Built in four major stages between 1902 and 1931 by Frank Miller, the Mission Inn is the outstanding example of Mission Revival architecture. It is a National Historic Landmark, the most important landmark status under the National Historic Preservation Act. Architectural historians rank the Mission Inn as one of the top three historic revival monuments in California, along with the California State Capitol in Sacramento and San Simeon - "Hearst's Castle" - on the Monterey coast.

Architect Arthur Benton designed the first section of the building, which opened in 1902 and constitutes the U-shaped open court facing south on Mission Inn Avenue (formerly Seventh St.), screened by the replica of the San Luis Rey arcade along the street. Until the 1940s, the original hand-shaped adobe home of Frank Miller sat where the Olympic-regulation swimming pool is located today. Later additions to the building became more decorative, reflecting California's changing appreciation for Spanish architecture.

In 1910, Miller built the Cloister Wing, also designed by Benton, along Orange Street. The eastern facade borrowed from the Mission San Gabriel, the northern facade from the Carmel mission. A replica of the Carmel Mission dome staked the structure to the Sixth Street-Orange Street corner. In 1914, Myron Hunt designed the Spanish Wing, giving the building some of its most famous spaces, the Spanish Patio, Spanish Art Gallery, and Spanish Dining room.

In 1929, Riverside architect, G. Stanley Wilson designed the remaining major addition, completed in 1931 - the five story structure at the northwest corner of the block, facing Sixth Street and Main Street. This wing included the International Rotunda, the St. Francis Chapel (a wedding chapel never consecrated for religious services), the St. Francis Atrio, and the Galeria.

The truth is, the Inn was never an actual mission housing actual missionaries; it was the personal, lifelong and quixotic "mission" of Frank Miller, the man who built what some have called an "architectural wonder."

In 1902, Miller purchased a small adobe building known as the Glenwood Inn, added a four-story wing, and the Mission Inn was born. Over the next 30 years, he built three additional wings, each more elaborate than the last. By the 1930s, the Mission Inn had expanded to fill an entire city block and had become Riverside's most visited attraction.

A wondrous, eclectic assemblage of styles, the Mission Inn achieved its national historic landmark status in 1976. Starting with Mission Revival, the hotel now incorporates architectural motifs from all over the world: Moorish, Italian Renaissance, Spanish Baroque, Chinese and Japanese. It's a dazzling array of flying buttresses, domes, fountains, statues, carved pillars, towers, gargoyles, balconies, plazas, turrets, spiral staircases, gardens, bells, colorful tile and stained glass, all constructed to display the extensive collection of art and artifacts that Miller gathered on his world travels.

Perhaps the most stunning of these is the Rayas Altar, which Miller bought sight unseen in 1920 and had shipped from Mexico. Hand-carved from cedar and covered in gold-leaf, the size and beauty of the altar inspired Miller to build the Chapel of St. Francis to house it. This ornate, non-denominational chapel, with its 30-foot, beamed ceiling, jewel-colored Tiffany windows and enormous carved mahogany doors quickly became one of California's most popular wedding sites. Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis (twice) and Constance Bennett all recited vows here, as have over 800 other couples each year.

After its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, a succession of owners and repeated bankruptcies brought the hotel close to demolition, but a seven-year, $55-million renovation during the 1980s restored the Mission Inn's eccentric grandeur. The Chapel of St. Francis is once again luring betrothed couples through its doors in droves, and the Inn's many banquet rooms provide wedding celebrations with unusual artistic environments. The Mission Inn is certainly one-of-a-kind, and will doubtless retain its status as a haven for newlyweds and honeymooners for many years to come.

Much of this information was printed in  The Riverside Press Enterprise  newspaper

RIVERSIDE — It’s the custom for school children in Riverside to take tours of the Mission Inn, and many a little girl has made up her mind on the tour that when she gets married, it will be in front of the gilded altar in St. Francis Chapel on the hotel grounds.

The chapel entrance at left and courtyard outside is one of the more beautiful spots at The Mission Inn in Riverside. The historic inn has undergone a ten-year renovation.

“ I’ve yet to have a little boy say that. They’re looking under the seats for gum,” says Sharon Yankee, marketing director for the Mission Inn Foundation and a former docent.

Lest you assume that the romance of history and the spell of a special place are lost on little boys, here’s the story of one boy who grew up in the shadow of the historic hotel and went on to buy it and rescue it from possible ruin. Taking the honorary title “Keeper of the Inn,” he has run it successfully since its grand reopening 10 years ago.

It’s a tale that may sound like a modern myth, especially in its strong echoes of the man who dreamed up the hotel in the first place, the one they call the “Master of the Inn.” Except it happens to be true. And it hinges on — of all things — frozen beef burritos. Millions of them, in fact.

