Two more blocks west to Stanyan, then look right. The three-story Beaux-Arts building with the corner tower and the wraparound porch is the Stanyan Park Hotel. It was built in 1904 and 1905 by Ferdinand Martens and Alfred I. Coffey, the same architects responsible for many of the city’s Victorian and Classical Revival buildings of that era. It opened as the Hotel Golden Gate, with a saloon, apartments, and storefronts on the ground floor.
The corner had been a hotel saloon since 1883, when proprietor Henry Heagarty first opened a bar facing the new park. The neighborhood had been built around exactly this hinge: cable car arrives, hotels and saloons follow, park anchors the western edge. By the early 1900s seven hotels lined Stanyan Street facing Golden Gate Park. Only the Stanyan Park Hotel still operates as a hotel. The others were demolished, converted to apartments, or destroyed in the 1906 earthquake (although this building, finished one year before the quake, survived it).
In the 1960s and 1970s the hotel was stripped of its ornamentation in a misguided modernization. The dome, balustrade, and carved details came off. In 1983 a restoration brought most of them back, working from historical photographs. That same year it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. It is the only restored Victorian hotel in Haight-Ashbury and the last surviving member of the cluster that gave the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park its character.
It still operates as a small Victorian B&B. Walk across the street and you’re in Golden Gate Park in thirty seconds.