This is the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa at Walt Disney World in Orlando Florida.
Along with the Contemporary and Polynesian, it is one of three resorts that sit alongside
the Seven Seas Lagoon and is connected to the Magic Kingdom via monorail.
It is one of the more beautiful and picturesque resorts at Disney and so unsurprisingly it’s
also one of the most expensive.
Today we are… not going to talk about the Grand Floridian.
Today we’re going to talk about one of the hotels that inspired the hotel.
Now like many projects at Disney World, the Grand Floridian draws inspiration from a number
of sources.
Obviously in this case, those sources are other historic hotels and they include resorts
such as The Mount Washington Resort in New Hampshire, the Grand Hotel in Michigan, and
the Belleview-Biltmore Hotel in Florida.
However today we’re going to talk about one of the more prominent and famous sources
of inspiration for the Grand Floridian, and that is the Hotel Del Coronado, otherwise
affectionately known as The Del, located just outside of San Diego, in California.
It was 1884 when Elisha Babcock Jr, a telephone company executive and Hampton Story, founder
of a piano company, arrived in San Diego.
The two initially didn’t know each other, but during a quail hunting trip on a peninsula
off the coast they both realized that the area would make for a fantastic resort destination.
So for the grand total of one-hundred and ten thousand dollars, the two purchased the
forty-one hundred acre plot of land with the dream of transforming the area into a southern
California paradise that would be home to the grandest hotel in the country, if not the world.
With the idea that it would be the “king of the west” when it came to resorts, they
named the area Coronado, which was spanish for “the crowned one”.
A couple of years later in 1886 they would split up the land into lots, saving a large
piece of the beachfront for their hotel, and auctioned off the rest.
They attracted over 300 buyers who ultimately paid around one-hundred thousand dollars in
total for their lots.
By the following year that total would exceed one and a half million dollars and by the
time all the lots were sold it would bring in a grand total of two point $2.25 million
The idea was that the revenue brought in from the sale of these lots would pay for construction
of the hotel itself.
Using part of that money they hired the Reid Brothers of Indiana to design this hotel paradise.
It was an all-wooden hotel that utilized what was called Queen Anne Revival architecture.
It was actually a little confusing.
There was a Queen Anne style of architecture in the early 1700’s, but it was actually
called English Baroque.
Then in the late 1800’s an architect named Richard Norman Shaw popularized a style that
he called Queen Anne style since it drew from that English Baroque era… except for the
fact that it actually didn’t.
As it turns out it was more similar to Elizabethan and Jacobean era architecture.
The name stuck anyway and so it remained Queen Anne style despite not actually being Queen
Anne style.
To add to the confusion, this all took place during the Victorian era, so it was all also
Victorian architecture.
In any case, with the hotel designed and ready, the construction team broke ground in March
of 1887 and over the following 11 months a team of over two hundred and fifty workers
raised what would become the largest hotel in the world.
There was so much lumber on site that smoking around the hotel while it was being built
was reportedly banned, out of fear of what might happen if a fire were to break out.
When it finally opened in February of 1888 it sported four hundred guest rooms and was
widely considered, beyond being the largest hotel in the world, to be one of the most
technologically advanced as well.
Because you see the Del offered a new blossoming modern marvel that had only really begun to
commercially spread over the previous few years: electricity.
But that’s not all!
The hotel also offered telephone service, which had only just reached that part of California
seven years earlier.
It’s final price tag?
Just around one million dollars.
At opening rooms went for around two dollars and fifty cents a night which included with
it three meals.
Try getting that kind of deal today.
Over the following one hundred years it would see famous guests from all around the world,
including many US presidents, members of the royal family, and more celebrities than you could count.
It would offer more firsts, such as the first outdoor electrically lit Christmas tree.
It would also appear in multiple films, the most notable being the 1958 Marilyn Monroe/Tony
Curtis comedy, Some Like it Hot.
In short, it became a San Diego and southern Californian icon.
In 1977 it’s historic background would be made official when it was finally designated
as a National Historic Landmark.
Just 11 years later in 1988, just in time for its centennial, it’s influence would
spread once more, this time to the east coast.
Disney was looking to finally build a third hotel along the Sevens Seas Lagoon, and the
concept they’d ultimately go with was a turn of the century Victorian beach resort.
Like I had mentioned at the top of the video, they’d end up taking inspiration from a
handful of different sources, as Imagineers tend to do, but there’s no denying the overwhelming
influence the Hotel Del Coronado had on The Grand Floridian Resort & Spa.
Now of course it would be silly to think that there wouldn’t be a Grand Floridian Resort
had the Hotel Del Coronado not existed.
Disney would have expanded either way.
However I think it’s safe to say that without the Del, the hotel we would have gotten would
have looked quite different.
So the next time you’re staying at the Grand Floridian, or if you’re like me, the next
time you’re passing it by and WISHING you were staying at the Grand Floridian, just
remember that the seeds of what it would eventually become were planted over 130 years ago.