Hotel del Coronado

When it opened in 1888 there was no larger resort hotel anywhere in the world.

The Hotel del Coronado sits on the beach across San Diego Bay from the city, and it is a rare survivor of a vanished American building type, the wooden Victorian beach resort. It is the second largest wooden structure in the United States, after the Tillamook Air Museum in Oregon. It became a California Historical Landmark in 1970, a National Historic Landmark in 1977, and joined Historic Hotels of America in 2018.

It exists because of a land boom. In the mid-1880s the San Diego region was in one of its first great real estate surges, and the standard play for a California developer was to build a grand hotel to draw people onto otherwise barren ground. In November 1885 five investors bought Coronado and North Island, about 4,000 acres, for 110,000 dollars. E. S. Babcock and Hampton L. Story set up the Coronado Beach Company the following April, then built the businesses to support it: a ferry company with its own wharves, a water company that piped fresh water under the bay from the San Diego River, and a railroad company that eventually linked Coronado to San Diego along the Strand. The hotel ran one of the largest electrical power plants in the state and supplied the whole community until the 1920s.

Presidents Harrison, McKinley, Taft and Wilson all stayed here, and much of Hollywood followed in the twenties and thirties.

The ghost story starts with a real death. In November 1892 a young woman checked in alone under the name Lottie A. Bernard and was found dead five days later of a gunshot wound to the head. The coroner ruled it self-inflicted; sceptics have argued the bullet did not match the gun in her hand. She was Kate Morgan, a housemaid in her mid-twenties. Room 502, where she stayed, is now the most requested room in the hotel, and the hotel runs Haunted Happenings tours.

The Del reopened recently after a six year revitalization.