Nevada Senator John P. Jones bought this land in the 1870s while helping found the city of Santa Monica, and built a mansion he called Miramar, Spanish for view of the sea, where he hosted guests including Mark Twain and Susan B. Anthony. His wife Georgina is credited with planting the property’s now-famous Moreton Bay fig tree in the 1880s; local legend holds an Australian sailor traded the sapling to a bartender to settle a drink tab, though the more documented account credits Georgina and the estate’s gardener directly.
The mansion passed to razor magnate King Gillette after Jones’s death and served briefly as a military academy before hotelier Gilbert Stevenson converted it into the Hotel Miramar in 1921. Greta Garbo moved into the Palisades Wing for four years, and Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, and Jimmy Stewart followed. The fig tree, now roughly 150 years old and standing 80 feet tall, was declared a Santa Monica historic landmark in 1976.