From mid-bay, south of the bridge, you can see it across the water on the Coronado shore: a red-shingled Victorian tower rising above the beach, white wood and red tile catching the light. The Hotel del Coronado opened in February 1888 as the largest wooden structure in the United States, and it is still there, and it has never once caught fire.
For a building made entirely of wood — no steel frame, no concrete core, just wood from the ground up — this is an extraordinary record. The hotel was built largely by Chinese immigrant laborers, many of whom learned construction skills in the course of the project. The architects, James and Merritt Reid, specified an all-wood frame partly for its warmth and partly for the design flexibility the material offered, at a time when steel-frame construction was still rare in California.
The developers, Elisha Babcock and Hampton Story, had purchased the Coronado peninsula as a real estate speculation in 1885. The hotel was their centerpiece — a destination resort ambitious enough to turn a sandbar into a destination. They brought in laborers, materials, and equipment across the bay by barge. The construction took fourteen months.
When the Del opened in 1888, the electric lighting was installed using equipment supplied by Thomas Edison's company. The Hotel del Coronado was one of the first hotels outside New York City to be entirely lit by electricity — installed, as it happened, in a building that had no backup fire suppression system beyond buckets and a fire company that could only reach Coronado by ferry.
Every American president since Benjamin Harrison — who stayed at the Del in 1891, three years after it opened — has been a guest. L. Frank Baum, who wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, spent several winters at the hotel and is said to have drawn on its architecture and surroundings while writing. The crown-shaped turret of the main building has been extensively photographed and is one of the most recognized architectural silhouettes in California.
The hotel has been designated a National Historic Landmark. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has been involved in its preservation through multiple renovation cycles. The main building's fabric — the original wood frame, the shingled exterior, the crowned tower — has been maintained and repaired but not replaced.
From the water it is exactly as it looks in photographs: a Victorian resort on a beach, startlingly intact, still operating as a hotel, still standing on the same pilings driven into Coronado sand in 1887. The remarkable thing is not that it is beautiful. The remarkable thing is that it is still there.
Sources: Hotel del Coronado official history; Wikipedia, "Hotel del Coronado"; National Trust for Historic Preservation, "A Renewed Welcome at San Diego's Hotel del Coronado."
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