San Francisco

On April 18, 1906, an earthquake and the fires that followed destroyed roughly 25,000 buildings across 500 city blocks of San Francisco, the largest urban disaster the country had seen. Almost everything a visitor sees downtown today was built in the years afterward, by a population that was broke, shaken, and in an enormous hurry to prove the city could come back bigger than before. San Francisco’s grand hotels carry that hurry in their bones — they are not simply old buildings, but statements of intent from a city that refused to stay down.

The Palace Hotel had already been standing since 1875, the largest and most opulent hotel west of the Mississippi, when the 1906 disaster hit. The earthquake itself left the structure largely intact, but the fires that raged through the city for three days finished what the shaking started. Rebuilt and reopened in 1909, the new Palace centered itself on the Garden Court, a glass-roofed atrium that announced San Francisco’s recovery in marble and crystal. It was in one of the Palace’s rooms that President Warren Harding died in 1923, a reminder of how thoroughly the hotel had become woven into the nation’s public life.

The Westin St. Francis, opened on Union Square in 1904, survived the earthquake itself and reopened with a new wing by 1907, becoming one of the fastest visible symbols of the city’s recovery. In the decades that followed it turned into the social center of San Francisco, host to a lobby clock that became a citywide meeting point and, in 1921, to the scandal involving actor Fatty Arbuckle that ended his career and briefly made the hotel a fixture of national tabloid coverage. Between them, the Palace and the St. Francis mark two different responses to catastrophe — one leveled and rebuilt from scratch, the other scarred but standing — and both still operate today as evidence that San Francisco’s grandest instinct has always been to rebuild rather than retreat.

For a fuller account of what staying in these hotels is like today, our companion guide at /blog/historic-hotels-san-francisco goes deeper into the rooms, the neighborhoods, and the history behind them.