Silver baron James Graham Fair bought this Nob Hill lot in the 1880s intending to build the grandest mansion in a neighborhood already crowded with railroad tycoons’ estates, but he died in 1894 before construction began. His daughters, Tessie and Virginia, finally commissioned architects Reid & Reid to build a hotel instead, naming it Fairmont by combining their family name with the hill’s own. The building was nearly finished and scheduled to open the morning of April 18, 1906, when a 7.9-magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco at 5:12 a.m.
The Fairmont’s granite exterior survived largely intact, but the fires that followed gutted its interior completely. Rather than abandon the project, new owners hired Julia Morgan, California’s first licensed female architect, to rebuild it using then-experimental reinforced concrete; it reopened exactly one year after the quake, on May 4, 1907, with a party serving 13,000 oysters. Delegates drafted the founding charter of the United Nations in the hotel in 1945, and Tony Bennett first sang I Left My Heart in San Francisco in its Venetian Room.