A Star Is Born

Once we get settled it’s time to explore the hotel … and bar 🤫. Here is where we get to learn some history behind this grand hotel. Below is the blurb from the hotels printed post cards. But I'm sure you can tell I didn't write it as its got some real big words that I needed to google. 😂 

The scene is 1928 San Francisco. A roaring stock market,

an aft-disobeyed prohibition. The global spotlight from two Worlds Fair’s combined with a boom in modern inventions like the radio, television, cars and phones helped to fuel The City’s progress. A new star is born: and they call it the Francis Drake Hotel.

The newspaper of the time called it ‘26 stories of luxury’, beginning a long history of added mysterious floor to the 

21-story hotel. Aside from indoor golf and in room water innovative touches were everywhere, from newfangled radios in every guest room to one of the countries first Servidor systems.

Opening reviews extolled the “glittering new monument to the progress, hospitality and underlying beauty of San Francisco”. The symbol of the cities progressive mindset was designed to reimagine what a hotel could be at a time of five cent coffees and three dollar rooms, construction cost an imaginable 5 million.

Almost a century after opening, this grande dame of San Francisco hotels is closer than ever to the original intent behind it’s creation: a centre of gravity for The City’s history-makers. 

The Beacon Grand shines once again as a place where locals and visitors converge to form a social circle at Union Square.

OK guys thanks for the history lesson, now back to me.

You know how much I love a $ comparison from the past to the present so let’s x it all by 100 USD.

So a 5c coffee then - today is 5.00 😂 (which it is not … well not that we have found anyway)

A $3.00 room - today $300.00 … which again depends on where … or where in the hotel you are staying! So to build today The Beacon Grand that would be 500 million ($795 mill Aus) … that was a lot of faith in 1928 just after the depression that if you build they will come … but they did build and she is still here today which we are so lucky to now be part of that history.

I just can’t stop looking up at the ceilings …