Raymond Hotel
Hotel in South Pasadena, California
The Raymond Hotel was a hotel in South Pasadena, California, and first major resort hotel of the San Gabriel Valley. Largely a winter residence for wealthy Easterners, it was built by Mr. Walter Raymond of Raymond & Whitcomb Travel Agency of Boston, Massachusetts. The hotel was built atop Bacon Hill which lies between Pasadena and South Pasadena and was renamed Raymond Hill with the opening of the hotel in 1886. The original hotel, a grand and unequivocal Victorian edifice was burned to the ground in 1895. A second building, of a later and more fireproof style, was erected in 1901 and equally replaced the older in grandeur. The hotel was foreclosed following the Great Depression and was razed for commercial development.
History
"Pasadena Paradise"
War Veterans, Health Seekers, and Tourists
In 1883, Walter Raymond had ventured west to the young community of Pasadena, California, described as a sleepy village of 1,500 people. Seeking to excite business in the transcontinental tour market, he noticed that the yet unincorporated town had no hotels for visitors. This piqued his interest in establishing one, thereby purchasing a hard granite hilltop called Bacon Hill as the site for his new Raymond Hotel.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Raymond Hotel” is hotel in South Pasadena, California. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Raymond, Hotel and South, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7298868. Authority coordinates are 34.124, -118.148. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1886, 1895, 1901 and 1883.
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This entry incorporates text from “Raymond Hotel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.