Look for a grand, cream-colored building with two connected blocks rising nine stories high, decorated with elegant arches and lining the sidewalk along L Street-just across from the Capitol and hard to miss with its columned facade.
Ah, welcome to the legendary Senator Hotel! Take a moment and imagine the sound of rain tapping on the pavement and cars splashing by in this famously political corner of Sacramento, as the grand arches of the Senator's front greet you with a nod from another era. Behind these walls, the air once buzzed with deals, drama, and the scent of wood polish and strong coffee.
Step back to 1924: Sacramento had just gotten its city council-charter and pure, filtered drinking water, and right here, the Senator Hotel threw open its peach-colored, marble-mimicking arches. Dressed up like a slice of Florence, Italy, this place offered 400 rooms and a showy veranda for guests to see and be seen-perfect if you liked the idea of politicians, famous boxers, and Hollywood-types bumping elbows over tea, or perhaps sneaking to a winding staircase, cool ironwork under hand, to whisper a secret from the balcony. Walking through its doors back then, guests passed hand-painted blue and gold details and heard, just possibly, the Syncopating Senators band warming up in the lobby’s echoing courtyard.
The 1930s and ‘40s cranked the drama up to eleven: Legendary lobbyist Arthur Samish ruled from his lavish suite, while out in those marble-like halls, politicians struck deals on oil, booze, and railroads-sometimes all in one sitting! In those wicker lobby chairs, local heavyweight champ Max Baer strutted his stuff, and if you eavesdropped just right, you might catch Governor Jerry Brown or Ronald Reagan trading words with presidents Nixon or Jimmy Carter. It was a political circus, and the Senator Hotel was the big top.
If you’d slipped into the Empire Room in 1937, you might have seen the mural that scandalized Sacramento-a splashy image of King Edward VIII abdicating his throne for American Wallis Simpson. Some locals thought it was all a bit naughty, but hey, that’s political hotels for you! And with rooms like the Peacock Room for tea, and the European-styled Florentine Dining Room and Roman Banquet Hall, it’s no wonder famous folks loved it here. Charles Lindbergh was toasted in these very walls after his heroic flight. Buster Keaton, Martin Luther King Jr., Joan Didion, and the jazzman Stan Kenton all crossed the threshold. There was always a new headliner-at one point, even Mickey Mantle was paid two grand just to show his face for a health underwriters’ convention. Not a bad gig if you can get it!
You might be a bit disappointed to learn that all this glitter didn’t last forever. By 1979, the hotel’s shine was overshadowed by 79 code violations-yikes! It was boarded up, a ghost of grand times, leaving Sacramento the only top 25 US city without a historic hotel. But the story doesn’t end with locked doors and silence! Enter Marvin “Buzz” Oates, who decided to pour $15 million and a ton of elbow grease into a rescue. The grand space became an office building, now called the Senator Hotel Office Building-but don’t think it lost its edge! Modern lobbyists moved in, and they got a “squawk box” to eavesdrop on the California Assembly, Senate, and committee rooms right from their desks. Let’s face it: if those walls could talk, they’d have enough tales to fill every seat in the Capitol across the street.
As you stand here in the shadow of its bold, Italianate arches, listen hard and maybe, just maybe, you’ll catch the echo of a whispered deal, the clink of glasses in the Empire Room, or the stomp of a jazzman’s foot on stage. In every way, the Senator Hotel lives on as a monument to Sacramento’s high-wire blend of power, style, and a little bit of mischief-or as the politicians call it, “Thursday afternoon.”
