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Overview

The Eagle Brewery had stood on this site until it was forced to curtail operations due to Prohibition restrictions in 1918. San Jose financial mogul Thomas S. Montgomery purchased the brewery site in 1923, and planned for an ambitious luxury hotel to be built there, having the same name, Sainte Claire, of an elite San Jose businessmen's club, established in 1893. Like many big buildings in the 1920s, planning and construction were expedited, taking only one year from groundbreaking to grand opening.

Building History

San Jose real estate investor and banker Thomas S. Montgomery (1856-1944) commissioned the San Francisco architectural firm of Weeks and Day to design this six-story hotel, what he considered to be the centerpiece of San Jose's cultural and business life. Montgomery had previously planned the Montgomery Hotel in 1911, designed by Binder and Curtis, a smaller and more modest undertaking that was considered the first fine hotel in San Jose. With the Sainte Claire, Montgomery sought to outdo all other hotels in town, including his own. Work began on the Hotel Sainte Claire amid much fanfare in 09/1925, with construction concluding in its opening in 09/1926. It cost about $1 million to build and furnish.

Weeks and Day had designed the Marks Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco and the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles, making them highly capable of designing a modern luxury hotel. It had one of the largest and best-provisioned kitchens in Northern CA.

Building Notes

Placed on the National Register of Historic Places; in 2005, the hotel had 171 guest rooms and three meeting rooms of 10,000, 3,425, and 1,650-square feet in size; it had two business guestrooms, two suites and six firepalce guestrooms;

In 1928, W.A. Newcome served as the manager of the Hotel Sainte Claire. (See Polk's Directory of San Jose City and Santa Clara County, 1928, p. 390.)