Thursday's A Hotel By Any Other Name

In a June 4th article in the San Francisco Standard, two hotels with similar names close to each other, found that their guests were showing up at the wrong location.  The Grove Inn and the Inn on Grove hotels handled it by going to court because it had become an almost daily occurrence, once guests would check in at the wrong hotel. 

While their case is winding through the system, it occurred to me that there are many hotels with similar names and wonder how this hasn't happened before.  And as I have been lurking around San Francisco hospitality for 30 years it was inevitable I would end up knowing of (and working in) some of them.

I don't know if they get each other's mail, but the 1920s-era Ocean Park Motel is in one part of the city's Sunset District, by the San Francisco Zoo.   I assume their guests are often confused with the Ocean Beach Motel, at the other end of the Sunset District by Golden Gate Park.  I wonder how many end up at the wrong one.

The original Carlton Hotel. Not to be confused with the Ritz-Carlton Hotel

One of the first hotels I worked in was the original Carlton Hotel.  Built in 1927, this little Art-Deco gem was a former Speakeasy during the Prohibition Era.  When I started working there as bellman, I encountered many different types of guests, including the occasional celebrity. 

After all Dick Blum, the husband of then-US Senator Dianne Feinstein, owned the hotel.  One day, two tour busses stopped outside the front door and started unloading what looked like sound equipment.  It turned out to be none other than Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.  To anyone under 30, Marky Mark was the rapper-persona of the actor Mark Wahlberg, of Transformers and The Departed fame.  Back in the early 1990s his billboard-sized underwear ads dominated the Times Squares and Union Squares across the country.

Please remember that the Carlton hotel had barely a hundred rooms and was on the edge of the Tenderloin District of San Francisco.  There was never more than one bellman on duty at a time as there were only three bellmen on the entire staff.  When the pudgy manager approached me in a shiny tour jacket, he said, "I need to coordinate with your bell staff, your concierge staff, and your security staff.  We want to make sure we do not interrupt the day-to-day business of the hotel."

With that I put my hands together and said, "You're in luck, you are looking at all of them."

I'm pretty sure what happened was Mark Wahlberg's people said, "Mr. Wahlberg only stays in the Ritz-Carlton when he is on tour."   I surmise that when some low-level assistant was told to look it up, they found only my beloved, rinky-dink, Tenderloin-adjacent Carlton Hotel as San Francisco's Ritz-Carlton wouldn't open for another three years.  And that is where Marky Mark and his entourage ended up staying, not knowing there was no Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco at that time.

This isn't the first time I found myself working for similarly named hotels.  I worked at the front desk and the concierge desk (as they are one in the same) at the quaint, 30-room, Inn at Union Square.  Ironically around the corner and down the block was the Union Square Hotel.  I can't tell you how many people showed up in taxis at the wrong hotel.  On more than one occasion I had to either walk their guests to them, or our guests to us.  Even though it was only two blocks away, I looked forward to those guests checking in who went to the wrong hotel.  It gave me a chance to get out from behind the concierge desk and stretch my legs.

You are probably thinking, "Wait, that can't be the only similarly named hotel." And you would be wrong.  My first concierge job was at the 1920s-era jewel called the Sir Francis Drake Hotel.  Not to be confused with the Saint Francis Hotel, one block away. 

Despite the fact that the Saint Francis is one of the most prestigious hotels in the city, their patrons still accidentally showed up and checked in at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, seemingly at least once a day. I mean, the both have the word “Francis” in their name.

I am also a graduate of San Francisco State University, not to be confused with the University of California, San Francisco. or the University of San Francisco.

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