Palace Hotel, San Francisco

The Palace Hotel features a grand, glass-domed carriage entrance that once allowed guests to arrive inside the lobby, protected from the San Francisco fog. When William Chapman Ralston opened the doors in eighteen seventy-five, he intended to build the largest and most luxurious hotel in the world. He filled it with fifteen million bricks and a self-contained power plant. Just months after the grand opening, Ralston drowned in the bay, leaving his unfinished vision to define the city’s opulent Gilded Age.