Grand Hotel, Johnson & Co., Proprietors, San Francisco, California.

Description

This stunning image was taken in the late 1860s by one of San Francisco’s most iconic early photographers, Carleton E. Watkins. It shows the northern façades of San Francisco’s Grand Hotel, occupying the triangular downtown block formed by Market, New Montgomery, and Second Streets. It is a large “mammoth‑plate” albumen print, created for commercial purposes from the original a few years later.

The view not only shows the newly completed hotel at the height of its commercial life, but captures a city animated by shopkeepers, pedestrians, horse‑drawn carriages, and a horsecar on the Market Street Railway. As such, it offers an unusually detailed document of San Francisco’s post‑Gold‑Rush urban fabric before the 1906 earthquake and fires would completely reshape the city.

The image presents a slightly elevated corner view of the hotel, a massive Second Empire–style structure rising three stories above a retail arcade and capped by a prominent central pavilion with a mansard roof and lantern. The vantage point is across Market Street, allowing the long primary façade to recede in a graceful diagonal from left to right. At the same time, the side elevation along New Montgomery Street extends deep into the distance, emphasizing the hotel’s impressive façade.

Watkins is rightly famous for his eminent compositions. This view centers on the corner entrance bay, where projecting columns and a deeper shadowed portal draw the eye. At the same time, the rhythms of paired arched windows, bracketed cornices, and elaborate window frames create a dense surface pattern typical of Victorian commercial architecture. Despite being the centre of the image, this is not part of the hotel, but the Apothecaries’ Hall run by B. B. Thayer. The hotel’s main entrance on Market Street is fronted with small groups in contemporary dress, and along the curb, several horse carriages wait for fares.

Along the cobbled expanse of Market Street, a horse-drawn streetcar is waiting for passengers at the track’s end. The horse’s motion blur against the otherwise crisp architectural detail suggests a relatively long exposure and hints at the challenges of photographing a busy city street with mammoth‑plate equipment. The photograph is interesting not only as an aesthetically controlled architectural study, but also as a large‑scale visual record of San Francisco’s premier luxury hotel during a time when the city was asserting itself as the economic and cultural hub of the Pacific Coast.

Background for the photograph

The photograph was made by Carleton E. Watkins (1829–1916), the preeminent landscape photographer of the American West and one of the most technically accomplished photographers of the nineteenth century. By the 1870s, Watkins was not only known for his celebrated views of Yosemite but also operated a commercial studio in San Francisco that produced images for an audience of local patrons, visiting tourists, and East Coast collectors. Motifs included city views, urban scenes, infrastructure, and prominent public or commercial buildings. The present photograph aligns smoothly within that framework.

Even so, the present photograph of the Grand Hotel was almost certainly commissioned or produced with commercial intent. Large hotels depended on visual publicity to attract wealthy travelers, investors, and international attention. A monumental photograph by the region’s leading photographer would serve as both advertisement and documentation. Watkins’ mammoth-plate process was particularly suited to this purpose: the immense negatives produced prints whose scale mirrored the grandeur of the subject.

Watkins’s work on San Francisco underscores that he was not just a wilderness photographer, but a visual chronicler of Western development more generally. By photographing the Grand Hotel at this point in time, he captured the culmination of decades of economic expansion following the Gold Rush. In that sense, the photo is part of a broader visual branding campaign that presented San Francisco as the “Paris of the Pacific”.

Watkins coined the term mammoth‑plate for his largest glass negatives. Such plates usually measured around 18 × 21 inches, though in practice, sizes ranged from roughly 15 × 18 to as large as 22 × 25 inches. The prints were usually the same or nearly the same dimensions. Mammoth‑plate prints of urban subjects were produced in smaller numbers than Watkins’s Yosemite and landscape views, in part because of the higher perceived market value of scenic images and the technical difficulty of deploying the large camera in congested streets.

Our photograph palpably demonstrates Watkins’s technical mastery of the mammoth‑plate process. Not only did it require transporting and setting up a camera capable of exposing large glass negatives and positioning it to frame the shot perfectly, but it also demanded a fully controlled exposure to render the light sandstone and painted surfaces without losing detail in shadows or the sky.

Census and publication history

CarltonWatkins.org registers the present mammoth-plate photograph as CEW 382. The original glass plate of this image is dated between 1865 and 1868. The California State Library nevertheless dates this image to 1874. A date between 1868 and 1874 is likely based on the building’s completion history.

Watkins produced photographs in several negative sizes, the most famous being the mammoth plate, which measured approximately 18 by 22 inches (about 46 × 56 cm). This corresponds well to the dimensions of our print (42 x 57.5 cm). Mammoth prints were expensive luxury objects intended for display rather than casual viewing. Multiple views of the Palace Hotel were published, including several reprints from the same negative over the decades. After Watkins’ bankruptcy in 1875, some negatives passed to the firm of I. W. Taber, who continued printing them, created later states distinguishable by mount style, imprint, or tonal characteristics. The rarity of any given example depends on survival, condition, and whether it represents an early Watkins printing or a later Taber issue. Early prints made directly by Watkins – especially those on original mounts with studio imprints – are normally considered the most desirable.

Institutional holdings of Watkins’s mammoth-plate views are found in institutional collections across the United States, but the mammoth prints of the Grand Hotel are nevertheless rare, even in American collections. The OCLC does not have any independent listings for this photograph. The California State Library has an example, whereas the Watkins photo collection at The Bancroft Library at Berkeley does not include this particular view. Similarly, the present print does not figure in the holdings of The Library of Congress, which, for Watkins photographs, holds mostly stereographs.

Context is Everything

The period in which Watkins took this photograph coincided with San Francisco’s consolidation as the principal port and banking center of the Pacific Coast, linked by rail and steamship to national and global networks of commerce. Market Street, seen here with its streetcar lines and emergent vehicular traffic, functioned as the grand urban stage upon which these aspirations were enacted. The Grand Hotel was both a literal and symbolic landmark within that milieu.

The Grand Hotel opened around 1865. Occupying a strategic corner on Market Street near the city’s financial and retail core and catering to an affluent clientele made newly wealthy by the fortunes of mining, railroads, and trade, it immediately stood out as one of San Francisco’s most ambitious hostelries. Its elaborate architecture and a street‑level arcade of shops and services epitomized the cosmopolitan aspirations of post–Gold Rush San Francisco, which sought to rival Eastern cities in luxury and sophistication.

Watkins’s photograph also anticipates loss: many of the buildings along Market Street, including the Grand Hotel itself, were destroyed or severely damaged in the 1906 earthquake and fires, so that the present photograph has become one of the most detailed visual testimonies to a now vanished architectural landscape. In this sense, the photo not only documents an important landmark in late 19th-century San Francisco, but offers a lost view of the fastest-booming city in America.