Some years back, I had the opportunity to visit the amazing ruined city of Petra in Jordan, featured so spectacularly in the movie “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” The Great Temple, in particular, is an amazing sight: a classical façade cut directly into the rockface, complete with columns, arcades and pediments.
And then I went inside, and… nothing! Just an empty, dusty room. It’s as if Spielberg and Lucas built a movie set, vacated the interior and left the façade for Jordanian Tourism.
The Great Temple of Petra is a good example of a surface decoration without depth. Such places exist all over the world.
By contrast, the Palace Hotel in San Francisco is just the opposite: an unassuming street-front concealing an amazing hidden treasure.
From the outside, it looks like just another downtown, historical office building. But ah, when you step inside, you’re greeted by stunning open court studded with columns and illuminated by hundreds of glass skylights. It’s like stepping into a grand ballroom transported directly from the Gilded Age. Jay Gatsby and his pals could easily be dining here in all their finery.
With 755 guest rooms, the original Palace Hotel (also known colloquially as the “Bonanza Inn”) was at the time of its construction, in 1875, the largest hotel in the Western United States.
It offered many innovative modern conveniences, including an intercom system and four oversized hydraulic elevators, called “lifting rooms.”
Alas, the Palace didn’t survive the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. Completely rebuilt from the ground up, the “New” Palace Hotel opened on December 19, 1909 and quickly resumed its role as a host of “great events.”
In 1919, Woodrow Wilson gave speeches in the Garden Court in support of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations.
In 1923, President Harding’s term in office ended suddenly when he died here, in Room 8064.
In 1945, the Palace Hotel hosted a banquet to mark the opening session of the United Nations.
It’s not often that you walk into a space and just stop and gape. The Palace Hotel is such a place, made more spectacular by its mundane street-front. When visiting Notre Dame in Paris or St. Peter’s in Rome, you expect the interiors will be great because the exteriors are so impressive. With the Palace, you just don’t see it coming. The surprise is part of what makes it so memorable. And of course, it’s extremely beautiful in its own right.
(People are the same way, of course. We make an assumption about someone based on their outward appearance, guessing that what they show us on the outside reflects what we’ll discover on the inside. And how often we are mistaken! The punk with the spiked hair turns out to be gentle pacifist. The shy, mousy librarian turns out to be an extroverted flamenco dancer. The trick is to overcome our biases and just talk to folks…check out their interiors. It might well be dry and dusty like Petra. It might also be a glittering, expansive Palace Hotel! Open the door of peoples’ personality and prepared to be surprised.)
(Dave Blum is the creator of Dr. Clue Treasure Hunts, www.drclue.com, a teambuilding company featuring over 150 treasure hunt locations worldwide. He has visited over 40 countries in his 60+ years of life and plans to keep traveling until he gives up the ghost. Dave lives in Northern California with his wife, Donica, and their 18-year-old Maine Coon, Ava — an indoor cat who dreams of one day escaping captivity and exploring her own neighborhood Wow Places.)