The Delta King: Sacramento's Floating Palace

Moored at the edge of Old Sacramento is a vessel that has outlasted Prohibition, World War Two, and a sinking in the early nineteen eighties. The Delta King is a two-hundred-and-eighty-five-foot sternwheeler built at two shipyards simultaneously. Her hull plates were riveted together at Dumbarton, Scotland, then shipped to Stockton, California, where she was assembled and launched in nineteen twenty-seven.

For thirteen years she and her identical twin, the Delta Queen, ran a nightly ferry service between Sacramento and San Francisco. At six in the evening they cast off from their docks. The voyage took ten and a half hours, threading a hundred miles through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The official schedule promised passenger service; the actual experience, at least during Prohibition, delivered something more. Jazz bands played through the night. Gambling tables ran below decks. Booze flowed despite the Eighteenth Amendment, far enough from shore that federal agents had little interest in following.

The bridges ended it. When the Bay Bridge opened in nineteen thirty-six and the Golden Gate in nineteen thirty-seven, automobiles could cross the Bay in minutes. The Delta King made her last regular passenger run on September twenty-ninth, nineteen forty, the closing day of the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. The timing was deliberate: the Exposition had been keeping riverboat tourism alive with visitors, and when it closed, so did the era.

World War Two gave both steamers a second life in uniform. The Navy requisitioned them, redesignating the Delta King as Yard Ferry Boat Fifty-Five. She served successively as a troop transport, a floating barracks, and a hospital ship on San Francisco Bay. After the war she passed through a string of failed commercial ventures, eventually sinking while laid up at Richmond, California, before being raised in the early nineteen eighties.

A five-year restoration returned her to Sacramento. Today she is a boutique hotel of forty-four rooms, permanently moored where the Sacramento River laps Old Town's planked waterfront, a Prohibition roadhouse and wartime hospital that never left the water.