Every grand hotel has stories, but Fairmont Breakers in Long Beach, California, has more than most. Yes, John Wayne used to hang out at the bar and a young Elizabeth Taylor spent the very first of her eight wedding nights there and Charles Lindbergh is said to have once steered himself to safety through the fog by the brightly illuminated “B” on its rooftop. Yet the building also saw years when its stories revolved around the quiet lives of retirees living amid its fading elegance, or when it served as a Red Cross headquarters after a devastating earthquake, or when pillbox structures mounted with guns projected from its rooftop, and later when all its stories seemed to come to an end, its abandoned halls echoing only with silence.
Through it all, the hotel, christened the Breakers Hotel in 1926 when it opened next to the beach, remained an imposing presence in the life of Long Beach’s residents, a Spanish Renaissance Revival landmark with a history that traced the changing fortunes of its hometown.
