After nearly five months of construction, on June 18, 1925, the new Hotel Californian opened its doors at the corner of State and Mason streets in downtown Santa Barbara.
Built of brick and composition stone, the $300,000 hotel offered 100 rooms with fresh or salt-water baths, one of only two hotels on the Pacific Coast to offer such amenities.
The rooms were advertised as “soundproof” due to “button lath used between walls with dead air space of several inches to prevent noise.”
The rooms were nicely furnished, and each had its own bath and phone. Rates started at $2.50 a room for single occupancy.
The owners were “assured of immediate success because of its position between the waterfront and the Southern Pacific station.”
On Monday morning, June 29, W.H. Scott, a Los Angeles businessman staying at the new hotel, was awakened at 6:42 a.m. by a large jolt and saw the walls of his room moving.
“They swayed sickeningly back and forth with the same motion as is imparted to an accordion when it is played,” he recalled. “I leapt out of bed and raced downstairs, clad only in my pajamas. In the lobby I overtook a man struggling toward the door with a small child. Just as they reached it the building gave way. Debris and wreckage piled upon them. I dived through a window into the street.
“When I looked back, the hotel was a gaunt ruin, its outer wall fallen to the street. And standing in a heap of wreckage on the third floor I saw a fat man apparently crazed with fear, screaming at the top of his voice for a taxicab.
“Later I found most of the guests of the hotel huddled in scanty attire in a vacant lot nearby. They had fled the building as soon as the shocks began.”
Still clad in his pajamas, Scott accepted a ride to Los Angeles, leaving all his belongings in the ruins of the hotel.
Several guests in upper floors found their doors jammed and tied sheets together to lower themselves to the floors below.
The Hotel Californian became one of the most photographed buildings of the 1925 Santa Barbara earthquake, serving as a great example of what happens when wood framing slams against unreinforced brick walls during a quake.
The damaged hotel was reinforced and rebuilt “in harmony with the new look for Santa Barbara” and reopened on April 17, 1926.
