San Remo Hotel

A. P. Giannini, the founder of the Bank of America, put this hotel up in North Beach in the immediate aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and fire. He called it the New California Hotel — a statement of faith in the city's recovery — and gave free meals and rooms to many of the workers hired to rebuild San Francisco, a good number of them Italian immigrants. The sixty-two-room Italianate Victorian was renamed the San Remo in 1922, after the town on the Gulf of Genoa, and it still runs as a European-style hotel with shared baths. In 1911 its restaurant was the scene of a double killing, when a former lover of a bride arrived at her wedding reception, started a fight, and shot two men seated at a nearby table. The presence most associated with the building is a retired madame who had run a brothel elsewhere in the city and died at the San Remo in 1978; she is said to knock on doors along the hallway near Room 33 and be gone when guests open them. A little girl is reported roaming the corridors, drawn to Room 42. Guests describe cold spots throughout, and a sense of being watched that many find more calming than unsettling.