Bed-and-breakfast · Pacific Grove, California · Built 1887; enlarged mid-to-late 1890s
Gosby House Inn
A redwood boarding house of 1887 on Lighthouse Avenue in Pacific Grove, built by shoemaker J. F. Gosbey for visitors to the town's Methodist summer retreat and dressed up in the 1890s with a Queen Anne corner turret.
History
Pacific Grove began in 1875 as a Methodist summer retreat by the sea, where tents went up each season for religious and educational meetings and, later, the Chautauqua. J. F. Gosbey, a shoemaker from Nova Scotia who had come to California by way of Panama, opened the town's first shoe business and in the early 1880s bought a lot on Lighthouse Avenue directly across from the First Methodist Church. In 1887 he built a plain stick-style house there and rented rooms to the visiting clergy and lecturers, a steady and respectable trade.
The Southern Pacific had opened the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey in 1880 and the El Carmelo in Pacific Grove, and when the Del Monte burned, local residents scrambled to house the overflow. Gosbey, a town councilman from 1892 to 1896, enlarged his house in the later 1890s, adding a turreted entrance and sitting room, matching angled bays and a rear wing, then electricity in 1900 and indoor plumbing. The 1906 earthquake probably toppled the original chimneys. In the 1920s Gosbey borrowed the name El Carmelo Hotel; by 1930 the business had been sold and was letting rooms by the week and apartments. New owners bought it in the late 1970s, restored it with antiques and fresh paint, revived the Gosby House name and reopened it as a bed-and-breakfast, and it was listed on the National Register in 1980. The final 'e' in Gosbey's name was dropped from the inn's.
“The Gosby House Inn is an excellent example of stylistic transition without adverse effect to the whole.”
Architecture
The inn is a two-story redwood frame building on a concrete foundation, irregular in plan, about 81 by 45 feet, under many gables. The 1887 house wore horizontal drop siding with fishscale shingles in the main gables and stickwork in the gable ends. The 1890s Queen Anne additions brought the rounded corner turret, with an open entrance porch below and a shingled sitting room above under a finial and weathervane, plus a second angled bay on the 18th Street front to match the one on Lighthouse Avenue. Windows are mostly paired one-over-one sash; those of the entrance hall and reception room have bands of stained glass and slender colonettes between them.
What to look for
- The rounded Queen Anne corner turret and weathervane
- Fishscale shingles in the older gables
- Paired angled bays on both street fronts
- Stained-glass bands in the entrance hall windows
- Neighboring Victorian cottages of the retreat era
Setting
The inn stands at the corner of Lighthouse Avenue and 18th Street in downtown Pacific Grove, across from the site of the First Methodist Church, among the Victorian cottages that grew up on the old retreat grounds. The shoreline of Monterey Bay and the town's waterfront park are a few blocks north, and Point Pinos Lighthouse is at the end of the avenue.
Timeline
- 1875Methodist retreat grounds founded at Pacific Grove
- 1887J. F. Gosbey builds his boarding house
- late 1890sQueen Anne turret, bays and rear wing added
- 1900Electric wiring installed
- 1920sRenamed the El Carmelo Hotel
- 1980Listed on the National Register on December 2
Where sources differ
- The nomination says the present owners bought the inn in 1976; Wikipedia says 1978.
- Wikipedia says previous owners adopted the El Carmelo name in the 1920s; the nomination credits Gosbey himself.
- The nomination dates the Queen Anne additions to the mid-1890s in one place and the late 1890s in another.
