Horton Grand Hotel - San Diego, CA
Posted by: 
Metro2
N 32° 42.630 W 117° 09.671
11S E 484894 N 3619205
This historic hotel, located at 311 Island Avenue in San Diego's Gaslamp District, was originaly two separate hotels. Wyatt Earp lived here for 7 years and it was once a brothel too.
Waymark Code: WMAQGP
Location: California, United States
Date Posted: 02/13/2011
Views: 8
The hotel's website (
visit link) has an excellent history of the hotel and the neighborhood...reproduced here in part:
"The Horton Grand Hotel is a restoration of two separate hotels (The Grand Horton Hotel and the Brooklyn Kahle Saddlery Hotel) built at different locations and opened in 1886.
The Grand Horton was an elegant, ornate structure built by a German immigrant as a replica of the Innsbruck Inn in Vienna, Austria. Opened in 1886, the hotel was one of many constructed during the "Boom of the Eighties" to accommodate the influx of people. During 1886, some 26,000 visitors flocked to the little town of 5,000 during 1886, after the arrival of San Diego's first trans-continental train in 1885.
The Brooklyn-Kahle Saddlery Hotel, a less formal building with a Cowboy/Victorian flavor, sprang up at about the same time. Originally named the Brooklyn Hotel, it was later dubbed The Kahle Saddlery after the prominent saddle and harness shop that occupied the ground floor in 1912. Wyatt Earp lived in this hotel most of the seven years he resided in San Diego.
The 100-year-old oak Grand Staircase is from the original Grand Horton. The staircase was dismantled and shipped to Austria, where, at a cost of over $200,000, all damage was repaired to restore it to its former glory.
The Grand Horton and Brooklyn hotels were scheduled for demolition in the late 1970's and were purchased from the City of San Diego for $1.00 each. The redwood infrastructures were swapped for the labor needed to dismantle them brick by brick. Over 10,000 pieces were cataloged and stored in a warehouse until the rebuilt "Horton Grand Hotel" reopened at its present location in May, 1986.
The exuberant Gaslamp Quarter has also been restored. Indeed, Third Avenue and "I" (now Island Avenue) was the heart of San Diego's notorious version of the Barbary Coast's Stingaree District. Also called an "entertainment district", the Stingaree was the "wide open" section of the young, raw city, an amalgamation of saloons, gambling halls, opium dens and brothels...with a few legitimate businesses mixed in. It was around Third and Island that the majority of the city's estimated 71 saloons and 120 bawdy houses sprang up during the "Boom of the Eighties." "