“Warren Harding died here” doesn’t quite have the tourist draw of “Washington slept here,” but for the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, the distinction of being the only hotel where a president of the United States drew his last breath is enough to put it into the pantheon of presidential sleep spots.
Scores of hotels around the country can lay claim to a little White House luster, having bedded down famous men before, during or after their stints in the White House. Most will tack the term “Presidential Suite” onto the spot and start charging the highest rates in the house.
But there are a handful of places around the country that have earned a tighter tie with presidential history. Two gave us political terms we still use—“lobbyist” and “smoke-filled rooms.” Another might have cost one man the presidency and later could have cost a president his life. It’s not surprising that the majority of the places on my short list are big, old, luxurious hotels in a few key cities. Washington, Chicago and New York are on the list. San Francisco has two. Here’s my collection of must-stay presidential hotels, with a list of also-rans.
The Willard,
Washington, D.C.
The nation’s capital is crammed with hotels containing presidential lore. The Hay-Adams near the White House was built on the site of homes of John Adams’ grandson and Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary. Along with introducing air conditioning to the sweltering summer capital, it was used as a fundraising spot related to the Iran-contra affair during President Ronald Reagan’s term. Barack Obama moved in for two weeks before his inauguration when the Bush administration said the usual guest lodging, Blair House, was unavailable. Until recently, another hotel in town was synonymous with political corruption: the Watergate. It’s now just offices and condominiums. But for a true slice of American history, nothing can beat the Willard. A couple of doors down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, it has hosted presidents going back to Zachary Taylor. Lincoln snuck into town after his 1860 election (Washington was basically a Southern town and many in the capital were friendly to the secessionist cause) and used the Willard as his pre-inauguration headquarters. Lincoln’s bill is on display in the hotel’s small museum. But its place in the dictionary was cemented by Ulysses S. Grant, the great Civil War general turned not-so-great president. Grant had the habit of making irregular strolls to the Willard to enjoy a cigar. Men seeking to influence legislation or gain political appointments would hang out, hoping they could elbow their way to the president to make their case. The crowd that loitered in the lobby were dubbed “lobbyists.” The term has stuck for advocates of all types who seek to bend laws and regulations by plying the halls of Congress, the offices on K Street, the party circuit and, yes, occasionally a hotel lobby—including the still-sparkling Willard.
The Blackstone Hotel, Chicago
No smoking is allowed at the hotel on the south end of downtown Chicago, an ironic policy given that it was plumes of cigar, cigarette and pipe smoke that gave the hotel its place in presidential history. Chicago was a frequent choice for political conventions before World War II, hosting 26. It was often a choice to keep politics away from the East Coast power centers and also to bring in as many people as possible, with its excellent rail connections to anywhere in the country and huge numbers of hotel rooms. With many of the conventions going on at the old Chicago Coliseum, the Blackstone was frequently the center of the wheeling and dealing that went on in the days before political conventions were a just-for-TV advertisement for each political party. The hotel’s pinnacle came during the 1920 Republican Party convention. On the first ballot, the leader was retired Army Gen. Leonard Wood (the major U.S. Army base in Missouri is named for him) with 287.5 votes. Illinois Gov. Frank Lowden was second with 211.5 votes. The convention at the Coliseum remained deadlocked and the action moved to a group of power brokers who gathered behind closed doors at the Blackstone to horse-trade federal jobs and money for votes. On the 10th ballot, Warren Harding—who had received a scant 65 votes on the first ballot—was proclaimed the nominee. Raymond Clapper, a reporter for the United Press wire service, wrote that the victory had not come on the convention floor, but in the “smoke-filled rooms” of the power brokers. Adding to the mystique, the hotel was a favorite of Chicago mobster Al Capone. The term became synonymous with decisions made out of sight by power brokers. By the end of the past century, the Blackstone had fallen into disrepair and the urban issues of its neighborhood made it a less desirable address for business and leisure travelers. It closed in 2000 but reopened as a Renaissance property in 2008 with fewer but larger rooms, modern amenities and an emphasis on the business trade and community events.
