Grosvenor Suites Nob Hill History, San Francisco California.

Grosvenor Suites is the historic Nob Hill hotel San Francisco, offering lavish shopping and breath-taking views of the downtown skyline. For more than a century San Francisco's Nob Hill has been associated with the upper crust, the beau monde, la dolce vita. Nob Hill lives up too the prestigious reputation of the area.

The name refers to its earliest settlers. Nob, as faithful fans of The Jewel in the Crown know, is a contraction of the Hindu word nabob or nawwab : "a person, especially a European, who has made a large fortune in India or another country of the East; a very wealthy or powerful person."

Lombard Street is one of San Francisco's most enjoyable attractions. Lovingly referred to as "The Crookedest Street in the World," it's actually crooked for a very good reason. It's unbelievably steep! If not for the serpentine curves taming this treacherous slope, people would likely be killed rolling down. This stretch between Hyde and Leavenworth Streets was built in the mid-1920s to accommodate the steepness of the slope. San Francisco's "nobs" made their fortunes in the West in the mid-1800s in gold, silver and the Central Pacific Railroad. Nob Hill is also located near the San Francisco Financial District.

Among the first to build their mansions there were the railroad barons known as the Big Four -- Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Collis Huntington -- in the 1870s, and is the site of two landmarks: The Fairmont Hotel and The Mark Hopkins. The "Big Four" and the "Comstock Bonanza kings" built their mansions here, but they were all destroyed by the earthquake and fire in 1906.

The only two surviving buildings were the Flood Mansion, which serves today as the Pacific Union Club, and the Fairmont Hotel, which was under construction when the earthquake struck. Today the burned-out sites of former mansions hold the city's luxury hotels--the Mark Hopkins, the Stanford Court, the Fairmont, Grosvenor Suites and the Huntington--as well as spectacular Grace Cathedral, which stands on the Crocker mansion site.

The steep grade (24.8 percent on the south face) was hard on horses and millionaires alike. So the house-proud hill-dwellers installed their own cable car line, the California St. R.R. Co., in 1878. It's still in operation today. Our famous Lombard Street, dubbed "crookedest street in the world," winds in a series of hairpin turns between Hyde and Leavenworth. When the cable car started operating in 1873, this hill became the city's exclusive residential area.

So now that you've had a history lesson, come stay with, and enjoy the Nob Hill area. The Grosvenor is a first class, all studio suite hotel (1962), which is located on Nob Hill at Pine Mason, near cable cars and Union Square. Overlooking San Francisco's downtown skyline, the Grosvenor Suites offers an alternative to the typical hotel experience.

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