History
Hotel Union Square, which originally housed the Golden West Hotel, was constructed in 1908 for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition. Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman may have conducted much of their love affair at the hotel, and Hammett loved the hotel so much that he booked his bride-to-be Josephine Dolan in a suite on the night before their 1921 wedding. During the Prohibition Era, a 10,000 square feet (930 m2) speakeasy called The Golden Bubble was located below the hotel. The original terrazzo floors and wallpaper still remain in what is now used as a storage area. In the 1950s, the hotel was renamed the Golden State Hotel. Personality Hotels purchased the building in the early 1980s and opened Hotel Union Square in 1982.
In recent years, the hotel is said to have been haunted, particularly in Room 207. Some attribute a ghost in that room to Hellman.
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“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
—Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913)
“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“As I am, so shall I associate, and so shall I act; Caesar’s history will paint out Caesar.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)