Hotel Potter - Santa Barbara, California -

San Francisco: Designed & Executed under the Direction of James King Steele, 1910. Softcover. Very good. Scarce, nicely designed promotional booklet for the Potter Hotel (as it is usually called, as opposed to Hotel Potter, as it appears here) and Potter Country Club in Santa Barbara. 9.25" x 6", 24 unnumbered pages, extensively illustrated from photographs. Not dated, but internal evidence suggests about 1910. Upper corner bumped, all else very good or better. 

Established in 1903 at a cost of more than a million dollars, the Potter Hotel boasted more than 350 guest rooms, four bowling alleys, billiard and pool tables, a music room, a grand ballroom, expansive landscaped grounds, tennis courts, a livery stable, and a small zoo, and also offered guests access to the Potter Country Club -- a 150-acre property about five miles from the hotel. The Country Club, which is described over several pages of this booklet, had a club house with restaurant, polo field and race track, and a golf course. According to an article in the Santa Barbara Independent, "The opening of the Potter Hotel...was a milestone in Santa Barbara tourism. The Potter soon eclipsed the Arlington Hotel as the top hostelry in the city and in a short time, wealthy industrialists from the Midwest and East Coast were choosing to spend their winters within the opulent confines of the Potter." The hotel was sold and renamed The Belvedere in 1919, then sold again and renamed The Ambassador before it burned to the ground in 1921. We locate one copy of this booklet in OCLC, at Yale. .