History
A hotel with a record
Most hotels this old have been renamed, refurbished and forgotten several times over. This one has been renamed and refurbished — but the record survives, and some of it is still in the building.
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1913
The Golden West
The building goes up on the first block of Powell Street as the Golden West Hotel, one of dozens raised across a city still rebuilding after 1906 — and raised in time for the visitors the Panama–Pacific International Exposition was expected to bring in 1915. It brought about eighteen million of them.
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1920s
The Golden Bubble
Prohibition arrives, and beneath the hotel a ten-thousand square foot speakeasy called the Golden Bubble does not appear to notice. Its terrazzo floor and its wallpaper are still down there.
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1921
A detective, and the night before a wedding
Dashiell Hammett is working one block away in the Flood Building, as an operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. When his fiancée Josephine Dolan arrives in San Francisco, it is not thought proper for them to live together before the wedding, so he books her a room here for the night before. He would later put the city he was working in — this stretch of it — into The Maltese Falcon.
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1935
Mosaics in the entry
Helen Bell Bruton sets Egyptian-motif mosaics into the entryway. Bruton and her sisters were among the Bay Area artists whose public work defined the period; four years later they would be working on Treasure Island for the Golden Gate International Exposition. The mosaics are still in the entry.
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1950s
The Golden State
The hotel is renamed the Golden State, and spends the middle of the century as what most Powell Street hotels were: a place to sleep near the cable car, unremarkable and useful.
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1985
Hotel Union Square
Refurbished and reopened under the name it still carries — and with a claim worth repeating, that this was San Francisco's first boutique hotel, at a point when the phrase was barely in use. A 2008 renovation added a room dedicated to Hammett on the fifth floor.
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2020
Closed
The hotel takes in unhoused residents as emergency shelter through the first eighteen months of the pandemic, and then does not reopen. The mortgage defaults in 2023. The last ground-floor tenant leaves in 2025. For most of five years, one of the oldest hotels on Powell Street is dark.
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2026
Opening again
The building changes hands, and the rooms and public areas are renovated. What did not need changing has not been changed: the mosaics, the floors, the stairwells, and the fact that the cable car still starts half a block down the hill.
Still here
Three things the renovation did not touch
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The mosaics
Helen Bell Bruton's Egyptian panels, set into the entry in 1935 and in place ever since.
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The speakeasy floor
The Golden Bubble's terrazzo, and the wallpaper above it, under the ground floor.
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The address
114 Powell Street. The cable cars have run past it since before the building existed.
Come and see the entry for yourself
The mosaics are the first thing you walk past. Most people walk past them. Have a look at the rooms, or call the desk.