The Grand Horton Hotel and the Kahle Saddlery Hotel, sometimes called the Brooklyn Hotel, both rose in 1886 during the boom that followed the Santa Fe Railway's arrival in San Diego the previous year. Both served the New Town business district as commercial hotels, and both declined with the district over the following century, the Grand Horton eventually becoming a flophouse. When the City Council voted to demolish them in the late 1970s to clear the path for the Horton Plaza shopping mall development, developer Dan Pearson and architect Wayne Donaldson intervened with an unusual rescue. Pearson bought the condemned Grand Horton for one dollar and traded its redwood structural timber for the labor needed to dismantle it.
The preservation method was unprecedented. Donaldson consulted two octogenarian carpenters who understood how the buildings were actually constructed, including the critical detail that beach sand had been used between the bricks instead of mortar, which meant the masonry could be taken apart rather than broken up. The components were catalogued, stored, and reassembled in 1986 at a new site on Island Avenue. The two separate hotels were combined into a single building with a central atrium courtyard, a fabrication rather than a restoration and presented as such. The exterior recreates the Victorian facades while the interior functions as a new hotel.
