By Ross Eric Gibson

Bookshop Santa Cruz is in a building similar to the storied St. George Hotel it replaced. Anson P. Hotaling was born 1827 in New York, his name’s spelling anglicized from the Dutch Houghtaling. He headed west in 1852 in search of gold, but in 1854 he became a partner in a wine and spirits store, which he bought in 1856. His company grew to prominence, gaining him the nickname “the Whiskey King.” He invested in real estate chiefly in San Francisco, Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz. In 1886 he built the Arlington Hotel at the corner of Pacific and Mission streets. (It was later known as the McHugh & Bianchi National Landmark, now gone). In 1887 Hotaling combined two Pacific Avenue structures into the Hotaling Building, then in 1893 formed a partnership with owners of two waterfront bath houses, and crated the Miller-Leibbrandt Plunge, at the time considered the best on the coast.

That same year he demolished the Hotaling Building, he hired San Francisco architects Kenitzer & Kollofrath, and built the deluxe three-story redbrick Hotaling House inn. It had numerous features that made it the best hotel in the county, putting to shame the former best “Pacific Ocean House” north of Plaza Lane. Then the following year, the Hotaling House was obliterated in the Great Fire of 1894. It wiped out the Front Street Chinatown, leveled the tri-corner block bounded by Pacific, Front and Cooper streets, and gutted the brick courthouse. All those brick buildings that had been built to resist fires, left little standing except some walls and the vault of the People’s Bank.

But Hotaling regarded this as a mere setback and started rebuilding his hotel to the same design. Meanwhile, four landowners just behind the hotel on Front Street decided to sell their property to Hotaling, so he designed a compatible three-story Front Street wing for his hotel. Then he bought the Werner Building site north of his hotel, so he built a compatible three-story wing on his hotel. Hotaling made sure his floors were secured to the walls with iron star-washers, and the Pacific Avenue facade was unified with a strong iron porch and veranda.

St. George

Hotaling named it the St. George Hotel, because St. George had fought the fire-breathing dragon and won, and the hotel was built to inspire a feeling of fire safety. At the grand opening, people were overwhelmed at the expensive details. The baronial lobby had Pompeii-terrazzo floors, a Paris-Opera style marble staircase, with a Band Balcony halfway up for concerts in the lobby. A central courtyard acted as a light-well for the Solarium Hallways, filled with natural light. Local wines were featured at a wine bar made of Honduras mahogany with fancy oak-grain panels. The hotel saloon also carried Hotaling Whiskey. The trapeze chandeliers had both gas flame and electric lights. In case one failed, the other was lit. But the technology that most impressed was the first public elevator in Santa Cruz (F.A. Hihn’s mansion had a private elevator). People would stand in line to ride it.

Before the hotel opened, it gave its banquet hall over to the use of the Superior Court, until it could move into the completed Cooper Street Court House in 1897. Likewise, a staircase off the sidewalk led to a second floor public library in Japanese Eastlake style. The Williamson & Garrett building was designed by the same firm as the St. George, its second floor being custom-made for the public library, opening 1899.

Off the lobby was an elegant seven-seat barbershop, with alphabetical shelves for each customer’s personal shaving mugs. Stairs in back of the barbershop led to the bandbox baths in the basement, which had rows of bathtubs. Private suites had “bathtubs so large a person could swim in them!” The hotel imported French furniture for all rooms. The People’s Bank returned to its spot at the south end of the hotel, a bank favoring local small business loans at a time of economic hardship. The hotel had single rooms for short stays, double rooms for extended stays, and “mansion suites” for honeymooners or elite guests. Hotaling built a private suite for when he was in Santa Cruz. Hotaling’s friend William Randolph Hearst enjoyed a mansion suite, and his newspapers reported that the St. George was “the finest hotel between San Francisco and Monterey.”

J.G. Tanner outgrew his popular drug store and fountain in the Flatiron Building at Pacific and Front streets and opened a larger store south of the St. George Barber Shop. Tanner’s looked onto a central courtyard which was barren and breezy, so Hotaling built a conservatory with vines, latticework and seats, called the Palm Court.

Anson P. Hotaling entered the new century, but died in February 1900, leaving the St. George to his son Frederick. Then the 1906 earthquake struck, causing great damage in San Francisco, followed by a destructive fire with water mains severed by the quake. Lacking sufficient water to battle the blazes, the military started dynamiting mansions to create a firebreak, which included the Hotaling mansion on Pacific Heights. To save a government building, the army sought to dynamite the Hotaling Warehouses next door, until they were warned that this enormous supply of firewater would unleash a dragon’s inferno. San Francisco poet Charles Field marveled at the priorities: “If, as they say, God spanked the town for being over-frisky; Why did He burn His churches down, and spare Hotaling’s whiskey?”

