The Three Great Hotels of San Francisco

San Francisco holds its civic memory differently from most American cities. It has been built twice, literally, in the case of everything that stood before April 18, 1906, and the second building was done with the particular intentionality of a place that understands what it lost and is determined not to lose it again. Three of its hotels contain the accumulated record of the city from its Gilded Age ambitions through the Cold War and into the present. The Palace, the Fairmont, and the St. Francis are archives. To understand them with any seriousness is to understand something essential about San Francisco, the version that aspired, that survived, and that bore witness.

The Palace, 1875

William Chapman Ralston never saw the hotel he built. The Bank of California, whose deposits had financed the $5 million construction, collapsed on August 27, 1875. Within hours of losing the institution he had founded, Ralston’s body was found floating in San Francisco Bay. Whether he drowned by stroke or by design, the city’s most consequential financier died two months before the doors of his masterwork opened. The hotel’s first guests arrived on October 2, 1875, into the lobby of a man who would never see it.

What they entered was genuinely unprecedented. Seven stories and 755 guest rooms on a two and a half acre site, at the time of completion, the largest hotel in the Western United States and, by most credible accounts, the largest in the world. The engineering was ahead of its era: four hydraulic elevators called “lifting rooms,” an internal telegraph system, electric call buttons in every room. But the defining gesture was the Grand Court, a vast enclosed carriage entrance beneath a soaring glass skylight, where horses and coaches deposited their passengers onto marble floors while guests watched from the surrounding galleries above. It was a theater of arrival, and San Francisco had nothing remotely like it.

On April 18, 1906, at 5:12 in the morning, the earthquake struck. The Palace survived the initial shock. Enrico Caruso, who had performed in Carmen at the San Francisco Opera the night before, was asleep in his suite when the building moved, and stumbled out into the street reportedly declaring that he would never return to the city. He never did. By late that afternoon, the fires that followed the earthquake had consumed the Palace entirely. What remained was a shell and a ruin that contained, somewhere in its debris, the memory of three decades of California history.

The second Palace Hotel opened December 19, 1909, rebuilt from the foundations up at a cost nearly double the original. What it gave the city in exchange for the loss was the Garden Court. Replacing the old Grand Court on the same footprint, the new dining room was assembled with 70,000 panels of leaded glass forming its domed ceiling, Austrian crystal chandeliers of a scale not seen elsewhere in the American West, and Italian marble columns of a white that the California light turned almost silver. It was designated San Francisco Landmark Number 18 in 1969. That designation was warranted and, if anything, understated: the Garden Court remains among the most beautiful dining rooms on the continent, a room that does not require the context of its history to be extraordinary, though the context makes it more so.

The record of what the Garden Court has witnessed belongs to the American century. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson hosted a state dinner there in support of the Versailles Treaty and his case for the League of Nations. In 1945, the Garden Court catered the official banquet honoring the opening session of the United Nations. President Warren G. Harding was staying at the Palace when he died on August 2, 1923, an event that gave the hotel the particular gravity of a site at which history stopped, unexpectedly, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.

The Fairmont, 1906 / 1907

If the Palace is the story of a man who died before his dream opened, the Fairmont is the story of a building that nearly did the same. Commissioned by the daughters of Senator James Graham Fair, Theresa Fair Oelrichs and Virginia Fair Vanderbilt, the hotel on Nob Hill was nearing completion by the spring of 1906. The grand opening was scheduled for April 18. At 5:12 that morning, the earthquake struck.

The structure survived relatively intact. What the fires took, over the following twenty four hours, was the interior. A contemporary witness crossing the Bay described the Fairmont sitting above the smoke with every window a sheet of gold flame, enormous and still, like a building designed to hold fire. The architects originally hired to rebuild were replaced after one of them, the celebrated Stanford White, was shot and killed in New York. In his place came Julia Morgan, the first woman to receive an architecture degree from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the architect who would later design Hearst Castle at San Simeon. Morgan’s reconstruction was not simply a restoration. It was an argument for the permanence of the institution.

The Fairmont reopened on April 18, 1907, exactly one year after the earthquake. The celebration featured 13,000 oysters, wine poured in quantities described by witnesses as rivers, and a fireworks display over the Bay. The symbolism was deliberate. The city had come back, and the hotel atop Nob Hill was the most visible evidence of it.

