Yesterday and Today

Hotel Del Monte once posh watering spot
When Mom was growing up in the 1920s, she and her parents
occasionally took a day off and drove over to Monterey. There,
they’d stop for lunch at the Del Monte Hotel, a venerable structure
which once commanded not only its own beach acreage but operated a
small railroad stop for its out-of-town guests. Mom said that even
during lunch time, hundreds of guests and day visitors, up to 750
at a seating, would be served like visiting royalty in the hotel’s
massive dining room.
Hotel Del Monte once posh watering spot

When Mom was growing up in the 1920s, she and her parents occasionally took a day off and drove over to Monterey. There, they’d stop for lunch at the Del Monte Hotel, a venerable structure which once commanded not only its own beach acreage but operated a small railroad stop for its out-of-town guests. Mom said that even during lunch time, hundreds of guests and day visitors, up to 750 at a seating, would be served like visiting royalty in the hotel’s massive dining room.

Waited on by formally clad waiters with a white napkin over one arm, and served multiple courses, including soup and salad prior to the luncheon entree, all that attentiveness made for a memorable meal.

The Del Monte as a destination spot arrived on the scene long before the posh trappings of Pebble Beach came into prominence. The hotel, situated right on the bay, with its resort-like surroundings was for decades considered Monterey’s crown jewel. Famous visitors during the resort’s earliest days included ex-US President Rutherford B. Hayes, General William Tecumseh Sherman, stage actor Edwin Booth, Joseph Pulitzer, and the Marquis of Queensbury.A turn-of-the century brochure announced, “The Hotel Del Monte is situated on the Bay of Monterey, and is distant from San Francisco one hundred and twenty-five miles by the best piece of railroad in the West. The route is richer in beauty, in height of development and in historical association, than any other short run in California.”

It was  easy for well-heeled San Franciscans to reach the resort. All they had to do was get on a Southern Pacific train and head for Salinas. From there, a narrow-gauge railroad ran to Monterey, with a special stop at the hotel’s tiny railroad depot. Robert Louis Stevenson made the train trip over to Monterey in late 1879,  as the hotel was being readied for its June, 1880 opening. Monterey was the author’s final stop on a voyage which had begun in his native Scotland. In observing the elegant hotel grounds, and the grand, rising structures,  he later described the permanent impact the new tourist draw was to have on the once-quiet town. “The Monterey of last year exists no more. A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the railway. Three sets of diners sit down successively to table. Invaluable toilettes figure along the beach and between the live oaks; and Monterey is advertised in the newspapers, and posted in the waiting rooms at railway stations as a resort for wealth and fashion…Alas for the little town! It is not strong enough to resist the influence of the flaunting caravanserai, and the poor, quaint, penniless native gentlemen of Monterey must perish…before the millionaire vulgarians of the Big Bonanza.”

Construction of the Del Monte Hotel was funded by railroad magnates known as the “Big Four:” Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington and Mark Hopkins. Building costs ran around  $1 million, a whopping figure for the 1880s.

In only seven years, the major portion of the wooden hotel burned down, causing many to wonder whether the spa,  and its manicured grounds, would  be rebuilt.  Within a year it rose again, and served a steady trade until another fire in 1924. The third main public portion of the building, which still stands, was rebuilt in 1926, this time in stucco and concrete. Behind the main building, two wings remained from 1888, built as additions following the first fire.

As the years went by, the Del Monte only seemed to get better, continuing to draw the rich and famous of the era: Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, silent movie star Charlie Chaplin, financier Andrew Carnegie, and Hollywood actors Greta Garbo and Clark Gable.

Well-known California painters, including Ferdinand Burgdorff, left art work in the form of murals on the walls inside the main lobby and upstairs in the former office of Samuel F.B. Morse, the hotel’s last owner. Local artists sold their works in boutique galleries, alongside gift shops, which led off the hotel’s main lobby and in an arcade area downstairs.

The resort grounds  boasted 126 acres of forests and gardens with bridle paths winding beneath mature trees and alongside a large lake where boaters could row out to a small man-made island. Among the many plantings on the premises, which drew guests to stare in wonder, was the Arizona Garden,  an early landscaping feature planted in the hotel’s first years. Rudolph Ulrich, the project’s architect, had designed a walk-though area of numerous varieties of cactus and succulents. An early promotional brochure called it  a spot where “grotesque and formidable cacti of every kind that grows in the arid Southwest find a home.”  A hedged maze on the grounds was another draw, offering hours of fun for guests who wandered in and out of its intricate patterns.

At the Roman Plunge, columns and arches offered a regal backdrop to the swimming pool. Across Del Monte Avenue at the beach, heated pipes placed beneath the sand (Stevenson’s “invaluable toilettes”), offered a warm spot for sunbathers to lounge on coolish days.  At one time, the Hotel Del Monte property stretched from the water’s edge at Del Monte Beach across today’s freeway to the present Del Monte Golf Course and as far as the current Monterey Fairgrounds, where the hotel’s polo field and racetrack were once located.

After a period of prosperity under owner Samuel F.B. Morse, the old Del Monte Hotel was occupied by the U.S. Navy during World War II. The property was then purchased by Navy  which moved its graduate school from Annapolis to the site in 1951. Today, the old hotel structure, plus the two 1888 wings behind it, now form billeting for naval and visiting military personnel. Numerous massive classroom structures now sit amidst the oak and redwood, where student officers now walk the old paths once enjoyed by hotel guests.

One time, during the early 1970s, in a Goodwill store in Seaside, Mom was just looking around, and she came upon a set of luncheon plates and a few pieces of silverware bearing the old Del Monte Hotel logo. She snapped them up and kept them as treasured souvenirs. Even though I never got to enjoy a trip to the hotel like she did,  it was a pleasure to listen to Mom reminisce over the hotel’s glory days. Whenever she got out those plates, it was like sharing a lost episode with her, to hear her tell of a time when fine dining, even just for lunch, was the rule, at the fine old watering spot.