About twenty years ago I was in the Plaza area for some reason, on a weekday which is what made it unusual. I stopped by the historic park management office, which in those days, if memory serves, was located in the old Mason hall. My intent was to ask politely if someone would please take me inside the Pico House, which I'd only ever seen from the outside due to its always being locked shut. The woman running the front desk very kindly offered to show me around.
These pictures aren't that great, because they were taken with a conventional albeit decent quality camera, then scanned recently.
The first one may have been taken from the street through the windows of the main entrance. This is looking up the "grand staircase"; you can see the niches where the statues were placed in its heyday. Now that I look at the shot again, it looks like there still might be a manikin or statue of some kind!
Next we have a large ground floor public room on the Plaza side. I believe this was the dining room during the period when the hotel was good enough to have one. In later years I believe this was used as a billiards hall.
Last we have the interior courtyard. The guide told me that the railings, along with the brick staircase on the far side, were new work; presumably they were hoping visitors would be on the upper floors for some reason yet to be determined, and they had to be brought up to code. We are looking at the north wall of the Merced Theatre. I seem to remember reading somewhere that there was a door between the Pico House and the auditorium level of the theater, which was on the second floor. The Merced, like the Pico House, is three stories high but we can see that the height of each floor was considerably greater in the theater building. This may be related to the fact that there are two doors of which the higher one doesn't seem to be on the proper level for either the second or third floor of the hotel. One door may be a recent alteration.
As I wrote in the Wikipedia
article on the hotel,
Quote:
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In the days of the hotel's primacy the courtyard featured a fountain and an aviary of exotic birds...The back of the hotel faces Sanchez Street, where the large carriage entrance can still be seen.
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