Warren Harding (1865-1923) was the 29th president of the States, elected to the position in 1921. He was the first sitting Senator to be elected to the office of President. Harding was a very popular and respected president until after his death, when the Teapot Dome scandal (leasing of Navy petroleum reserves to private oil companies at low rates and without competitive bids) was made public, as well as Harding’s extramarital affairs. The Secretary of the Interior was imprisoned over the Teapot Dome scandal. Today, Harding is considered one of the worst presidents in US history.
The Palace Hotel, located at the corner of Market and New Montgomery, opened in 1875. Developed by banker William Chapman Ralston and William Sharon, both of whom had made their fortunes at the Comstock Lode (the Nevada Silver Rush), the hotel was the largest hotel in the West. At nine stories and with 755 rooms, it was also the tallest building in the City for almost a decade. The carriage entrance led to an open courtyard surrounded by seven stories of balconies. In 1900, this courtyard was converted to a lounge called “Palm Court” and later renamed “Garden Court”. The hotel had all the modern luxuries for that era, including an intercom system and four hydraulic elevators called “lifting rooms”. Ralston would drown two months before the hotel opened: the same day that his bank collapsed.
The Palace Hotel was destroyed during the 1906 earthquake and fires[1]. Enrico Caruso, a world renowned tenor, had sung in the opera Carmen the night before, and was in the hotel at the time of the earthquake. He refused to ever return to the City.
After the earthquake, a 23-room “Baby Palace” was quickly built at Post and Leavenworth while the new Palace Hotel was rebuilt from the ground up. This second Palace Hotel was plainer than the original, but still grand, with a replica of the original Garden Court. It opened on December 19, 1909.
President Harding had a known heart condition. In June 1923, he set off on a “Voyage of Understanding Tour”, where he made speeches across the country, visiting Alaska and British Columbia. On July 27th, while in the Washington Territory, he called his physician, complaining of pain in his upper abdomen. He was taken by train to San Francisco and put into the Palace Hotel, where doctors found that he not only suffered from heart problems, but had pneumonia. He was confined to his bed. On August 2nd, his condition looked to be improved, but he died that night of heart failure as his wife Florence read to him. On August 3rd, his body was carried out of the Palace Hotel and onto his train. It is said that 9 million people lined the railroad tracks as the train made its way from San Francisco to Washington DC.
In 1954, the Palace Hotel was sold to the Sheraton Hotel chain and renamed the Sheraton Palace. There was an extensive renovation, including seismic retrofitting, between 1989-1991. Sheraton sold the hotel to a Japanese corporation in 1973, and the name reverted back to the Palace Hotel. A second major renovation occurred in 2015. While the hotel was closed in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it reopened a little over a year later. Nineteen presidents have stayed at the hotel, from Ulysses S. Grant to Barack Obama.
[1] 1906 earthquake: https://thesanfranciscophoenix.com/?p=2849
