The Claremont Hotel

Frank Lloyd Wright called The Claremont, “…one of the few hotels in the world with warmth, character and charm.”

Born of a “golden” era, The Claremont Hotel is situated on a mountainside in the Berkeley Hills, with a view of the San Francisco Bay. The history of The Claremont dates back to the early days of the Gold Rush, when a Kansas farmer, Bill Thornburg, struck it rich. He came to California with his daughter and his wife who dreamed of living in an English Castle. Thornburg purchased 13,000 acres (part of the old Peralta and Vicente Spanish grants) to fulfill his wife’s dream and built the castle and several stables, which housed pedigreed hunters and jumpers. Shortly after Thornburg’s daughter married a British lord and moved to England, Mrs. Thornburg died.

Bill Thornburg subsequently sold the “castle” to the Ballard family. While they were out on July 14, 1901, a dry and windy day, the castle burned to the ground. The destroyed property fell into the hands of Frank Havens and Borax Smith, a famous miner. They planned to erect a resort hotel on the property with trains running directly into the lobby. These plans were later abandoned. One night, Havens, Smith and John Spring, a Berkeley capitalist, played a game of checkers in the old Athenian Club of Oakland with the stakes being the property. As legend goes, Havens won.

Havens and the Claremont Hotel Company began building in 1905, but the earthquake of 1906 and subsequent Panic of 1907 interrupted construction. The additional land The Claremont now rests on was purchased in 1908 and The Claremont Hotel opened for business in 1915. In the 1930’s bands as Count Basie, Louis Armstrong and Tommy Dorsey performed. After the repeal of Prohibition, the Claremont Hotel continued to suffer from a state law banning the sale of alcohol within one mile of UC Berkeley. In 1936, an enterprising student and her friends measured several of the possible routes, finding that the shortest distance from the school to the hotel's front steps was a few feet over a mile. The Claremont immediately opened a bar and awarded the student free drinks for life!