Gardenway Motel

2958 Missouri 100, Gray Summit, MO
Phone:

East < GO > West

The Gardenway is one of those motels that is so long it is difficult to get it all in one photo. Louis Eckelcamp started out in 1945 by building a motel with 25 rooms each with tile baths. He named it the Gardenway Motel and expanded it in the early 1950s with the addition of 16 more rooms in a second building behind the original, bringing the total room count to 41. Late in 2014 the Gardenway Motel closed abruptly after 70 years of operation by the same family.

It is located just west of Shaw Nature Reserve / Missouri Botanical Gardens on MO 100 which is the original alignment of Route 66 at that point.
Probably the most distinctive feature of the motel in later years was the huge GARDENWAY neon sign on the roof. That sign was added to the roof after I-44 opened and siphoned traffic of the old road out front. The apparent hope was that travelers on the freeway would see the sign and pull off. The top bar in the "E" is missing in this photo. The sign is long gone now.

Another neon sign stands out front by the office. Glass blocks make up part of the lower section of this sign. The name is a take off on the Henry Shaw Gardenway, a portion of Route 66 from St. Louis to the Botanical Gardens in Gray Summit. The road got its name as a tribute to Henry Shaw who was instrumental in the development of the Botanical Gardens. This sign has been mostly dismantled hauled away, only the stonework remained in 2021.

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Vintage Advertising Highlights

Gardenway Motel
Located on U.S. 66 & U.S. 50, Robertsville, Mo.
1 block west of Beautiful Shaw's Garden.
25 Modern Cabins with Tile Baths &
Air Conditioning
FREE Television in ALL Rooms

NOTE: Here's another example of the mailing address not matching the actual location, probably by some quirk of Post Office mapping. Anyway note that the large neon GARDENWAY sign wasn't yet on the roof.
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Photo(s): 2016