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Plans for The Westgate Hotel
(what was then called The Westgate
Plaza Hotel) began in the early '60s
with a dinner conversation between
the late President Eisenhower and C.
Arnholt Smith, a local banker and
financier. "Is this the best hotel
you have in San Diego?" Eisenhower
asked. History fails to record the
hotel in which the remark was made,
but the latest downtown hotel had
been built thirty-five years before;
and Smith -- a native San Diego
Rags-to-Riches success story -- took
it as a personal challenge, and the
Westgate-California Corporation, the
conglomerate he headed, undertook
the launching of a new hotel.
It would be a complete anachronism
and denial of all the principles of
hotel cost accounting! "The
Westgate" would be a modern hotel
designed along the lines of the
classical European hotel palaces
de grand luxe.
Richard George Wheeler & Associates,
in partnership with Fujimoto & Fish,
A.I.A designed the hotel. It was
built by Southcoast and Riha
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at a cost of $14.5 million. When the Westgate Plaza
Hotel was built in 1970, it
was the most expensive hotel built
in the country.
The lobby of the hotel is a
re-creation of one of the anterooms
at Versailles. French nobility used
the anterooms as waiting rooms
before being presented to His
Majesty Louis XV.
Smith and his wife wandered all over
Europe in search of furnishings,
paintings and equipment. Their
purchases included a $150,000
eighteenth-century marble fireplace
flanked by gilded bronze nymphs (now
in the elegant Versailles Ballroom);
a $50,000 rosewood bombe commode
signed by Linke, a celebrated French
craftsman. Hanging on the glazed
cream walls of the lobby is a
detailed reproduction of Return
of the Prodigal Son by
Rembrandt. The original painting is
in The Hermitage in St. Petersburg,
Russia. A mirror on the south wall
is a work of art by Claude Charles
Saunier, a noted cabinet maker
during the Louis XVI period.
Filling the public rooms are
paintings by Boucher, Fragonard and
Gainsborough. A seven-foot-long,
nineteenth-century desk, the twin of
one in the king's bedchamber in
Versailles, now resides in the
Westgate Hotel lobby.
Braced with
golden cherubs above its
bronze-encrusted pigeonholes, an
1886 desk by Henri Dasson, was
purchased at auction for $25,000
over 20 years ago.
Other Westgate treasures include a
beautiful Steinway piano, one of the
first five pianos manufactured by
the company and exquisite tapestries
of Aubusson and Beavais. The Beavais
is from a painting by Francois
Boucher (1703-1770), the first
painter to King Louis IV, and who
was greatly admired by Mms. De
Pompadour. Magnificent chandeliers
of hand-cut Baccarat crystal,
specially made for the Westgate
Hotel in Milan, Italy, crown the
lobby and Versailles Ballroom
"The key to The Westgate's greatness
is it's luxury hotel, in a
sense that might almost be
outmoded," said Richard Joseph of
Esquire magazine. "This is no
motel-modern, roadside renaissance
structure; it is rather, a
contemporary version of such elegant
buildings as the Ritzs of Paris,
Madrid and London, the Grand in
Rome, the Amstel in Amsterdam and
the Imperial in Vienna."
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