Restored Mission Inn Cause for Celebration in Riverside

George Washington never slept there--the place isn’t that old--but Teddy Roosevelt did. Ron and Nancy Reagan honeymooned there, and Richard and Pat Nixon were married there. Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, Anthony Quinn . . . a loop of luminaries stopped by the inn to dine and doze on their way to or from somewhere else.

Some even stayed for the “winter season” back when travel was a lot more leisurely, when jet was only a color.

Even when the hotel fell into desuetude and Riverside, lacking a distinctive hostelry, became a mere way station between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, the many-splendored if rundown Mission Inn continued as psychic center of the pretty town.

Back in Business

Now the Mission Inn is back in business, or will be in mid-December. Sold by the city’s Redevelopment Agency to the Carley Capital Group of Wisconsin, the funky old facility has been revivified--more a matter of restoration than renovation--and Riverside is excited. So much so, in fact, that a “Celebrate Our Mission--Winter Festival,” a four-monthlong celebration surrounding the inn’s reopening, already is in full flower.

Today’s Citrus Heritage Parade and Festival, Big Orange Band Classic and Master Chorale performance of “Creation,” and Sunday’s “Mission Inn Music Room Concert Reenactment” (with performers’ costumes based on famous guests of yore) are typical of festivities planned through February. Basketball tournaments, concerts, dinner-dances, quilt shows, Dickens revivals, antique festivals. . . . In the homey, understated way of this inland oasis, Riverside is going all out to welcome Frank Miller’s fantasia back as a functioning component of the community.

What an Inn!

All this for an inn? Ah, but what an inn! Miller built the place at the turn of the century as the Glenwood Tavern and added onto it as his far-flung, highly personal collection of objets d’art outgrew the premises. His architectural additions--as his choice in art--beggared the word eclectic.

“Whatever you want to call (the architectural gallimaufry), you must admit it’s intriguing,” says Chris Richards, who is helping to run the festival. “There’s Mission Revival, some Oriental influence and some Moorish touches, Spanish Colonial, Mediterranean. . . . Every time his collection branched out, so did the inn.”

“He wasn’t formally educated,” says Theresa Hanley, curator of the Mission Inn Museum, which will be housed there. “His travels were his education. He tended to buy what he liked: things that represented some philosophy or thought or idea that he was learning about. As a hotelier, he also had a very good sense of what his guests would find appealing.”

Consequently, there is a Court of the Orient; a chimera of about 100 bells, many incorporated into the inn’s design; a Chinese sculpture of a guanyen (a Buddhist deity) astride a dog; another sculpture of the Goddess Pomona. (“No,” Hanley laughs, “it’s not a gag, like the ‘Goddess Reseda.’ She’s a harvest goddess, I believe; protectress of the citrus industry; sort of Our Lady of the Oranges.”)

A clock, now restored, chimed the hours with a revolving base carrying a parade of historic California figures, from Father Serra on (“Miller was one of the great unsung early California boosters,” Hanley asserts). A Court of the Birds sheltered Miller’s favorite feathered friends, including a pair of macaws; this space too has been restored to house not the Real Macaws but a brace of their descendants--logos of the festival.

“In the inn’s heyday,” Richards says, “large numbers of people would come out from the East by train and stay the winter.” Presidents, thespians and transient celebrities were pleased to sojourn at the inn, which gradually began to lose its luster after Miller’s death in 1935. His daughter and son-in-law continued the tradition until 1956, when the inn and all its treasures were sold to a San Franciscan bent on modernization. Akin to laying linoleum in the Louvre, the move didn’t work.

The inn changed hands several times, was purchased by the city of Riverside in 1976, briefly turned into apartment units and finally sold to Carley, which is maintaining its original intent as a Tax Act Certification Project.

Labor of Love

Both festival and restoration are in large part labors of love, but the question remains: Why would anyone want to spend time in Riverside?

“The city is rich in architecture,” Richards says, “and for a place this size (population 200,000), it retains a lot of its character.”

“It’s a nice town,” Hanley says. “Especially in January and February, there’s no better place on the face of the Earth. And part of it is the lingering influence of Frank Miller.

“They told him, ‘You’ll ruin yourself. What will draw people to Riverside?’ ‘The inn,’ he answered, ‘and what I’m going to put into it.’ ”

Today: Citrus Heritage Parade 10 a.m.-noon, Market Street; Festival, 9 a.m.-4 p.m., Main Street Pedestrian Mall; Big Orange Band Classic, 9 a.m.-9:45 p.m., Wheelock Field, 4800 Magnolia Ave.; Master Chorale, 8 p.m., Riverside Community College, Landis Auditorium, $6 - $9.

Sunday: Concert Reenactment, 3:30 p.m., Public Library, 3571 7th St., $2.50.

For continuing festival events, call (714) 781-7335. For information on the inn, foundation and museum: (714) 781-8241.