Palace Hotel
Entry Author: Charles
A. Fracchia
Luxury hotel located at the corner of Market and New Montgomery
Streets. There have been two hotels of that name occupying
this location.
(1) The first Palace Hotel was opened in October of 1875,
and was the project of William C. Ralston, a brilliant San
Francisco banker and financier who had died nearly two months
earlier.
That Palace Hotel was designed by architect John P. Gaynor,
and was purportedly the largest, costliest, and most luxurious
hotel in the world. It cost an outrageous $5 million to complete,
and featured 755 rooms on seven floors, each room being 20-feet
square, with 15-feet high ceilings. There were 45 public and
utility rooms, and 7000 windows in the majestic hotel that
was hailed as the "Grande Dame of the West."
Palace Hotel, 1889
The Bancroft Library. University of California, Berkeley
Guests entered the hotel through a graveled
carriage entrance (the site of which is the lobby and the
Garden Court of the present hotel), and balconied galleries
extended from the marble pavement of the Grand Central Court
to the lofty roof made of opaque glass.
Ralston spared no expense in building and furnishing the
Palace Hotel. Fifteen marble companies supplied 804 fireplace
mantels, 900 washbasins, and 40,000 square feet of flooring.
Rare woods were much in evidence. Ralston constructed a brick
factory in Oakland and purchased an oak forest in the Sierra
Nevada Mountains to provide materials for the construction
of the hotel.
It was intended to be the height of luxury and to contain
the newest technologies. It had five hydraulic elevators (reputedly
the first in the West), electric call buttons in each room,
plumbing and private toilets, shared baths every two rooms,
closets, telegraph for staff on each floor, a pneumatic tube
system throughout the hotel, air-conditioning in each room,
and fireplaces and bay windows in each room.
In addition, the Palace Hotel had an elaborate and state-of-the-art
defense against earthquakes and fire, including a cistern
and four artisan wells in the sub-basement, a 630,000 gallon
reservoir under the Grand Court, and seven roof tanks holding
130,000 gallons of water.
 None
of this was enough to save the hotel in 1906, when the earthquake
of April 18 and the subsequent three days of fire destroyed
a substantial part of San Francisco. The fire was kept at
bay by hotel employees, but when the water ran out, the fire
began its destruction.
From the Virtual Museum of the City of San
Francisco
For whatever reason, it was decided to tear down the hotel
and construct a new one. It took 18 months to tear down the
thick brick walls, resulting in 15,000 wagonloads of debris
that had to be carted away.
(2.) The second Palace Hotel opened on the same site in 1909.
A new and very different structure was designed by the New
York architectural firm of Trowbridge and Livingston, with
George Kelham, who designed San Francisco's Main Library (now
the Asian Art Museum), the Old Federal Reserve Bank, and the
Hills Brothers coffee plant, appointed as supervising architect.
Celebrated American illustrator and artist Maxfield Parrish
was commissioned to paint a mural for the hotel's 1909 re-opening.
His magical seven-by-sixteen-foot oil on canvas depicts the
children's fable of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and was recently
appraised at $2.5 million. It has been a permanent fixture
above the hotel's club-like bar, which was originally named
The Pied Pier Room, and later renamed Maxfield's Bar and Restaurant.
The Pied Piper by Maxfield Parrish, Oil
on Canvas, 1909
postcard from collection of Christopher Craig
In 1969, the Garden Court, the extraordinary main dining
room which many feel is the most dazzling public room of any
hotel in the world, was designated Landmark Number 18 by the
San Francisco Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board.
Measuring 110-feet long by 85-feet wide, the Garden Court
is crowned by a $7-million stained-glass dome and is flanked
by a double row of massive Italian marble Ionic columns. The
chandeliers are made of the finest Austrian crystal.
The Palace Hotel was closed in 1989 for restoration and re-opened
on April 13, 1991. The total cost of the two-year restoration
was in excess of $150 million.
Throughout its history, the Palace Hotel has witnessed the
arrival of numerous prestigious guests. Presidents U. S. Grant,
Benjamin Harrison, and Rutherford B. Hayes stayed there, as
did President Warren G. Harding, who died there. King David
Kalakaua of Hawaii also died there. Business leaders John
D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan were guests, as were renowned
British playwright Oscar Wilde, actress Sarah Bernhardt (who
arrived with her pet baby tiger), and opera legend Enrico
Caruso.
Bibliography
Lewis, Oscar and Carroll D. Hall. Bonanza Inn: America's
First Luxury Hotel. New York: A. A. Knopf, c. 1939.
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The first Palace Hotel was opened in October of 1875