The Palace Hotel stands at the southwest corner of Market and New Montgomery streets, beside the Montgomery Street BART station. The hotel’s own history page says the original Palace was the largest and most luxurious hotel in the world when it opened in 1875. It was financed mainly by Bank of California co-founder William Ralston.
From carriage court to Garden Court
According to the hotel, horse-drawn carriages entered through a grand entrance on New Montgomery and dropped guests on a marble courtyard floor under a glass roof. Wikipedia says that Grand Court was turned into a palm-filled “Garden Court” a few years before 1906. The hotel survived the shaking on April 18, 1906, but was consumed by the fires that afternoon. Tenor Enrico Caruso was staying there at the time.
The rebuilt hotel opened on Dec. 19, 1909, with a new Garden Court on the same spot as the old Grand Court. The hotel describes the 8,000-square-foot room as having more than 70,000 pieces of colored glass in its ceiling, Austrian crystal chandeliers and Italian marble columns.
History in the room
Wikipedia says Woodrow Wilson gave speeches in the Garden Court in 1919 supporting the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. President Warren G. Harding died at the hotel in 1923. The Garden Court was declared a San Francisco Landmark in 1969. The hotel closed on Jan. 8, 1989, for a $150 million restoration and seismic retrofit and reopened on April 3, 1991. The hotel says each of the ceiling’s 70,000 glass pieces was cleaned and reinforced during that work.
The Pied Piper
Off the lobby, the Pied Piper bar is named for Maxfield Parrish’s painting, which the hotel says has hung there since the 1909 reopening. Wikipedia reports that the owners took it down in 2013 to sell at auction. After public opposition, they had it restored and rehung that August. The hotel also has a lobby-level history display called Landmark 18.
For another nearby landmark, see our guide to the Rincon Annex murals.