Resort hotel · Coronado, California · Built 1887–1888
Hotel del Coronado
A sprawling, turreted wooden seaside hotel of 1887–88 on the Coronado peninsula facing San Diego, built in eleven months during a land boom by mostly Chinese labor and opened with 399 rooms around a garden court.
History
In 1885, at the height of a Southern California land boom, Elisha Babcock, a retired Indiana railroad man, and Hampton Story of the Story & Clark piano company bought the empty Coronado peninsula and North Island for $110,000. They laid out lots, ran ferries and a street railway, piped fresh water under the bay, and planned a hotel that would make the place famous. Babcock hired the Reid brothers of his home town, Evansville, and James Reid drew a plan around a tropical garden court, with a tower on the ocean corner and a dining wing angled toward the sea. Construction began in March 1887. With no lumber or skilled carpenters in San Diego, green timber came from northern California, brick was fired from Coronado clay, and the labor force, recruited through San Francisco's Chinese Six Companies, learned on the job, starting with the simplest north wing and working south. The hotel opened on February 19, 1888, with 399 rooms, each with a fireplace and a safe, and electric light.
The boom had already collapsed. To finish the work Babcock and Story borrowed $100,000 from the sugar heir John D. Spreckels, who by 1890 owned the hotel; his family kept it until 1948. The hotel became Coronado's center, with a tent city for less wealthy vacationers along the Strand, and drew presidents from Benjamin Harrison to Richard Nixon, who held a state dinner here in 1970. In 1920 the Prince of Wales was honored at a banquet in the Crown Room. Film stars came in the Prohibition years. The hotel was listed on the National Register in 1971 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977.
“The labor force was imported from San Francisco by applying to the Chinese Seven Companies.”
Architecture
The hotel is a five-story wooden building over a full basement, built around a courtyard about 150 by 250 feet, its white walls and red roofs broken by turrets, dormers and the tall ocean-corner tower. The public rooms sit along the southeast side. The two-story lobby is paneled in dark oak, with a gilded iron cage elevator beside the main stair. The Crown Room, the former main dining room set at 45 degrees to the building, is about 156 feet long and 33 feet high under a coffered, arched ceiling of sugar pine, and seats a thousand. The ballroom on the ocean side was built 120 feet across with its timber structure open to 57 feet, though it has since been reshaped. Many entrances and interiors have been remodeled.
What to look for
- The ocean-corner tower and red turret roofs
- The Crown Room's coffered sugar-pine ceiling
- Gilded birdcage elevator in the oak-paneled lobby
- The interior garden court
- Views over the beach to the Pacific
Setting
The hotel occupies a broad site on the Pacific shore of Coronado, between the ocean beach and Glorietta Bay, across San Diego Bay from downtown San Diego and reached by the Coronado Bridge or ferry. Orange Avenue, the town's main street, leads to the front, and the Silver Strand runs south toward Imperial Beach.
Timeline
- 1885Babcock and Story buy the Coronado peninsula
- 1887Construction begins in March
- 1888Hotel opens on February 19
- 1890John D. Spreckels gains control
- 1920Banquet for the Prince of Wales in the Crown Room
- 1971Listed on the National Register
- 1977Designated a National Historic Landmark
Where sources differ
- The nomination says Thomas Edison supervised the electrical installation; Wikipedia says this is a myth and that the Mather Electric Company of Chicago did the work.
- The nomination says the Prince of Wales first met Wallis Simpson at the 1920 banquet; both later wrote that they met years afterward.
- The nomination refers to the 'Chinese Seven Companies'; the San Francisco association is usually called the Six Companies.
- The ghost of Kate Morgan, a guest found dead in 1892, is hotel legend.
