Legend holds that Frank Havens won this hillside property from Berkeley capitalist John Spring in a game of checkers at Oakland’s Athenian Club, though the documented history is more conventional: Havens and mining magnate “Borax” Smith began building a resort hotel here in 1905, only to have the 1906 earthquake and the financial panic that followed stall construction for nearly a decade. Erik Lindblom eventually financed the project’s completion, and the Claremont Hotel opened in 1915, in time to house visitors crossing the bay for San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
Built in Tudor Revival style with exposed half-timbering, the hotel got its now-famous white paint job in 1939, specifically so it could be seen shining on its hillside from across the bay during the Golden Gate International Exposition. By 1959 it had more convention space than any hotel west of Chicago.