In 1992, the Mission Inn had been surrounded by chain-link fencing for seven years. What was supposed to have been a two-year renovation had dragged on. The owner went bankrupt. The lender completed the renovation to be able to market the Riverside property.
But a recession was a bad time to sell a hotel. Besides, the ornate, overstuffed Mission Inn — which occupied a full block in a dead downtown — had been losing money since the Eisenhower era.
The Mission Inn was viewed by some as a white elephant, too big and out of fashion to succeed.
In stepped Duane Roberts, a shrewd businessman in Laguna Hills who’d grown up in Riverside and had a sentimental attachment to the property.
Roberts made an offer of $15.6 million, far below the estimated $55 million Chemical Bank, with help from City Hall, had invested in restoration. Anxious to clear its ledger, the bank cut its losses and said yes.
Roberts, one account goes, excitedly drove to the fenced-off hotel. Security wouldn’t let him in. He told them he’d just bought the hotel. Sure you did, they scoffed.
“It took a day,” Barbara Burns, who has written extensively about the hotel’s history, related Monday, Nov. 3, concerning Roberts. “By the time he got in, the Friends of the Mission Inn were having a meeting in the lobby. When he walked in, they stood up and cheered. He felt very gratified by that.”
Roberts, who owned the Mission Inn for the next 32 years, died Saturday at home in his sleep, surrounded by his family. He was 88.
A Riverside native born in 1936, Roberts had no hotel or restaurant experience. His father had owned Butcher Boy, a meat wholesaler. In the 1950s, Roberts invented the frozen burrito, which became a staple of grocery and convenience stores and made him a millionaire.
In the meantime, the Mission Inn had fallen on hard times.
Built in phases from 1903 to 1931 under the direction of owner Frank Miller, the baroque hotel came to occupy an entire block bounded by Mission Inn Avenue, Orange, Main and Sixth streets. Borrowing elements of California missions and European castles, and filled with art and antiques, the hotel attracted snowbirds, artists, writers, thinkers, actors and politicians, including presidents.
After Miller’s death in 1935, his heirs ran the hotel until selling it in 1956 to the Fairmont Hotel Corp. in San Francisco.
Already the hotel was losing money. Tourists had more options to choose from. And in the Jet Age, an opulent, Old World hotel in the middle of a fading downtown, and with no parking lot, wasn’t what Americans were looking for.
In 1969, the next owner went bankrupt and the hotel briefly shuttered. It was a sign of worse times to come.
“… for the next 25 years, the Mission Inn was sold off to a revolving door of corporate owners, each refinancing and mortgaging the property to its maximum to fund needed renovations and cover operating costs,” Emily McEwen wrote in a 2020 article for the Riverside Historical Society.
Roberts’ role is sometimes overstated. He didn’t fund the renovations. Nor, after the millions that had been poured into it by others, was the hotel in danger of being bulldozed.
“He still, nevertheless, was the person who reopened it,” Philip Falcone, the City Council member who represents downtown, said Monday. “He got it across the finish line.”
Burns, a former history docent at the hotel, gives Roberts a lot of credit.
“Within four weeks, the hotel was open. Six months later, all 240 rooms were booked,” Burns said. “That’s how fast Duane Roberts worked.”
She added: “I think he did a great service to the community in 1992 when he bought the Mission Inn when nobody else wanted it.”
Roberts presided over Riverside’s signature attraction ever since. He was a part of civic life through four mayors and six presidents.
Under his ownership, the famed hotel returned to prominence. Downtown, which in 1992 was stuck in a long slumber, has surged in popularity with night life, an arts scene, museums and hundreds of new residences.
“Duane was transformational. As goes the Mission Inn, so goes downtown,” Falcone observed. “The downtown of the 1990s and the downtown of today are very different because of Duane.”
In 1993, Roberts had a light-bulb moment, one that involved thousands of light bulbs. Why not make the hotel’s grand exterior a Christmas extravaganza of decorations and call it the Festival of Lights?
The elaborate lights display, paired with activities along the adjacent pedestrian mall, lure tens of thousands annually and is the city’s signature event.
This year’s Festival of Lights switch-on ceremony takes place Nov. 22. It may double as a public appreciation for the man whose vision made the event possible.
Roberts was likely to be the subject of comments at Tuesday’s City Council meeting, after this column’s deadline, on what would have been his 89th birthday.
Mayor Patricia Lock Dawson was traveling Monday but texted me her reaction to his death.
“I just want to thank Duane for all his years of support for the city and me, personally. Downtown Riverside is what it is today because of his love for his community,” Lock Dawson said.
No funeral or memorial service has been announced.
“We’d like to have some kind of local celebration of life,” City Manager Mike Futrell told me Monday evening. “We’ll just have to see what the family has in mind.”
The hotel’s long-term fate is unknown. For now, at least, the Roberts family will continue to own it.
Duane Roberts’ long life delayed the inevitable day when he would no longer own the hotel.
It seemed to mean something that the Mission Inn wasn’t owned by some faceless corporation, subject to the whims of investors.
It was owned by a native son, who was born just over a year after Frank Miller’s death, who had explored the property in his teens, who has said he bought the hotel because his mother had loved it.
Roberts liked to call himself “Keeper of the Inn,” just as Miller had done. You could interpret that phrase a couple of ways.
One is that the two men modestly thought of themselves as innkeepers, albeit of a hotel whose baroqueness was anything but modest. The other is that the hotel is eternal, and they were stewarding it until the time came to pass the keys to the next innkeeper.
David Allen writes Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, until someone changes the locks. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, and follow davidallencolumnist on Facebook or Instagram, @davidallen909 on X or @davidallen909.bsky.social on Bluesky.
Source link