Palace Hotel,
San Francisco
The hotel was brand new when the 1906 earthquake struck, sending the most famous opera singer of the day, Enrico Caruso, running into Market Street, reportedly in his bedclothes. The terrified Italian tenor, visiting San Francisco as part of an American tour, vowed never to return. He kept his promise. The hotel was gutted by the fire that raged after the earthquake. Three years later it reopened as the city’s premier hotel address. In 1923, it hosted President Warren G. Harding, the handsome Ohio newspaper publisher whom historians rank with Grant as among the worst presidents in our nation’s history. Harding had been ill with flu-like symptoms when he left for a trip to the Northwest, which included playing golf in Vancouver and making speeches in Seattle. He was scheduled to go to Yosemite, but instead, the weak chief executive was taken to San Francisco and installed in room 8064, a high-floor suite overlooking Market Street and Lotta’s Fountain, a gathering place for survivors of the 1906 earthquake. While his wife was reading to him, Harding passed away, most likely from a heart condition—it’s not completely known, because Mrs. Harding would not allow an autopsy. After decline dropped the Palace out of the top ranks of the city’s hotels, it has been reborn under the Starwood Luxury Collection brand as one of the city’s finest. Its Pied Piper bar is famous for an illuminist painting by Maxfield Parrish.
St. Francis Hotel,
San Francisco
In many cities, different parties tended to hunker down at different hotels. In Los Angeles, Republicans staked out the Century Plaza while Democrats favored the Biltmore downtown. In San Francisco, the Democrats more often stayed at the Fairmont atop Nob Hill, while Republicans preferred the St. Francis, just off Union Square. The St. Francis was part of two dark moments for Republicans—the most famous being the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford by Sarah Jane Moore randomly aiming a handgun across the street outside of the hotel. Ford survived unscathed, which can’t be said about Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican nominee for president in 1916. In a political route that’s hard to imagine today, the former New York governor left a seat on the Supreme Court to run for president as a Republican. He ran as a Roosevelt-style progressive. Hughes destroyed any chance at success with bad moves while in California. First, he failed to show up for an appointment with California’s progressive governor, Hiram Johnson, a rising national political power broker. Hughes made matters worse by going ahead with a banquet at the St. Francis, despite a strike by the hotel’s unionized kitchen staff. Progressives were appalled and Hughes lost the state and its 13 electoral votes by just over 3,000 votes. It sealed Hughes’ electoral doom and sent Woodrow Wilson back to the White House for a second term. The St. Francis is famous for the clock in the lobby where generations of visitors have “met at the clock” before going out on the town.
Menger Hotel,
San Antonio
The Alamo is practically a holy site in Texas, the place where Davey Crockett, Jim Bowie and a small knot of others held out against a superior force of Mexican troops until they were finally crushed and killed in a bloody siege. Today, the small building sits in the midst of Alamo Plaza, a surprisingly peaceful and leafy part of San Antonio, the seventh largest city in the U.S. with 1.3 million people. The “Texicans” lost the battle but won the war that saw Texas briefly become an independent country before merging with the United States (and shortly thereafter join the ill-fated slave-state secession by the Confederacy that brought on the Civil War.) Across the street from the Alamo is an old hotel that in some ways is just as important to American history as the Alamo—and you can still check in. It has beautiful, cool-blue tiles and handsome cream-colored Corinthian columns in the atrium. The Menger Hotel is where former Assistant Navy Secretary Theodore Roosevelt stayed while assembling his Rough Riders to fight the Spanish in Cuba. Roosevelt trained his troops on a makeshift parade ground that’s now Roosevelt Park. The troops marched off to Cuba, where the charge up San Juan Hill became one of the most famous moments in the war and catapulted Roosevelt from rich, connected New York politician-turned-bureaucrat into a national political figure. He was selected as William McKinley’s running mate in the 1900 election after the unexpected death of Vice President Garret Hobart. A year later, Roosevelt became president when McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo, N.Y., and the rich-boy bureaucrat who remade himself into a tough-talking, risk-taking warrior-politician while staying at the Menger Hotel was on his way to having his face memorialized on Mount Rushmore with Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson.
Gary A. Warner is a Capital News contributor.
