its bar is open.

Affeldt said that refurbishing could be transformative for Las Vegas and the state.

“I think that (opening the hotel) would be a really huge thing not only for Las Vegas but also for tourism in New Mexico in general,” he said.

Las Vegas City Manager Tim Dodge has met with Affeldt and believes if the plan goes through it would be a big boost for the local economy.

“Las Vegas is a community that is still underdeveloped and under-recognized,” Dodge said.

Affeldt “is in it because he has a passion for restoring historic buildings,” Dodge added.

Affeldt has met other challenges following his days as a racquetball-playing philosophy student at the University of California at Irvine. In 1988, he undertook a peace march across Russia at age 28 and there met his wife, artist Tina Mion, his only partner in the Castaneda project. He also produced the first stadium concert in Russia in 1987 with the late music impresario Bill Graham, was mayor of Winslow for two and a half years and has been a candidate for Congress in Arizona.

He seems undaunted by the Castaneda project, even though the 25,000-square-foot Las Vegas property is in worse condition than La Posada was when he bought it in 1994. “This is going to be years of work,” he said. He reportedly spent $12 million on his Winslow project.

Although Las Vegas has historic cachet, it lacks infrastructure and tourism “anchors,” Affeldt said. A renovated Castaneda “would be catalytic for Las Vegas with its historic buildings and its amazing downtown,” he said.

Stephen Fried, who wrote “Appetite for America,” about how immigrant Fred Harvey built a hospitality empire that helped civilize the West, spent time in Las Vegas researching his book.

For the people of Las Vegas, this “is a level of wish fulfillment you can’t even believe,” he said Thursday. Matching what was done with La Posada in Winslow “is something the people of Las Vegas have been praying for for years,” he added.

Santa Fe’s DeAnne Ottoway of Sotheby’s has been the listing agent for La Castaneda for five years. It was put on the market about 10 years ago by a Las Vegas couple who had owned it for a long time, she said. The hotel was listed for sale by Sotheby’s for $450,000, although Ottoway said she was prohibited from disclosing the selling price.

Of Affeldt, she said, “He knows what he is doing. It’s a great property.”

The hotel on Railroad Avenue “sits a few miles from Route 66, but has become a common side trip for travelers exploring the 1926-37 alignment of the old road that looped to Santa Fe,” the route66news website says.

Affeldt posted a “selfie” photo on his Facebook page on Wednesday calling the hotel “one of the loveliest and most famous in the Southwest,” adding he had until April 8 to close his latest hotel purchase “and ponder my sanity.”

Others in Las Vegas are also excited. “It’s a vacant, historic building that needs to be restored,”said Cindy Collins, executive director of Main Street de Las Vegas, a nonprofit intended to develop the city economically through historic preservation.

“Allan Affeldt is the perfect person to restore this building because he has proven it with the restoration of La Posada,” Collins said. “La Posada is the sister hotel to La Castaneda. They are sister buildings on the National Register of Historic Places.

“The Castaneda is just as beautiful and is dying and in need of renovation,” she added.

Affeldt purchased La Posada in complicated negotiations with the Santa Fe Railway after he visited it and, with his artist wife Mion, helped local preservationists save it. La Posada, where you can dine on classic period dishes in the Turquoise Room restaurant and fall asleep to the midnight lullaby of passing trains horns, was voted the seventh-best hotel in the Southwest by readers of Conde Nast magazine.

Affeldt is probably the only person in the country who could pull off a similar transformation in Las Vegas, said author and Harvey expert Fried.

“He and his wife are brilliant at this stuff.”