Archive:Westgate Hotel (San Diego)

Built in 1970, The Westgate Hotel is located in downtown San Diego, facing the Westfield Horton Plaza. The Westgate is one block away from the historic Gaslamp Quarter and is across from the Civic Center and a short walking distance from the San Diego Convention Center.

History

Plans for The Westgate Plaza Hotel began in the early 1960s with a dinner conversation between President Eisenhower and C. Arnholt Smith, a San Diego banker and financier. Eisenhower reportedly asked Smith, "Is this the best hotel you have in San Diego?" Smith took it as a personal challenge, and so he and his Westgate-California Corporation undertook the launching of a new hotel.

The Westgate was to be a modern hotel, yet designed along the lines of the classical European hotel palaces de grand luxe, such as The Ritzs of Paris, Madrid and London; the Grand in Rome; the Amstel in Amsterdam; and the Imperial in Vienna.

Richard George Wheeler & Associates, in partnership with Fujimoto & Fish, A.I.A designed the hotel. It was built by Southcoast and Riha Construction at a cost of $14.5 million. Smith and his wife wandered all over Europe in search of furnishings, paintings and equipment for the hotel. Their purchases included $150,000 for an 18th century marble fireplace flanked by gilded bronze nymphs, and $50,000 for a rosewood bombe commode signed by Linke. Other additions included a Steinway piano, and tapestries of Aubusson and Beavais, and paintings by Boucher, Fragonard and Gainsborough.

The lobby of the hotel is a re-creation of one of the anterooms at Versailles. A detailed reproduction of Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son, the original being in The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, hangs on a wall of the lobby. Chandeliers of hand-cut Baccarat crystal from Milan, Italy, crown the lobby and Westgate's Versailles Ballroom. When completed in 1970, The Westgate Plaza Hotel was on of the most expensive hotels built in the country, in terms of capital investment.

By 1974, Smith's Westgate had entered foreclosure, and was subsequently purchased by Earl Holding, who has owned the propery since that time.