These wonders may not today curdle the imagining, but only six years after the Pacific Railroad was opened to transcontinental travel, nothing to compare with it had been seen anywhere either west of the Mississippi or even east of it. The wags of seventy-five years ago had a field day with the Palace and one of them wrote in a current newspaper that in its restaurant “every table is waited upon by two picked waiters, one of whom is attired in a superb swallow-tailed coat, cut bias, and Frodsham watch, and who brings in the solid gold dishes, while the other is arrayed in the costume of a fourteenth-century troubadour and accompanies the conversation on a mandolin. … Just before the conclusion of dinner Mr. Leland and Mr. Smith (the managers) will enter at opposite ends of the dining salon mounted on solid bonanza silver velocipedes, and will make graceful curves around each table, handing every waiter at the same time a new trade dollar. … There are thirty-four elevators in all—four for passengers, ten for baggage, and twenty for mixed drinks. Each elevator contains a piano and a bowling alley.”
When the first Palace burned down in the holocaust of 1906 there was good reason why the West should at once regard it as a symbol of the collapse of civilization and at the same time point out that the Palace contributed to the conflagration the most costly and ornate combustibles in all history.
Today's Palace, with its Great Court on the precise site of the first Great Court, is still maintained in the spirit of another era in hotel-keeping. The house stationery shows a covered wagon with a plainsman gazing across the desert vista toward Market Street with the sentiment, “At the end of the trail there is the Palace,” and this is very true. It is probably, with the single exception of Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo, the only hotel in existence where people go without any other business in San Francisco, but just to put up at the Palace. In a house of its venerable age it is inevitable that scores of elderly couples should revisit it annually as the wonderful scene of their wedding trip many years ago.
Probably today's luncheon guests in the Palm Court, awash as they are with sand dabs, abalone steaks, fresh California figs, and the traditional dessert of the house, petits coeurs flottants à la crème, would be mildly startled if Edmond Rieder, the general manager, and Adolph Bach, the Palace steward, should make an appearance to circle among the wine coolers on solid silver velocipedes, but few other magnificences would bug the eyes of such regular lunchers as Paul Smith, publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle, Herb Caen, the West Coast Winchell, George Cameron, Charles Crocker, or Mme. Margaret Chung, the town's ornamental and leading doer of good works. Since the death of Charlie Norris, the Pied Piper Bar has been widowed of one of its chief literary ornaments, but the affairs of the mighty Southern Pacific Railroad and the adjacent Wells Fargo Bank and Union Trust Company are daily settled at its long and populous mahogany, and there is more of the legislative work of the Commonwealth accomplished there than ever is evolved at Sacramento.
Despite the legend of San Francisco's smaller Bohemian and native restaurants, the Palace to this day maintains almost the only cuisine in town which is wholly above reproach. At night during the social season the Rose Room and Palm Court are populated by the town's chivalry in Magnin frocks and broadcloth tailcoats (San Francisco takes a dim view of the dinner jacket), and weekend parties bound either for the uninhibited pleasures of Reno and the Nevada side of the Sierras or for Carmel or the Peninsula always pause for a stirrup cup in the hotel's Happy Valley Bar, an enchanting premises decorated in souvenirs of the fragrant San Francisco of only yesterday.
Already possessed of two stand-up bars, a night club, three conventional restaurants, a coffee shop, a grand ballroom, and only Mr. Rieder knows how many private ballrooms and diningroom suites, the Palace is at present muttering about a cocktail lounge to be installed at vast expense on the Market Street-New Montgomery corner. Since the days of the great Kirkpatrick, for whom oysters Kirkpatrick were named, no Palace manager has missed a bet of any sort, and it is an equally safe wager that the astute Mr. Rieder will not be the first. The gracious and spacious way of life has always paid off in San Francisco and there is no immediate prospect of any abatement of this altogether satisfactory circumstance.
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