It all begins when Duane Roberts accompanied his parents to parties and dinners and other functions at the Mission Inn and would sneak away to explore the dark reaches of the brick-walled catacombs and other off-limits areas on the hunt for ...

Duane Roberts, of Laguna Beach, bought the Mission Inn in 1992 to restore it to its former glory. He named one of the restaurants, pictured in background, at the inn after himself.

THE MISSION CULT

Now covering an entire city block in downtown Riverside, the Mission Inn began in 1876 as Glenwood Cottage, a 12-room, two-story boarding house. It was made of adobe, the cheapest building material around, which was covered in clapboard siding to give it a more “Eastern” appearance.

Frank Miller, the son of the original owner, took it over in 1880, with grand plans to expand it and attract the wealthy tourists who flocked to the more posh hotels in Pasadena and Redlands, Calif.

His original blueprints called for an ordinary hotel, but by the time construction began in 1902, Miller had changed his mind. He’d become enamored of a version of local history that romanticized the California missions, which were founded by Franciscan friars along El Camino Real in 1769-1823.

Popularized by a newspaperman named Charles Lummis and other civic boosters, this mission myth also idealized the cattle-raising rancho system, which was by then fading into the past, and the Spanish-inspired architecture of the missions, much of which was fast crumbling into heaps of adobe.

According to state historian Kevin Starr, the myth was appealing for several reasons: It gave Southern California a past of its own, independent from the more                        “Americanized” Northern California, which had been shaped by the flood of Yankees during the Gold Rush, and it gave city and town dwellers a connection to the rural rancho past.

“ Lummis’ Spanish myth hit (Miller) with the force of a religious conversion,” Starr writes in his 1985 work, “Inventing the Dream.”

The hotelier hired architect Arthur B. Benton, a proponent of the Mission revival style, to design the U-shaped structure with a red-tile roof now known as the Mission Wing. Over the next three decades, Miller added three more wings to the hotel.

An arched doorway leads to one of the guest rooms at The Mission Inn, of Riverside, California.

An inveterate collector — a William Randolph Hearst without the publishing magnate’s deep pockets — Miller traveled the world and filled the hotel with an astonishing array of art works and artifacts — oil paintings, tapestries, armor, flags, bells, bronze Buddhas and Bacchuses, Tiffany stained glass windows and Mexican altar pieces.

“ Both architecturally and in terms of boosterism, Frank Miller’s Mission Inn in Riverside pushed Lummis’ Spanish myth about as far as it could go, which in Southern California was very far indeed,” Starr writes.

“ Riverside, which had not even had a mission in the days of the padres, now became the Southern California center of the mission cult.”

The Mission Inn was an immediate success.

What it lacked in luxury appointments, it made up for in atmosphere.

“ Mr. Miller had the foresight to create this romantic California image. You know how in Las Vegas, they’ve created Paris and New York? He created this romanticized image of early California days and he invited his guests to spend time there,” Yankee says.

“ There were simple rooms with Roycroft and Stickley furnishings. They were simple. But the guests were very well seen to.”

An entrepreneur and a promoter, Miller used the local culture to lure guests to the hotel. He would ride the train south to San Diego, reboard northbound trains carrying tourists from the Hotel del Coronado, and hand out oranges to get them to stop at the Mission Inn rather than traveling on to Los Angeles.

“ He was capitalizing on the mystique of the citrus culture,” Yankee says. “It was a more naive time, when California was the golden state and the place you wanted to come to experience these things. I’ve seen pictures. He would have greetings written out in oranges to play up orange culture.

“ I think Mr. Miller must have been a delightful man.”

In time, the hotel became a desert getaway for Hollywood stars and other movie people. With its palm trees, tile-lined swimming pool and bougainvillea-draped porticos, the Mission Inn was Palm Springs before there was a Bob Hope Drive and a Two Bunch Palms. Humphrey Bogart was married there; Bette Davis was married there twice.

After Miller’s death in 1935, his daughter and son-in-law ran it until their deaths in the 1950s. The hotel passed out of family hands in 1956, when it was sold to San Francisco hotelier Ben Swig, owner of the Fairmont Hotel. With Swig’s purchase, the hotel entered a steep downward spiral that ended when it closed in 1985.

Even shuttered, the hotel wasn’t forgotten by the loyal locals.

“ What it really is is a kind of icon,” says Patricia Morton, an architectural historian at the University of California, Riverside. “It’s very much beloved and revered and incredibly important for the identity of the city.”

She recalls that when she was interviewing at the university and would meet people in the community, they’d urge her to come and help them save the hotel.

