The Mission Inn

OVERVIEW

A hotel that fills a whole downtown block, begun as the Millers' twelve-room adobe boarding house, Glenwood Cottage, which took its first paying guest on 22 November 1876. Frank Augustus Miller bought it from his father in 1880 and from 1902 built it outward and upward for thirty years: Arthur Benton's Mission Wing (1903) and Cloister Wing (1911), Myron Hunt's Spanish Wing (1914) and G. Stanley Wilson's International Rotunda Wing (1931), with flying buttresses, a five-storey rotunda staircase, a chapel of Tiffany windows, courtyards, campaniles and Miller's collections of bells, crosses and California mission paintings. It is a National Historic Landmark (5 May 1977) and California Historical Landmark 761.

HISTORY

Richard and Pat Nixon married in what is now the Presidential Lounge in 1940; Ronald and Nancy Reagan honeymooned here in 1952; eight other presidents have stayed. Frank Miller died in 1935 and the hotel declined after the family sold it in 1956, closing in 1985 for a seven-year restoration; Duane Roberts bought it in 1992 and reopened it, and its Festival of Lights each winter draws hundreds of thousands. The property was sold in 2026.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The Riverside tradition puts Frank Miller in his old rooms and his sister Alice in hers on the fourth floor — cold spots, a touch, a figure, singing — and has honeymoon-suite guests reporting a push on the spiral stair between the suite's two levels; the Riverside Press-Enterprise and the city college's Viewpoints have carried the stories for decades, and the 'catacombs' under the hotel are a local legend the hotel neither confirms nor exploits. The hotel does not run ghost tours; the entry records a well-known civic tradition attached to a very well documented building.

VISITING

A working hotel and spa; the courtyards, chapel and shops are open to the public and the Mission Inn Foundation museum runs daily history tours. Festival of Lights from late November.