Rates: $2.50 to $3.00 per day
W.W. Bowers, Proprietor
The Florence Hotel
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History at
HillQuest |
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Largest
and Best Furnished Rooms of Any Hotel in Southern California Rates: $2.50 to $3.00 per day W.W. Bowers, Proprietor |
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Hotel
Florence (Fourth and Fir) San Diego, California |
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Main
Entrance
Hotel
Robinson |
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Hotel Casa Loma
San Diego, California Mrs. James J. Wall, Manager |
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I
am not a doctor, neither am I building a sanitarium, asylum, hospital
nor home for the friendless, I am engaged in erecting what is intended
to be a first-class family hotel, nothing more-nor-less; the guests
will, I suppose, do as at other hotels, choose their own physician if
they desire one, without the advice or interference of any employe of
the house; I state this because I have in one day received as many as
four application [sic] for the position of physician - not from the
doctors here, but from friends and relatives of doctors who want to
come here.
W.W. Bowers
1883 letter to the San Diego Union
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| W. W. Bowers, late U. S. Collector for San
Diego, is building a monster
hotel called the Florance [sic]. It is 136 feet long, he already has
used up 177,000 feet of lumber and will be open on the 15th of January.
He is now on his way per Orizaba to San Francisco, to buy furniture. It
is a pity our big houses did not bid for it. San Diego has no love for
Los Angeles. December 15, 1883, San Pedro
Shipping Gazette
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| Chief among the places where the visitor
may find comfortable and even
luxurious accommodations is the new FLORENCE HOTEL, which was opened to
the public January 24, 1884. This house was especially designed to be
and is a first-class family hotel. It is the unanimous verdict of the
guests that it is the best hotel they have found. — promotional
pamphlet
“San Diego as a Summer Resort for Pleasure Seekers and Invalids” published by William Bowers |
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| A.E. Nutt, proprietor of the Hotel
Florence, wins the good will of citizens by guaranteeing the payment
for sprinkling Fourth street until the city is able to pay for such
work. This public-spirited action will save one of the most
important thoroughfares from ruination. October 14, 1895, Los Angeles Times
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| “The Florence Hotel in those days was
then, way out of town, or so it
seemed. ...As I stood at the side of the hotel and looked about, I
could see little but wild country. There was a big flock of sheep
near
the hotel, but off where the fine city park now is there was little but
sagebrush and cactus. It did not look much then as if the city
would
build up that far for a long time, but in a comparatively few short
months it had spread far beyond that — largely on paper, it is true,
but it actually spread pretty fast.” Judge Thomas J. Hayes
Quoted in 1922 City of San Diego and San Diego County by Clarence Alan McGrew |
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