Malouff Block - Powell Hotel 112 W. 1st St.

The Malouff Block-Powell Hotel was a two-story brick building constructed in 1912 for James Malouff and in 1913 the adjacent one-story brick addition was completed. The two-story building included fourteen second-story rooms for lodgers above the first-floor storeroom. 

James (Jim) Malouff, born September 27, 1890 in Syria, immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s, joining members of his extended family, who immigrated to the Trinidad, Colorado, area. Jim married his wife Jennie Scaff (daughter of Syrian immigrants) in 1910. Jim and Jennie welcomed their first child, James Malouff Jr and a daughter, Mary, in 1913. Jim and Jennie worked in the family grocery business. 

In 1915 Jim sold the West 1st Street property to his brother, Fred Malouff. In 1917 the Malouff Block was leased to F.M. Thomson a representative of the Chicago food company Libby, McNeil & Libby for operation of a condensed milk plant. Thomson planned to have a cheese factory that would "give the farmers who intend to furnish milk to the local condensary an opportunity to make deliveries". It is unknown how long the cheese factory operated or at all. 

In 1919, the two-story building was documented as a storage warehouse while the upper floors continued to house lodgers and the one-story addition housed a pool hall. In the 1930s Japanese immigrants, Jukichi Okugawa and wife Sute (Enoki), Mr. Shinode, Y. Hayashi and T. Miyazawa, lived in the buildings.

The Malouff Block was sold to Eugene and Gertrude Powell in 1944. Eugene was born May 29, 1889 in Mississippi to a mixed-race father of Choctaw descent and a black mother. Eugene and Gertrude Mollie Newberry, seventeen-year-old daughter of Alice Hamilton, married on October 24, 1915. Eugene and Gertrude moved from Garvin County, Oklahoma to La Junta in 1930. 

After the Powells acquired the Malouff Block a potato chip factory was operating in the two-story building and they operated the Powell Hotel. The Powell Hotel was one of the five known lodging establishments in La Junta that advertised in travel publications specifically targeted to African Americans. The Powells owned the property for more than thirty years. 

In 1978, ownership of the  Malouff Block-Powell Hotel was transferred to Ronald and Larry Nunner and in 1983 to Jack and Barbara Bell. Then in 1985 to Valley Auto Parts. During that time the building were unified into a single storefront.