Roomer

“There's a cat made of wrought iron perched above the fourth-floor stairwell, and nobody on staff seems to know why it's there.”

Mission Inn Avenue is wider than it needs to be, the kind of boulevard a small city builds when it's convinced it's about to become a big one. The Metrolink from LA Union Station takes about an hour and change, and the Riverside-Downtown station drops you close enough that you can walk the last ten minutes past taco shops and bail bond offices and a surprisingly good Vietnamese sandwich place called Bánh Mì Chè Cali. The sidewalks are clean but mostly empty at 3 PM on a Thursday. Then the hotel appears on the left, and you stop walking because you have to. It takes up an entire city block. It looks like someone airlifted a Spanish colonial mission, crossed it with a Moorish palace, added gargoyles for fun, and then just kept building for thirty years. Which is more or less exactly what happened.

Frank Miller, a local engineer with more money than restraint, started construction in 1902 and basically never stopped until he died in 1935. He traveled the world, bought bells from Asian temples and tiles from Spanish churches, and bolted them all onto his hotel. The result is a building that shouldn't work — a collision of architectural impulses spanning continents — and yet somehow it holds together with the conviction of a man who simply refused to be told no. You feel that energy the moment you walk through the arched entrance into the Spanish Patio, where a fountain murmurs under a canopy of bougainvillea and a wedding party is already taking photos at four in the afternoon.

Sleeping inside someone else's obsession

The hallways are the real experience here. They twist and turn and dead-end into unexpected courtyards. There are flying buttresses. There's a spiral staircase made of wrought iron that leads to a rooftop rotunda where you can see the San Bernardino Mountains going pink at sunset. The hotel has hosted every president from Taft to Nixon, and it wears that history without being stuffy about it — more curiosity cabinet than museum. You half-expect to turn a corner and find a suit of armor. You do turn a corner and find a suit of armor.

The rooms, by comparison, are almost startlingly normal. Mine had a king bed, dark wood furniture, a flat-screen TV that felt like a concession to the century. The bathroom was fine — good water pressure, adequate towels, a slightly aggressive air conditioning unit that I fought with for twenty minutes before finding the sweet spot between arctic and off. The walls are thick enough that you don't hear your neighbors, which is a genuine luxury in a building this old. What you do hear, if your window faces the courtyard, is the fountain. All night. Some people would find this soothing. I am not some people. I slept fine after the second night.

The spa occupies a lower level and leans into the whole mission-revival aesthetic with dim lighting and terra cotta. It's popular with local couples doing anniversary weekends, which gives the pool area a pleasant, unhurried energy on Saturday mornings. The on-site restaurant, Duane's Prime Steaks & Seafood, is the kind of place where the waiter calls you "sir" without irony and the portions are designed for people who skipped lunch. It's good. It's not the reason to eat in Riverside.

“The building is the attraction. Riverside just happens to be the city that grew up around it.”

The reason to eat in Riverside is Simple Simon's, a no-frills lunch counter three blocks east on University Avenue that does a patty melt worth rearranging your afternoon for. Or Tio's Tacos, about a ten-minute drive south, where the yard art installation is so dense and strange that you'll spend more time outside than eating — though the carne asada plate is ‎$۱۲ and honest. The hotel's front desk staff will recommend Duane's or the in-house café, but push them a little and they'll admit that Mario's Place on Mission Inn Avenue does a better pasta than anything on the property.

What the Mission Inn gets right is something most hotels don't even attempt: it gives you a reason to wander without leaving. I spent an hour one morning just walking the upper floors, finding hand-painted tiles from Seville, a copper dome that Frank Miller reportedly haggled for in a Kyoto market, and a tiny chapel — the St. Francis of Assisi Chapel — where couples still get married on weekends. There's a docent-led tour at 1:30 PM on Fridays and Saturdays that costs ‎$۱۵ and is worth it even if you're staying here, because the building has more stories than any one guest could stumble into alone. I learned that Booker T. Washington once spoke from the balcony. I learned that the International Shrine of Aviators on the fifth floor contains a chunk of rock from the Mount of Olives. I did not learn who put the iron cat above the fourth-floor stairwell.

Walking out the door

Checkout is at noon, and by then Mission Inn Avenue has woken up. A guy is selling elote from a cart near the pedestrian mall. The Riverside Art Museum across the street — another mission-revival building, smaller, quieter — opens at ten and rarely has a line. The light is different in the morning here than it was when I arrived; the mountains catch it earlier, and the hotel's bell tower throws a shadow that reaches almost to the taco shop on the corner.

If you're heading back to LA on the Metrolink, the 3:15 PM train gives you time for one last patty melt at Simple Simon's. The walk to the station is flat and easy, and you'll pass the hotel one more time. It still looks impossible. It still looks like it belongs somewhere else entirely. That's the whole trick of Riverside — a city that built something extraordinary and then quietly went about its business.

Rooms at the Mission Inn start around ‎$۲۰۰ on weeknights and climb past ‎$۴۰۰ on weekends and holidays. For what you get — a building that doubles as a fever dream, a neighborhood that feeds you well, and mountains visible from the roof — it's a fair deal. Just pack earplugs if you're a light sleeper. That fountain doesn't quit.