The L.A. Weekly laments the purchase of Pasadena's Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel by Langham Hotels International, and worries that it may spell gloom and doom to the facilities:
Where the dust of fallen or gutted landmarks chokes the air as we embrace a shopping-center aesthetic, the sale of the storied Ritz Huntington to a foreign developer has the ominous tint of demolition — at least of the hotel’s character, if not the building.
What the author, Mark Cromer, doesn't mention is that the Huntington has already been demolished once -- after being shut down in 1985 because of seismic concerns. After a preservation fight, the old hotel was torn down, and a replica built in its place. The new hotel, rebuilt for about $100 million by Gemtel Corp., opened in 1991 under the Ritz-Carlton management.
And that's not the only rocky moment in the hotel's history. Opened in 1907 as the 383-room Hotel Wentworth, it shut down just a year later due to business problems. It reopened in 1911 as the Huntington.
More recently, the revived hotel stumbled soon after its 1991 grand reopening, as the nation was gripped by recession and the Persian Gulf war. But it managed to hold on, and by the late 1990s had regained much of its luster.
As most of the TV Critics Assn. press tours have taken place at the Ritz-Carlton Huntington since I moved out here in 1996, I've gotten to know the hotel (and its chilly ballrooms) pretty well. Of course, that 1991 renovation was now 17 years ago (that makes me feel pretty damn old, BTW -- I graduated from high school in '91, after all), so Langham's promise to plow $25 million into sprucing up the structure could be a good thing.
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