The history of San Diego
On Orange Avenue in Coronado, the Hotel del Coronado has stood as a wooden Victorian resort since 1888, raised by Chinese laborers and lit by a world-first electric system. Beneath its beachfront setting lie far older shell mounds, and around it the land boom that founded Coronado itself.
The Hotel del Coronado, on Orange Avenue in Coronado, California, opened on February 19, 1888, built by architect James W. Reid for a syndicate of investors on a sandspit once home to jackrabbits and coyotes. It became the first hotel in the world lit by electricity and remains a working hotel today.
Investors raised a wooden resort on an empty sandspit
The Hotel del Coronado is a wooden Victorian beach resort in Coronado, California, still running today as a hotel. It opened on February 19, 1888, built on a sandspit that had been home mostly to jackrabbits and coyotes.
Five investors bought Coronado and North Island in 1885 for $110,000, and among them was E. S. Babcock, a retired railroad executive who dreamed up the hotel's design himself: a courtyard garden, a tower on the ocean corner, a dining room angled out toward the view. He hired James W. Reid, an architect who had never built anything this large, and put nearly 2,000 laborers to work, many of them Chinese immigrants brought in from San Francisco and Oakland.
The lumber came from a single company up north in Eureka. Reid built his own brick kilns and ironworks on site because San Diego had neither. The Crown Room was built with wooden pegs and glue instead of nails. Reid also installed the world's first electric lighting in a hotel, wired alongside gas lines in case the new technology failed. It did not, and the Hotel del Coronado became the first hotel on Earth lit by electricity.
Presidents and movie stars stopped at the Hotel del
The Hotel del Coronado grew into a stop for presidents and movie stars. Staff and visitors kept reporting strange occurrences in her old room, and the legend only grew with each retelling.
A guest died shot on the hotel's beach staircase
Four years after it opened, a woman calling herself Lottie A. Bernard checked into the hotel. Five days later, on November 29, 1892, she was found dead on an exterior staircase leading down to the beach, shot in the head. She was later identified as Kate Morgan.
The coroner ruled it suicide. Historians have since questioned that finding, pointing out that the bullet did not match the gun she was said to have bought.
A pine tree here wore the first electric Christmas lights
In 1904, the hotel lit one of its Norfolk Island pines with 250 colored bulbs, calling it the world's first electrically lit outdoor Christmas tree. The hotel landscaping had been laid out by Kate Sessions.
The Hotel del Coronado earned California Historical Landmark status in 1970, and became a National Historic Landmark in 1977.
Landmark status locked the Victorian hotel's wooden shell in place
The National Historic Landmark designation in 1977 locked in the hotel's wooden Victorian shell for good. It remains, by weight of timber, one of the largest wooden buildings left in the country, trailing only an aircraft hangar in Oregon.
Ben Press worked as the hotel's tennis pro for 28 years, from 1977 until the courts came down in 2005. He had already spent 17 years teaching at another San Diego club before coming to the Del, and he coached tennis standouts including Maureen Connolly and Karen Hantze Susman.
Ownership of the hotel passed through several hands over the decades, eventually landing with Anbang Insurance Group, a Chinese company. The 2018 addition of the Hotel del Coronado to Historic Hotels of America, a National Trust program, recognized what the building had already become: a working museum piece that still takes reservations.
A short walk from the hotel, past Orange Avenue, stands the house where Rebecca Zahau was found hanging in 2011 at her boyfriend's beach home. The case became a fixture of Coronado's darker reputation, discussed alongside Kate Morgan's death as one of the island's unresolved mysteries.
Coronado itself sits on a narrow strip of land connected to the mainland by a sandy isthmus called the Silver Strand. Before any of this was built, the peninsula and nearby North Island were Kumeyaay land, with shell mounds and stone tools found along the coast dating back roughly a thousand years. Spanish explorers reached the area in 1542, long before Babcock's investors ever saw it as a resort site.
Today the Hotel del Coronado still operates as a working hotel on Orange Avenue, its red turrets and white wooden walls unchanged in silhouette since 1888. Visitors can walk the same beachfront promenade Babcock imagined, and the Crown Room, built without a single nail, still hosts guests under its wooden ceiling.
The Hotel del Coronado still rises over the beach on Orange Avenue, a working hotel built from Victorian-era wood and legend alike.
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