The storied Mission Inn reopened in 1992 and once again became Riverside’s biggest tourist attraction. (Or at least the largest: The hotel, opened in 1902 and expanded in stages, occupies an entire city block.)
But for one of the few times in the past three decades, you can’t book a tour.
That’s the aftermath of a bruising dispute that saw the nonprofit Mission Inn Foundation get booted from the property. Its last tours were May 31. Meanwhile, the hotel plans to start its own tours starting Sept. 5.
What do you do in the meantime? You can still hear stories about the famed hotel. And the foundation’s docents are still the ones telling them. You’ll just be hearing them from the sidewalk.
Seven days a week at 10 a.m., 11 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., Mission Inn Foundation docents will lead a “Raincross Tour” of the hotel perimeter. Cost is $10. Tours began Monday.
Curious, I showed up to the first one. The meeting place is the Main Street pedestrian mall near Sixth Street, close to the Eliza Tibbets statue and the hotel’s northwest corner.
I wondered if there would be any hoopla. Instead of cutting a ribbon with giant scissors, maybe someone would push an oversized reset button.
Uh, not exactly. George Pehlvanian and Linda Ward, the docents, were there, but I was the only person on the tour.
“For the next tour, at 11, there are six people who signed up,” Ward assured me.
Because I hadn’t signed up — do so at missioninnmuseum.org — it was only by a lucky break that I got a tour. A message had been relayed to Pehlvanian and Ward that there were no guests. But they didn’t see the message and showed up anyway.
Docent George Pehlvanian talks Monday about a wall outside the Mission Inn in Riverside built with imperfect bricks bought cheaply in Spain by Frank Miller, the hotel’s original owner. Pehlvanian is among the docents shut out of the hotel and now leading downtown walking tours. (Photo by David Allen, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
I’ll give you the bare outline of the 45-minute tour rather than spoil anything. We started at the Eliza Tibbets statue, where Pehlvanian, to whom Ward deferred, explained the origins of the city and the orange industry.
Then came the arrival of the Miller family. The success of their boarding house led to creation of the Mission Inn over 30 years, gradually filling a city block the Miller patriarch had bought for $250.
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Pehlvanian and Ward talked about the Loring Building, another crucial early-Riverside structure, and about the original City Hall, now home to Tilden-Coil Contractors. But mostly we walked around the exterior of the hotel, where the pair spoke knowledgeably about its development and architectural features.
Needless to say, I never lost sight of my tour group.
Early on, we were standing a few paces from the former Mission Inn Museum, which occupied a corner retail space and was run by the foundation until its eviction. It’s now empty with a padlock on the doors.
Who should walk by but Stephanie Starbuck, who had been the store’s manager. She’s now in charge of the Mission Inn Run, the foundation-sponsored run/walk that is now in its 47th year and which is scheduled for Oct. 20.
“We’re at over 2,100 runners signed up. We were at 1,800 at this point last year,” Starbuck said.
On May 31, the last day, the store did $5,700 in sales, a high point. An online store will open in the coming weeks, because the foundation still has “a ton” of merchandise, Starbuck said, and the search for a new retail space downtown goes on.
The hotel had offered to relocate the museum as part of lease negotiations, an offer foundation leadership rejected, leading to an eviction notice and a lawsuit, not to mention some intemperate comments. The foundation lost in court in April.
I’m no legal mind, but as someone attuned to public mood, as well as a political realist, I thought the foundation’s attempt to shame the Mission Inn was doomed to fail.
To paraphrase Walt Whitman, the Mission Inn is large, it contains multitudes.
If you want to make the Mission Inn laugh, tell it your plans. Similarly: Man plans, the Mission Inn decides.
A related question: Can Riverside make a hotel so large that even Riverside can’t move it?
Foundation officials are trying to repair the damage. Previous leadership is gone. New leadership met with hotel co-owner Kelly Roberts in mid-June, expressed their contrition and have hopes they can resume a productive relationship.
“We don’t think discussions are over yet,” Rich Vandenburg, the board vice president, told me by phone Monday. “We are still committed to the Mission Inn, even if it’s from the outside.”
The former Mission Inn Museum stands padlocked on Monday. Tours of the hotel took place up to five times a day starting from the museum, but the museum was evicted May 31 and the tours are dormant. (Photo by David Allen, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
After the museum closed, docents met at ProAbition bar in a farewell that was anything but a goodbye. The band didn’t want to break up.
“They said, ‘We’re not done,’” Starbuck told me in a follow-up conversation Monday. “They came up with a tour route and content.”
(She and I were talking by phone. In retrospect, I should have invited Starbuck to coffee. She might know a place.)
Pre-COVID, the foundation was giving four to five tours a day and guiding 15,000 people a year.
Expectations for the Raincross Tour are low because summer in Riverside always slows down. And the hotel won’t be sending guests over to the museum, because it no longer exists.
Ward and Pehlvanian, who have been leading tours since 2015 and 2016, respectively, are devoted to carrying on the history.
“What we want to do is to tell the story as well as we can from the outside,” Pehlvanian said.
“This is a baby step,” Ward said of the initial tours.
As we parted, docent Patti Koesling arrived to handle the next group. There was good news and bad news.
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The bad was that of the six people who’d signed up, only one was coming. The other five, a group, had had to cancel. The good news: “They said, ‘keep the money,’” she reported.
“It’s a grassroots effort,” Koesling said of the tours, “but we’ll get it going.” She smiled confidently. I believe her.
brIEfly
Yours truly will be emcee of the Pomona Concert Band’s free concert at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 18, outdoors at Ganesha Park, 1575 N. White Ave. Hollywood movie themes will come from such disparate sources as “Beetlejuice,” “How the West Was Won,” “How to Train Your Dragon” and, ecumenically, both “Star Wars” and “Star Trek.” Come hear them!
David Allen writes Wednesday, Friday and Sunday (and emcees on Thursday). Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on X.
