Fairmont Hotel National Register of Historic Places Listing

The Fairmont Hotel nearly died before it ever opened. In April 1906, the Tessie and Virginia Fair sisters were just days away from launching their luxury palace atop Nob Hill. Then the earth ripped open. The great earthquake and subsequent fire gutted the interior, leaving only a soot-stained granite shell standing over a ruined city. Most thought it was a total loss. But the owners hired Julia Morgan. Morgan, the first licensed female architect in California, used pioneering reinforced concrete techniques to rebuild the structural bones. It worked. The grand hotel opened exactly one year after the disaster, showing the world that San Francisco was back.

Decades later, the hotel became a stage for world history. In 1945, delegates from fifty nations gathered in the Fairmont's Garden Room to draft the United Nations Charter. They literally drew up the post-war world order in these hallways. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius even ran his operations out of the penthouse suite. It wasn't all heavy diplomacy, though. In 1961, Tony Bennett stepped onto the stage of the hotel's Venetian Room. He sang. Specifically, he premiered "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" to a packed room of locals. Just a simple love letter to the city.