Hotel St. James (San Diego)

★★★★☆

2024 Update: The hotel has been remodeled and is now the Palihotel San Diego. It’s still in the same location, though, so at least some of my experience is still relevant!

As late as 2018, the historic Hotel St. James still had its original elevators (super-fast by 1913 standards) – complete with hand-pulled sliding gates instead of automatic doors. The kiddo was quite taken with them. The rooms are small, but our double turned out to be a tiny suite, which was nice. Breakfast at the hotel restaurant was quite good, and there’s a casual rooftop lounge area open to hotel guests that offers a great view of the city.

One downside to being an old building: No room for central air conditioning, so they’d put in window units instead… and being in the Gaslamp, weekend nights get loud. Not just traffic and sirens, but there are a lot of bars and nightclubs, and we heard people talking, shouting, and cheering late into the night.

Transit

We took the train down to avoid traffic and parking. (Parking’s bad enough downtown that I usually end up leaving the car in the hotel lot the whole weekend anyway.) Amtrak’s Surfliner runs all the way to Downtown San Diego, and we took the trolley from the train station to within two blocks of our hotel. From there, we walked everywhere downtown, and took a bus out to the zoo and Balboa Park.

Follow-up

I’ve never stayed here during Comic-Con, but I have stayed here twice with the family. The first time, when I wrote this review, was the weekend the weekend after the con, when the crowds (and hotel prices) go back down to normal summer levels. A few of the trolleys were still wrapped, and one gift shop had 50%-off superhero shirts, but otherwise there was no sign left of the Gaslamp’s annual week-long transformation into a pop-culture extravaganza. The second time we got a slightly bigger pair of rooms. Even the first set of rooms were bigger than anything at the Mark Twain or the Mosser (both in San Francisco), though, and I have no idea whether Pali remodeled the existing rooms or knocked out the walls to build new ones.