Hotel del Coronado

One of the largest wooden buildings ever raised in America, built in under a year on a barren sandspit, the 'Hotel Del' turned a remote California peninsula into a Gilded Age resort destination and a Hollywood backdrop.

Businessmen Elisha Babcock Jr. and Hampton Story bought most of the undeveloped Coronado peninsula in 1885 with a bold plan: build the largest resort hotel in the world on land that was then little more than sand and scrub. Architects James and Merritt Reid designed a sprawling Victorian, Queen Anne-style building crowned by a distinctive red-shingled turret, and construction crews completed the massive wooden structure in roughly 11 months, opening the hotel in 1888.

The hotel was wired for electric lighting during construction, making it one of the first hotels in the country to feature it throughout its public rooms, and it quickly drew presidents, royalty, and celebrities to its beachfront halls. Its history also carries a darker legend: in 1892, a guest named Kate Morgan died at the hotel under circumstances that were never fully explained, and her unsolved death gave rise to ghost stories that persist to this day.

The hotel's fame grew further in the 20th century as a filming location, most famously as the setting for Billy Wilder's 1959 comedy 'Some Like It Hot,' starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon. Still an operating luxury resort today, the Hotel del Coronado was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977, recognized as one of the last surviving examples of a wooden Victorian beach resort built on this scale.