Midland, TX: West Wind Motel
- Samantha Gaylor
- Feb 20
- 5 min read
Address: 3808 W Wall St, Midland, TX 79703
Coordinates: 31.978091, -102.114980
EP Date(s): October 1955
Date I Visited: Wednesday, January 15, 2025 & Thursday, February 20, 2025
Building Status as of Date Visited: Open to the public, and believed to be partially occupied by owners
My Experience
Um... there's a lot to be said about this motel as of January 2025, and none of it is very good. Let me walk y'all through it. Warning, this is gonna take a second or ten, because in my opinion, the West Wind Motel is unfortunately one of the Elvis locations that shouldn't exist anymore. I would've preferred a visit to an empty field or nail salon and writing an X marks the spot post, because the alternative was kind of unnerving.
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Driving up, it looks like your typical old rundown motel in a bad neighborhood, but if you look a little closer, it gets a little worse with each passing moment.
I brought a guy friend on this particular adventure and we made sure to visit around high noon. We parked in the back (in one of the few available spots) to the left, like a pair of not so smart people would. haha The pavement near my car was scattered with charred dog excrement and dogs were barking incessantly from inside the motel; a lot of the windows were wide open; there were electrical wires running above exterior doorways and in and out of rooms; and there was a broken microwave and old mattress outside someone's door. The wall of the left building, facing the main road, has been fenced in with sheets of corrugated metal to create the illusion of a patio, which the owners have furnished with a few metal chairs, and table, and some trash. The parking lot is rather large (I'll come back to that in a moment), yet the available parking space for visitors has been fairly limited due to the entire middle section being taken up by a car and truck combo on jacks and two cross-country style tour buses. The aforementioned vehicles have been sitting on those exact spots for years. At least one of the buses originated from Norfolk State University and the longer I was at the motel, the more I was convinced the students had stayed there one night and the owners had eaten them or something (I'm exaggerating... slightly).
The base structure of the entire motel is the pretty much the same, but let's focus on the main office. The owners have built onto the street-side wall using 2x4 and plywood sheets, wrapped in thin opaque plastic to build a makeshift greenhouse, which may or may not be used for nefarious plant growing. The large motel sign that branches off the office's carport, is original as far as I can tell, but the space for the actual sign has sat empty since at least the early months of 2024. The original "office" sign structure is still there by the main building, but that too has been empty since between 2013-2018. The motel itself seemed to be holding up decently well until, I assume, it changed owners around 2013.
There is one thing y'all need to know, if you are like me and research old motels sometimes. Motels in the 1950s were often designed with the pools in the middle of the parking lot, not in the back or off the to the side like they are today; that reason is why the parking lot at the West Wind Motel is so large--they filled in the pool in 2007. Old postcards of the motel were not much help in locating the pool's exact location on this particular property because of the size and quality of the photos, and the slight change in the pool's surroundings. But, lucky me, concrete fill-in jobs can be botched, especially when done cheaply, as I can only assume this one was; and in walking around the parking lot, I noticed that a pool-sized section in the middle of the lot was in fact slowly but surely sinking. So Bob's your uncle! I found the pool I was looking for. And upon closer inspection of the pool area, I noticed something rather awesome. Because the cement in the pool is not level with the ground around it, the cement on the edge of the pool area is breaking away and the brick pool surround is slowly being revealed, as shown in the photos above. So, you can still go walk the edge of the pool Elvis likely walked in the fall of '55.
The Google reviews for this location are poor when it comes to staff friendliness, room cleanliness, and safety, with people noting that the staff are unfeeling and rude, the rooms have roaches, and the exterior doors can be easily jimmied with a credit card or knife. It is not exactly a place I, or anyone that has actually stayed there, would advise paying money for.
The motel is currently very far from what Elvis, Scotty, and Bill knew in '55.
History of the Motel
There is not much about this motel online. Really, the only things I could find out about the motel, besides the fact that Elvis stayed there when it was brand new, can be found on the back of one of the original promotional postcards. The back of the postcard reads:
West Wind Motel
U. S. Hwy. 80 West
Midland, Texas
40 Unites • room phones • 24 hr. hotel service • wall-to-
wall carpet • air conditioned • combination bath • Electric
heat • room service • swimming pool
• free morning coffee in lobby or room. ALL NEW -
Owner & Operator: John L. Miley.
Member of T. R. A.
Hopefully, I'll find more when I dive into Midland's newspaper archive. Y'all will be the first to know.
Elvis at the Motel
I have yet to go through the town's newspaper archives, which might reveal new information, so right now, all I have about Elvis, Scotty, and Bill at the motel is this:
Elvis and the boys were often good friends with one family in town and in Midland, it was the Holifield family (more on them in a future post). Cecil Holifield Jr. remembers pushing Elvis in the motel's pool in October 1955. There was a drive-in restaurant nearby and they sent out for burgers. It was around that time that the town caught wind of where they were staying and they came in droves. Cecil Jr. didn't seem to think they left the motel much after that because of the large amount of people waiting for them outside.
Sources
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