The stately San Pedro Hotel was built atop the 75-foot-high Nob Hill in San Pedro in the late 1880s, in the community’s early days.
The first land deed for the Nob Hill area, located roughly between present-day First and Fourth streets near Harbor Blvd., was issued to shop owner John Malgren in 1882. Soon thereafter, many of the nascent town’s most influential business owners had moved to homes atop the hill.
Originally known as the Clarence Hotel, the deluxe hotel was one of the first in the area, and definitely one of the most elegant. Its balconies commanded a panoramic view of San Pedro Bay and its rapidly growing harbor, and the distinctive building itself could be seen atop Nob Hill from miles around.
In its early years, the hotel prospered, becoming one of the places to see and be seen in San Pedro.
The harbor’s selection as the official site of the Port of Los Angeles brought a flurry of new development. Many newer hotels sprung up in the rapidly developing area, and as San Pedro’s fortunes rose, those of the hilltop hotel seemed to have fallen.
Lillian B. Mullen, owner of the Ideal Sanitarium in Santa Monica, began leasing the struggling hotel for $100 a month in April 1912 with the idea of starting a new hospital there. She moved the equipment from Santa Monica to the Nob Hill building.
The new San Pedro Hospital sported 48 beds and was staffed by ten employees. Supposedly, the staff also raised chickens on the side for its Sunday meals.
A February 1914 editorial in the San Pedro Daily News calling for the construction of a newer, more modern hospital facility praised Mrs. Mullen’s efforts at converting the dilapidated hotel into a hospital:
“The fact that the antiquated building [the San Pedro Hotel] has been successfully transformed into a hospital is a marvel of marvels and stands as an object lesson of what can be accomplished, under stress of adverse conditions, by a capable, and energetic, woman, fully equipped with experience and exact knowledge in her chosen vocation.”
The editorial goes on to give two reasons why a new hospital was a must. First, the imminent opening of the Panama Canal later that year would greatly increase shipping activities and jobs at the port. Also the harbor’s increasing strategic value as a military center would lead to more troops being stationed in the area.
A third factor became even more persuasive in 1915, with the implementation of the plan to demolish Nob Hill itself to make way for the construction of Harbor Boulevard. It would serve to connect the Harbor Area to roads leading from downtown Los Angeles. Located as it was in the heart of downtown San Pedro, the hill was seen as an impediment to traffic and to business development.
Over the next dozen years, most of the once-posh houses atop the hill would be razed. The U.S. military ordered the hospital moved for security reasons in 1915, and it subsequently moved to new temporary quarters at Santa Cruz and Gaffey streets.
The hospital would find its permanent location in June 1925, when the brand new San Pedro General Hospital opened for business at the corner of Sixth St. and Patton Ave.
SPGH cost $19,000 to build. Room fees for patients ran $12 a day, or $4.50 for those in the worker’s ward. The much larger state-of-the-art San Pedro Medical Center, now known as the Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center — San Pedro, would open next to the original hospital site in 1961.
As for the hotel building, it was re-transformed back into the more modest San Pedro Hotel, offering low-cost accommodations for workers at the community’s now-broad range of industrial operations.
Meanwhile, the lowering of Nob Hill continued through the 1920s, with the old hotel pretty much the only structure left by 1928. The plan: to lower the hotel to street level as the hill beneath it was being removed.
The photo above/below taken from the front page of the San Pedro News Pilot edition of May 21, 1928, shows this process in action. Unfortunately, technical details on exactly how it was accomplished are scant.
Accompanying text: “Typical of the difficulties surmounted in building a city on the site of San Pedro is this illustration of the work of lowering the old San Pedro hospital to a new level. It’s old site was in the aristocratic section of the city 25 years ago and known Nob Hill. Comprising many blocks,
Nob Hill has been reduced 75 feet below its old level and will become an Important business section. The work of leveling the site of San Pedro has equalled that of either Seattle or Kansas City, although it has received far less public notice.“
The San Pedro Hotel did land safely on the ground following its journey down from the top of Nob Hill. Afterward, it continued to operate in its low-budget fashion during the 1930s.
Eventually, though, the dilapidated building was abandoned. During the 1940s, it was destroyed after the Los Angeles Fire Department finished using it as a site for its firemen to practice fighting building fires.
Sources:
Daily Breeze files.
Los Angeles Herald files.
Los Angeles Times files.
San Pedro: A Pictorial History, by Henry Silka, San Pedro Bay Historical Society, 1984.
San Pedro News Pilot archives.
