Frank Miller's Fever Dream

Frank Miller was not an architect and he was not a hotelier. He was the son of a furniture dealer who inherited a twelve-room boarding house in Riverside in eighteen eighty, and he spent the next fifty-five years losing his mind into the building's walls.

What he built is officially known as the Mission Inn Hotel. What it actually is requires more explanation. There is a rotunda modeled on the Pantheon. There are flying buttresses lifted from a Spanish cathedral. There is a collection of more than eight hundred bells gathered from churches across Mexico, Spain, and the Philippines, embedded in the building's towers and arcades. There are cloisters, gargoyles, a presidential suite, a courtyard chapel with hand-painted tiles where Richard Nixon married Pat Ryan on June twenty-first, nineteen forty. Architects worked on the inn across six decades, most notably Arthur Benton, who brought professional discipline to Miller's increasingly elaborate visions, though the discipline was always in service of the obsession rather than the other way around.

Ten presidents have visited or stayed here, including Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, John F. Kennedy, and Nixon, who came first as a groom.

The style Miller helped invent and popularize has a name: Spanish Mission Revival. You have seen it everywhere in Southern California without necessarily knowing what to call it. The Santa Fe train station in San Diego. Post offices, courthouses, city halls across the region. School buildings from Santa Barbara to Riverside. The aesthetic came from missionaries and rancheros and was reimagined by Anglo romantics at the turn of the twentieth century as a brand identity for Southern California, warm, Mediterranean, ancient-seeming, something to sell to tourists arriving on railroads from the frozen Midwest. Miller did not invent this romantic impulse, but his hotel was its grandest monument.

He was still adding rooms when he died in nineteen thirty-five. The building covers an entire city block. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-seven. The chapel still hosts weddings. Nixon's ghost does not appear to object.