In the summer of 1945, while the war in the Pacific moved toward its conclusion, the Fairmont became, for eleven weeks, something close to a diplomatic capital. Delegates from more than forty nations arrived in San Francisco to draft the charter of the new United Nations. The finessing of the language was conducted in the Fairmont’s Garden Room; Secretary of State Edward Stettinius occupied the penthouse suite for the summer. A plaque in the Garden Room still marks the event. On June 26, 1945, President Truman signed the United Nations Charter. The negotiations that made it possible had taken place, in significant part, in the hotel on Nob Hill.

Then, in December 1961, a well dressed crowd gathered in the Venetian Room, the Fairmont’s premier supper club, which had opened in 1947 and for fifteen years had drawn the full roster of American entertainment: Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Tina Turner. A young singer from Queens named Tony Bennett performed, among other songs, a number written by George Cory and Douglass Cross called “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” The room’s response was enough. The recording, made the following year, became one of the most thoroughly city identified songs in the history of American popular music, a song that names a specific hill, a specific fog, and a specific kind of longing that belongs to a specific place. Bennett returned to the Venetian Room many times in the decades that followed. A bronze statue now stands in front of the hotel on the stretch of street the city renamed Tony Bennett Way.

The St. Francis, 1904

The St. Francis is the oldest of the three, though it does not advertise itself as such. It opened on March 21, 1904, and on that first evening a line of carriages and automobiles stretched three blocks down Powell Street. The hotel had been commissioned by the trustees of the Charles Crocker estate, one of the “Big Four” who had built the western half of the transcontinental railroad, and its architects, Bliss and Faville, designed something deliberately spare. A contemporary critic noted that the St. Francis “followed the style pioneered by Louis Sullivan in Chicago; its simple face was bare of the bric a brac and ornamental frosting that made much of San Francisco look like a baroque toy shop.” It sat on the western edge of Union Square, which in 1904 was completing its transformation into the social and commercial heart of the city. The hotel became the Square’s defining institution immediately.

The earthquake of April 18, 1906 did no structural damage to the St. Francis. The fires did. Yet the hotel rebuilt with a directness that told you something about its sense of its own position: within three months of the earthquake, the annual Merchants’ Association dinner was held in the hotel’s still charred banquet hall, surrounded by rubble. It was an insistence on the continuation of ordinary civilization in the presence of its wreckage.

The 1920s made the St. Francis the center of Hollywood’s West Coast social life. Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Cecil B. DeMille, the studio system’s most consequential figures used it as their San Francisco address. In September 1921, rooms 1219, 1220, and 1221 became the site of the scandal that ended Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s career: a Labor Day party, a young actress named Virginia Rappe, a death that led to three trials. Arbuckle was acquitted at the third, but the acquittal could not restore what the headlines had destroyed. The rooms can still be booked.

On the morning of October 23, 1950, the entertainer Al Jolson, just returned from touring Korea for the troops, died of a heart attack in those same rooms after a few hands of gin rummy. History repeats in the St. Francis, not as tragedy or farce but as simple accumulation.

On September 22, 1975, a woman named Sara Jane Moore stood in the crowd across from the hotel as President Gerald Ford emerged through the Post Street entrance. Ford had just addressed the World Affairs Council inside. Moore raised a .38 caliber revolver purchased that morning, the sights were improperly calibrated, and her first shot missed the president’s head by five inches. A former Marine named Oliver Sipple dived toward her and deflected the gun as she raised it a second time. Ford was placed in his limousine and driven immediately to the airport. Moore served thirty two years of a life sentence. A bullet hole is reportedly still visible on the wall near the hotel entrance.

What Three Hotels Hold Together

There is a reason these three institutions are still central to any serious account of the city. They have survived everything San Francisco has survived: the earthquake, the fire, the Depression, the war, the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. They have been present at the drafting of international agreements, the end of careers, the last evenings of presidents. They have absorbed what hotels absorb: the grief and ambition and celebration of a century of guests who arrived with their particular histories and departed, in most cases, without the building noticing. The Palace has its Garden Court. The Fairmont has its hilltop and its association with the moment when the international order was remade. The St. Francis has its position on the Square, its record of witness, and its bullet hole. San Francisco keeps its memory, in the way cities do, in the rooms where things happened.