Hotel del Coronado History, Hotel del Coronado Heritage Department (c) 2013, 208 pages, $39.95
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — If you are a Hotel del Coronado fan, and who isn’t, this is a great book to leaf through. I’ve always been interested in the lives of U.S. Presidents, and it’s interesting to see the list of those — with accompanying photos — who have visited the stately old hotel now celebrating its 125th birthday. The first, during the ownership of partners Elisha Babcock Jr. and Hampton Story, was President Benjamin Harrison (no relation), who can be seen being admired in his top hat as he emerges in 1891 from the hotel’s front door.
Additional photos show William Howard Taft looking plump and fit; Franklin D. Roosevelt arriving in an open air limousine; Richard Nixon and Mexico’s President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz arriving together for a bi-national banquet (the head table also included former President Lyndon B. Johnson and future President –then California Governor– Ronald Reagan); Jimmy Carter shaking the hands of chefs as Hotel del Coronado owner M. Larry Lawrence watches approvingly; Gerald Ford at a Hotel del Coronado lectern; Reagan at various stages of his career; George H. W. Bush playing tennis; and Bill Clinton playing golf (with the hotel’s cupola in the background. )
This is more a picture book than what most historians would call a history. It lacks an index, glosses over or skips entire periods, virtually ignores the various controversies that sprung up over the years between the hotel and the not-always admiring people of Coronado, and, in short, is more a public relations document that an objective look at one of San Diego County’s best known and loved institutions.
I was interested to see that some of the celebrated visitors in the Hotel del Coronado’s second period, when it was owned by the Spreckels family, were people who later would mar their reputations by becoming admirers of Nazi Germany, among them automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, aviator Charles Lindbergh, and Britain’s future King Edward VIII, who abdicated his throne in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson. Her former Coronado home has been transported to the Hotel del Coronado grounds.
Notwithstanding the company the Spreckels kept, Jews apparently were always welcome as paying guests at the Hotel del Coronado, a refreshing difference from hotels elsewhere in the country, which tried to make themselves more glamorous by being restricted. In the Hotel del Coronado history, such guest names appear within photo captions as those of Ruben and Minnie Finkelstein, who honeymooned at the Del in 1922 (page 51); Pauline Friedman, who resided at the hotel for 40 years (page 55); the Marx Brothers (page 62); Marilyn Monroe (pages 64, and a section on the filming of Some Like It Hot, pages 182-187); Max Heyman, a guest playing tennis (page 66), a long list of Jewish movie celebrities and on and on.
One of the hotel’s owners, M. Larry Lawrence, was active in the Jewish community of San Diego County, as well as in Democratic party politics. One of the owners before him was Barney Goodman, but he rated just a mention in this book. In 1975 when Nicholas Fintzelberg of Mesa College reviewed for the Journal of San Diego History another Hotel del Coronado book, The Crown City’s Brightest Gem: A History of the Hotel del Coronado by Marcia Buckley, he noted that the Spreckels family sold the Del to real estate man Robert Nordblom. The latter was apparently the public face of a partnership including Herman Miller and M. Bert Fisher, who were “best known locally for creation of Collwood Village, near San Diego State University and renovation of the Maryland Hotel.”
Fintzelberg reported that group resold the hotel two days later to Barney Goodman and his associates, adding “the necessity of a ‘dummy’ buyer… can never be resolved until one investigates the terms of John D. Spreckels’ will. Folklore among local real estate men in the late 1940s was that Spreckels placed requirements upon the disposition of the Hotel del, and that Robert Nordblom met those requirements.”
That story isn’t told in this current history either, so we have to guess at what Fintzelberg was hinting about. One suspects from his account that while Spreckels willingly accepted Jews as paying guests, he required the hotel to be sold to someone who was Christian, or, in any case, not Jewish. But, let me stress, we do not know this for sure.
Perhaps some future historian, with an interest in such matters, will share with us both the glamorous and not-so-glamorous episodes in the hotel’s history, enabling us to better understand the social history of San Diego and what role its swankiest hotel played in it.
The photos in this book, covering staff, visitors, construction, legends (including the ghost of Kate Morgan), will provide some rich source material for that future historian. But a true history will require a great deal more research than went into the present book.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com
Myron Shelley wrote to us: I don’t recall Bert Fisher being involved in anything except the ownership of the U.S. Grant Hotel for several years. As far as Collwood is concerned, that was developed by Bill Starr. I don’t believe the Maryland Hotel was ever renovated between the time it opened and when it was purchased in recent years. You failed to mention that the Alessio family also owned the hotel in the 70s. I think they sold it to Larry.
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