“ People were upset,” she says. “There was enormous concern that it would be lost. They’d say, ‘You must come here and help us save our Mission Inn.’ ”

LOCAL SAVIOR

Fittingly, the man who stepped in to save the inn was one of Riverside’s own. Although he now lives in Laguna Beach with his wife, Kelly, Duane Roberts grew up mainly in Riverside, the son of a meat wholesaler who supplied hamburger patties to the original McDonald’s in San Bernardino.

Like Miller, Roberts took a piece of the authentic regional culture and transformed it into something that itself became a part of the woof and warp of local history. Miller took the romance of California’s rancho and mission past and turned it into a hotel; Roberts appropriated a homey Mexican dish and transformed it into a multimillion-dollar business.

“ My claim to fame. I’ll talk about that all day long,” Roberts says when asked about developing the first commercial frozen burrito.

Lunching at Duane’s, the upscale steakhouse at the Inn, he’s seated with Kelly in his customary booth, the one facing “The Rough Riders,” an 8-foot- tall painting of Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill, which he notes is valued at $800,000. A genial host, he’s happy to recount incidents of local history such as how Roosevelt planted one of the three orange trees that started the entire U.S. citrus industry, or how he came up with the frozen burrito when he was a 19-year-old working for his father’s Butcher Boy Meat Co. and on the lookout for new fast-food menu items.

“ They didn’t want ham and cheese sandwiches or tuna sandwiches, they wanted something new,” he recalls. “We had a Hispanic butcher there — we were a small company at that time, we had 25 people or so — this man, he comes up, and he says, ‘Why don’t you make burritos?’

“ I ate in Mexican restaurants. There were tamales, enchiladas and tacos. I said, ‘What’s a burrito?’ ”

After experimenting a couple of days, he came up with a recipe that he thought was pretty good.

“ Beef and red chili beans. I made a small batch of them at the plant and went out and sampled them around. People thought they were great,” he says.

By the time he sold the company in 1980, it was producing more than a million burritos a day and had grown from 60 employees to more than 1,400, and from one plant to six, and had 65 percent of the market in frozen Mexican food.

After the sale, he turned his attention to other business ventures such as real estate and banking, to philanthropies such as an animal adoption service with the Riverside Humane Society, and to raising money for the Republican Party.

When the opportunity to buy the Mission Inn came up, he took a gamble. On Christmas Eve 1992, he closed on the purchase for $15.6 million.

Running the hotel hasn’t been easy. These days, the popular resort hotels are located on the coastline, so the Mission Inn has been forced to reinvent itself for the broader market of corporate, convention and weekend travelers and fans of historic hotels.

Still, Roberts, 66, has fallen hard for the luxury end of the hotel business.

“ It’s not the one that could make the most money, but you enjoy doing it. There’s a difference,” he says. “There are some businesses that are very profitable, and money is what drives you to do it. And there are other things that you get personal enjoyment from and are fun to do.”

Like flipping the switch that turns on the extravagant display of Christmas lights on the hotel every year.

“ I get a big charge out of it,” he says. “I get the kids and I tell them, ‘This is the one time you can scream and your mother can’t get mad at you.’ We start yelling, ‘10 ... nine ... eight ....’ Then we turn on the lights. We have like 2 million lights. There isn’t anything like it anywhere.”

Some of the areas that characterize the Mission Inn.

St. Francis Statue

This small statue of St. Francis stands in a covered niche above the four seasons stained glass window and carved double entry doors to the St. Francis Chapel, in the St. Francis Atrio.

Ramona Dome

The statue of St. Francis stands atop the Ramona Dome and is visible from the Spanish Patio. Twelve stained glass story windows recall "Ramona," a novel by Helen Hunt Jackson.

Author's Row

Authors' Row suites atop the Spanish Wing, named for the famous authors who stayed in them, flanked by flying buttresses of colorful hollow core bricks.

Rotunda

International Rotunda features an open air five story spiral staircase and is dedicated to international peace.

Colored Tiles

The Inn offers many pleasures in its architectural details. These delightful colored roof tiles can be seen from blocks away, part of the distinctive architecture of downtown Riverside.

Anton Clock Tower

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The weathered original Anton Clock face is exhibited in the Mission Inn Museum. It is replaced by a hand carved replica. The clock and its near life-size figures are above the Spanish Patio.

Spanish Dining Room

The Spanish Art Gallery exhibits paintings and sculpture along its walls. Other features include stained glass, a bold marble staircase, and a draped ceiling (stylish in San Francisco hotels of the nineteenth century).

Swimming Pool

Miller's heirs added an Olympic-sized pool in the 1940s to the Court of the Birds, on the site of the Miller adobe home.