This Month’s Film: To Be Announced
Cuisine: Korean
For the past six years, I’ve been watching and reviewing all the Asian entries in the San Jose Cinequest Film Festival, but up until this year, I’d never been to the festival itself. So this year, Public Relations Director Jens Hussey extended an invitation for me to come down to the two-week festival for a couple of days, to meet the staff and watch a few films. The invitation included two nights at the Hotel Montgomery, a stylish, intimate establishment with a fascinating history and a well-preserved vintage flair. According to the Hotel Montgomery website:
“The Hotel Montgomery was originally constructed in 1911 by noted San Jose architect and designer, William Binder. It was developed and owned by T.S. (Thomas Seymour) Montgomery, an influential and prominent San Jose developer and businessman who has sometimes been referred to as the Mayor of South First Street. Montgomery was not only a leading developer, but also the director for both competing railroads (Southern Pacific and Western Pacific) and was the Chairman of the Board of the California Prune and Apricot Growers, Inc. A portrait of T.S. hung in the lobby of the hotel until approximately 1980; the current whereabouts of the portrait is unknown.
From the Hotel Montgomery’s opening in 1911 until 1926, it was considered San Jose’s only first class downtown hotel. The high-style hotel featured four stories, 142 rooms, a restaurant, a ballroom and two dining rooms. In the 1920s, a single room went for approximately $1.50 per night. A private bathroom cost an additional dollar. It was a grand and elegant hotel sporting a unique facade and building design. Its style is predominantly Renaissance Revival, with elements of Spanish and Beaux Arts traditions.
When it first opened, the Hotel Montgomery was the most cutting edge hotel in the area. It included the most modern conveniences of the time, including in-room plumbing, a switchboard with in-room telephones, electric elevators and steam heat. It was a hotel of many firsts: it was the first hotel in San Jose to have electric fixtures, the first with private baths, and the first in the area to be built with reinforced concrete, which helped make it resistant to both fire and earthquakes.
The hotel’s heyday ended in the 1950s with the general decline of downtown San Jose. The hotel was in use until 1962, when it was sold and converted to residential use. The San Jose Redevelopment Agency (SJRA) purchased the land and Hotel in 1982 for $450,000. After decades of dilapidation and damage from a major earthquake, the city began to consider the preservation of this historic structure.
Upon taking office in January 1999, Mayor Ron Gonzales made the preservation of the history of San Jose a major goal of his administration. This included the Hotel Montgomery, which at the time, was non-operational after suffering damage from the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. In order to begin construction of the Fairmont Hotel Annex, the Montgomery needed to either be moved or demolished. The San Jose Redevelopment Agency teamed up with the Preservation Action Council of San Jose, the Historic Landmark Commission, and Fairmont developer Lew Wolff to draft save the historic landmark.
In January 2000, the SJRA took the extraordinary step of relocating the hotel 186 feet south of its original location at First and Paseo de San Antonio to First and San Carlos streets ‹at a cost of $8.5 million. The building weighed 4,800 tons and was the heaviest move ever made on rubber wheels and the longest, according to Devcon, the contractor responsible. Special remote controlled machinery was placed under the structure, which inched along for more than three hours before reaching its destination.”
Quite a story…
My original plan for the first evening at Cinequest was to check into the hotel, meet the staff, have an early supper, and attend a screening of a Vietnamese film titled The White Silk Dress, one of the entries that wasn’t available for me to preview on DVD. But after the exhausting demands of my many deadlines last week, room service and a soak in the tub was far too tempting, although I still want very much to see The White Silk Dress, and will eventually. The amended plan for the evening was a wise choice indeed. In fact, it was pure bliss…
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