The two La Jolla hotels – one subsumed by another – are just 528 feet apart.
As long as there have been tourists in La Jolla, there have been hotels in La Jolla, rising up on the coast and beckoning visitors with ocean views and easy access to the beach and local amenities.
Two of the oldest-standing La Jolla hotels are pictured in the 1929 photo above, taken from Jenner Street at Prospect Street. Quite the change from the “now” image, in which several updates can be seen.
The constant, though, is the Grande Colonial at 910 Prospect St., which opened its first building Feb. 1, 1913, with eight apartments and rooms in a “white wood-framed building just steps from the beach,” according to Historical Hotels of America.
The Colonial “was such an immediate success that a second building was opened not long after,” wrote Howard Randolph in his 1955 book “La Jolla Year by Year.”
In 1926, the La Jolla hotel’s owner, foreseeing the growth of the seaside community’s population, commissioned the construction of a larger property.
The original structure was moved to the rear of the property – and is still there now – and a four-story, Colonial Revival building opened June 28, 1928, boasting the first sprinkler system west of the Mississippi.
The Grande Colonial has changed hands and expanded over the years, undergoing many renovations.
Among the revamps is the evolution of the hotel’s dining space from Putnam’s Pharmacy, which installed an ice cream fountain leading to constant crowds and celebrity sightings like Charlton Heston and La Jolla Playhouse co-founder Gregory Peck, the son of the in-house pharmacist, according to the hotel’s history.
The pharmacy became Putnam’s Restaurant, which then transitioned in 2001 to its current name and concept, Nine-Ten, with Michelin recognition and a solid reputation for memorable meals.
Grande master?
People seated in and standing by the McKeen Motor Car in front of the four story Hotel Cabrillo. Squire Wilson, who built the Cabrillo Hotel, is in the 3rd porthole window from the left on the train, c 1915.
Though the Grande Colonial is arguably the oldest La Jolla hotel, there is a strong argument that there is one older: the Hotel Cabrillo.
Hotel Cabrillo, also called the Cabrillo Hotel, was built in 1908 and 1909, using much of the lumber from a dancing pavilion that once stood in Scripps Park but was taken down in 1907, according to Randolph.
The La Valencia Hotel, another longstanding hotel with its own illustrious place in La Jolla history, annexed the Cabrillo Hotel in 1956 and the structure is now known as La Valencia’s “West Wing,” according to Historical Hotels of America.
‘Grande’ scheme
La Jolla Park Hotel with Paterson family, c 1888.
A list of the oldest La Jolla hotels would be incomplete without mentioning a couple others that were quickly lost to fires.
One of the first structures in La Jolla, the La Jolla Park Hotel opened after five years of construction in January 1893, Randolph wrote.
The 80-room hotel stood near where the Grande Colonial is now, at the head of what was then Grand Avenue but is now called Girard at the north end of Prospect Street.
The hotel, which had no record of guests after Feb. 29, 1896, indicating “the hotel must have closed soon after,” according to Randolph, was empty “when it caught fire and burned to the ground on June 14, 1896.”
In 1909, the same year that Hotel Cabrillo opened, the oceanfront Strand Hotel opened in Neptune Beach.
Unfamiliar with “Neptune Beach”? In 1919, the Strand Hotel’s owner, Arthur Snell, held a contest to rename the property. The entrant “Hotel Windansea” won, leading to the beach later becoming Windansea beach.
While Windansea has stuck, the Hotel Windansea unfortunately did not, burning down in 1943.