In Santa Cruz, earthquake damage was minor, and Hotaling had spared no expense to make his hotel resilient. A.D.M. Cooper was hired around 1906-1907 to paint murals in the St. George banquet hall. The subject was a garden theme, to link the dining hall with the adjoining conservatory. Cooper painted women in diaphanous gowns frolicking in a springtime setting of wisteria bowers. Fred Swanton then hired him to paint the pleasure dome restaurant with a frieze of wisteria bowers, minus the nymphs.

Bob Jones

Hotaling hired Bob Jones, one of the most brilliant managers of the St. George. Jones wanted to cater to traveling businessmen, so he enrolled the first 50 in the Embassy Club he invented, so wherever they traveled or regarded as home, they had ties to Santa Cruz, and a yearly reunion. The St. George maintained a telegraph office, which kept the businessmen connected with home base and customers. The Eastlake style of hotel was already becoming old-fashioned, so in 1912 Frederick brightened the lobby with golden oak, paneled masonry walls, and polished stonework on the stair rails. The centerpiece of the lobby was a gothic stone Embassy Fireplace, containing the Embassy Club’s time capsule behind the bronze plaque of Pistrucci’s St. George defeating the dragon.

Mrs. J.P. Harris opened the Gem Motion Picture Theater in the south end of the St. George, an early motion picture theater that ran from 1911 to 1913. Bob Jones realized the promotional possibilities of shooting films in Santa Cruz, and personally advocated film companies to stay at the St. George while shooting films using county landmarks and backgrounds. He would even scout locations for them.

During World War I, the St. George had offices north of the lobby for Red Cross Headquarters, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, the State Board of Equalization and the Edna H. Mosher Library. After the war, Bob Jones feared the center of tourist services was moving to the waterfront, the Casa Del Rey and the Cocoanut Grove. The 1920 construction of the New Santa Cruz Theater at Pacific and Walnut was to create a downtown auditorium for movies, Vaudeville and conventions.

Tourists now favored Spanish-style architecture, so Hotaling purchased the Jarvis building and Pease building north of his hotel, and remodeled the entire Pacific Avenue facade in a unifying Spanish-style, renaming the hotel in 1922 as “The St. George Mission Inn.” This was another remarkable revival that improved the hotel for a new era. Bob Jones put a grand piano in the lobby belonging to his wife, Doris. A large lighted Christmas tree was placed in the lobby, while Knute Maddock (a young bellhop at the time) stoked a roaring fire in the Embassy fireplace. Doris accompanied guests and staff on the piano, as they sang carols, in an atmosphere Knute likened to an Olde English Christmas.

A hotel founded by the Whiskey King seemed out-of-step with Prohibition. Yet it was rumored the hotel’s Redwood Room was a speakeasy. Then in 1925 came a shocking turn of events. The Hotalings: Anson’s wife, with her daughter and son (Frederick), were gathered at their breakfast table in San Francisco, when they noticed the milk had a bad smell. They had it tested and discovered it had been poisoned by a relative who wanted to kill all three of them, eliminating those who stood in his way of inheriting Anson’s fortune. The Hotalings sold the St. George Hotel soon after. Fred Swanton was mayor from 1927-1933, when the old city hall was being demolished for an adobe-style city hall. Swanton spent part of his tenure with his mayoral offices on the St. George Band Balcony, enthroned on the landing of the marble staircase, overseeing his palatial domain.

During the Depression, day trippers would drive to Santa Cruz but not stay the night. In 1930, Frank Roth leased all three of the town’s top convention hotels: the St. George, the Palomar and the Casa Del Rey. In so doing, he made it easier for any-size convention to book Santa Cruz through a single agent. Soon there were two or three conventions in town every weekend, which became a sustaining feature of the Santa Cruz economy.

The dragon returns

World War II made Santa Cruz popular among soldiers for weddings, honeymoons, shore leave, or the Naval Convalescent Hospital by the Boardwalk. Blackout regulations required darkening every skylight (remaining so after the war), turning the St. George’s solarium halls into dreary corridors, in a hotel later humbled by the 1955 flood and soon called a flophouse. In 1964, the Hip Pocket Bookshop in the St. George brought the early counterculture to Santa Cruz, dying in controversy in 1966. Then came the Catalyst coffeehouse from about 1973 to 1976, in the old dining room amid the murals of free spirits, where the generations came together and enjoyed cutting edge music. The St. George survived the 1989 earthquake, then the dragon rose up, and burned down the fireproof building. Architects Thacher & Thompson did a good job of remaking many of the key features as an homage to the beloved landmark.