Park View Hotel is also known as the Stanyon Park Hotel. From the
The hotel has 36 guest rooms and suites on three floors with elevator access. Some rooms directly overlook
. Multi-room suites are available.
Description:
The Stanyan Park Hotel is a three-story frame independent structure, rectangular in plan, sited on a prominent corner across from Golden Gate Park. It has three
angle-sided bays on the Stanyan Street facade across from the Park, a round corner bay, and three more angle-sided bays on the longer, Waller Street facade. The roof is flat. The ground floor contains three stores and two entrances to the upstairs. The building
was substantially altered over the years, but has now been restored utilizing the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation.
On the second and third floors the window treatment is identical, whether on the wide central face of a bay, on its narrower side face, on the flat walls surface between bays, or with curved glass on the round corner bay. The round bay has three windows per floor and each of the other surfaces mentioned above has one, except for two between the easternmost bays on Waller. The windows are double-hung, with single light in each, sash, and the lower sash is nearly twice the height of the upper. The window surrounds are decorated with shouldered architraves, banded sides and, only above the major second floor windows, wooden keystones.
The street level was designed to be different from the two upper floors, in order to mark the difference of commercial function and to facilitate the frequent updating required for commerce. This floor has no bays, but it has five major entrances: one each to the two stores and the hotel upstairs on Stanyan, an angled corner entrance to the third store, and towards the rear on Waller, a four-columned, recessed entry. On this rear part of the building the ground floor facade relates best to the upper floors;
it has the same siding, groups of three windows below bays, and fine quartets of columns and pilasters leading up six steps into a recessed vestibule.
The years were not kind to the Stanyan Park Hotel but the owners have restored it to its former splendor. Prior to the completion of the recent renovation, the building had been stripped of most of its ornamentation and covered with imitation brick paper. A handsome corner dome and roofline balustrade had been removed. Luckily an historic
photograph exists, probably from about 1908-1910. The owners have restored the hotel to conform to the photograph. It shows smooth, flush siding, the wi.ncfcw surrounds described string courses between floors which include a dentil molding above the second floor, and still-extant cornice with acanthus consoles and egg-and-dart moldiings. The outstanding revelation of the historic photograph was the documentation of the original existence of a roofline balustrade and a corner dome, metal covered and finial topped, with oval oculi and a drum that continued the line of the balustrade. The photograph shows a rear section on Waller Street to have a facade complementary to the upper
floors, with the same siding and shouldered and banded window surrounds, and with the columns steps and artificial stone foundation that exists today. Already at that tme the remainder of the ground floor was different from but not inharmonius with the upper floors. The siding was of similar smooth, flush type, frut apparently varnished instead
of painted. Several windows had shouldered architraves but no banding. Door posts and vertical dividers carried paneling typical of such store-front positions. However, the saloon's high windows and possibly terrazo door posts were nontraditional possibly a carryover from the previous saloon on the site, or possibly a remodeling in the four to
six years since the original construction. The southernmost store, at that time a restaurant had a traditional shop front with large plate glass windows, transoms, and a
paneled wood base.
Significance:
The Stanyan Park Hotel is significant as the oldest extant hotel on the border of Golden Gate Park. It was built in 1904-1905 for Henry P. Heagerty [1849-c. 1918], who knew the
area's commercial requirements from having run a saloon and small boarding house on the site since 1883. Opening one of a dozen hotels serving the Park, seven on Stanyan Street alone, Heagerty responded to the competition by having an elegant and fashionable structure created for his new hotel, in order to attract quality, high-paying
customers. He hired a highly respected architectural firm, Martens & Coffey, who gave him the best and costliest ($28,000) of the'ir many buildings in the neighborhood. The recent restoration has returned the building to its handsome Beaux Arts appearance.
The hotels, apartment hotels, and lodging houses in competition with the Stanyan Park at its birth have all been demolished except for two "apartment-hotels" which years ago reverted to ordinary apartments. "The Frederick" at the southwest corner of Stanyan and Frederick, recalls its more commercial past only with a grocery store at ground level; the building itself is taller but much less elegant than the Stanyan Park Hotel. The
more elegant and much larger "Bon-Air Apartment" at the Stanyan-Oak main entrance to Golden Gate Park retains no commercial aspect a tall. In contrast, the Stanyan Park Hotel has continued in Directory listing of Hotels, though under a variety of names: Park View Hotel according to the 1905 Sanborn insurance map, Hotel Golden Gate 1907-1919, Hotel Roamer 1925-1930, Stadium Hotel (referring to the now, little used Kezar Stadium in the Park (1930-1975), and a brief interval in 1960-1961 as The Fremont House. The new owners are calling it the Stanyan Park Hotel.