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Beacon Grand
San Francisco, California, United States · Independent · Accessible Luxury
Ten thousand people packed a two-day open house when the Sir Francis Drake opened on 23 October 1928 at Powell and Sutter, a $5 million Weeks and Day Renaissance tower with radios in every room and an indoor golf course. Conrad Hilton bought it in 1938 as his first hotel outside Texas. After Kimpton years and a 2020 closure it reopened 30 June 2022 as the Beacon Grand, still crowned by the 21st-floor Starlight Room.
- 418 rooms
- Opened 1928
- Neighborhood: Union Square
- Architect: Weeks & Day
- Interiors: Kraig Kalashian (KKAD)
About Beacon Grand
- Named for the explorer who in 1579 missed San Francisco Bay and landed instead at Drakes Bay 28 miles north.
- Hilton sold the hotel to E. B. DeGolia on 8 December 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor; blocks of rooms later housed wartime military traffic.
- Herb Caen nicknamed the Persian Room supper club "The Snake Pit" for its hissing, writhing dance-floor crowd after Prohibition's repeal.
- Beefeater doorman Tom Sweeney became a Union Square fixture in the red uniform; guests photographed him hundreds of times a day before his 2020 retirement.
- A hidden Prohibition Room sits above the elevator lobby, reachable only with a key.
History
When the Sir Francis Drake Hotel opened on October 23, 1928, ten thousand people converged on Union Square over a two-day open house to see what Midwestern hotel developers Leon W. Huckins and John A. Newcomb had wrought at a cost of five million dollars. Mayor Jimmy Rolph and Governor C.C. Young were among the dignitaries on hand, and the San Francisco newspapers called it "26 Stories of Luxury" — though the building was actually twenty-one stories, a piece of promotional hyperbole that became part of its mythology.
Huckins and Newcomb had hired the distinguished San Francisco firm of Weeks and Day to design a hotel that would announce its ambitions through architecture. The firm created an extravagant homage to the European Renaissance of Sir Francis Drake's own era — the sixteenth-century English explorer who, in 1579, narrowly missed sailing into San Francisco Bay, instead making landfall at Drakes Bay twenty-eight miles north. Weeks and Day gave the hotel a grand marble staircase, vaulted ceilings laid in gold leaf, and bas-relief detailing that evoked Elizabethan grandeur. The lobby became one of San Francisco's great public interiors. Room rates started at $3.50 per night, and the amenities were extraordinary for the era: radios in every room, one of the country's first Servidor systems for discreet corridor deliveries, and even an indoor golf course.
During Prohibition, the Drake developed a quiet talent for survival. A secret room above the elevator lobby reportedly stored bootleg liquor brought in from Moss Beach, and staff peepholes in the lobby ceiling allowed lookouts to spot approaching law enforcement. The Persian Room lounge was described in contemporaneous accounts as "enveloped in an aura of romance," its midnight-blue carpets and bronze lamps drawing a clientele willing to work around the restrictions of the era.
As the hotel approached World War II, it became primarily a residential hotel for military personnel, and then, in 1940, the first Beefeater doormen were introduced — originally as a show of solidarity with Britain during its darkest year of the war, when it stood alone against Nazi Germany. The doormen, dressed in full Tudor livery, became the Drake's most recognizable signature and one of San Francisco's most beloved street-level theatrical gestures.
The Starlight Room arrived in the 1940s when the original rooftop apartments were converted into a nightclub on the twenty-first floor, with panoramic city views that made it an immediate institution. It drew generations of San Franciscans for special occasions and late-night dancing, and its identity as a destination in its own right far exceeded the hotel itself.
By the late 1980s, the Drake had run into financial difficulty. In 1993, Kimpton Hotels founder Bill Kimpton saved the building from further decline, forming an investment partnership that purchased the property for $22 million and investing another $9 million to renovate it inside and out. The hotel was renamed the Kimpton Sir Francis Drake Hotel, and Kimpton's stewardship restored much of its original grandeur while giving it the warmth and personality that came to define the brand. It held this identity for nearly three decades, becoming Kimpton's longest-tenured flagship and the property most closely identified with the brand's San Francisco origins. In 2022, following further renovation, the hotel was rebranded as the Beacon Grand — honoring its heritage while writing the next chapter of a building that has stood at the center of San Francisco life for nearly a century.
The setting
At the corner of Powell and Sutter streets in Union Square, the Kimpton Sir Francis Drake Hotel has commanded this address since it opened in 1928 as one of the city's grandest Jazz Age statements, its 21-story frame dressed in vaulted gold-leaf ceilings and hand-painted murals by W.F. Bergman. The Powell Street cable-car turnaround is steps away, linking guests to Nob Hill, Chinatown, and Fisherman's Wharf; Union Square is thirteen minutes by transit, and the Painted Ladies thirteen minutes. The hotel's legendary Starlite Room rooftop nightclub, Beefeater doormen, and Depression-era bullet holes in the upper lobby ceiling give this corner an irreplaceable density of San Francisco lore.
Restaurants and bars
- Starlite Room — Restaurant
Amenities
- Fitness center
- Pet-friendly
Open Beacon Grand in the atlas for live weekend rates, photos, and the full folio.
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