The Stanyan Park Hotel, designed in the Beaux Arts style by Martens & Coffey for Henry P. Heagerty is the oldest extant hotel on the border of Golden Gate Park. Heagerty had run a saloon and small boarding house on the site since 1883.

When Heagerty opened his hotel, a dozen hotels already served the Park, seven on Stanyan Street alone. Heagerty responded to the competition with an elegant and fashionable structure designed to attract quality, high-paying customers. Martens & Coffey gave him the best and costliest of their many buildings in the neighborhood. Among their works, the Stanyan Park Hotel stands out for its restrained elegance, its orientation to the Park and the street corner, and for the unity it imposed on the different functions of hotel, flats, saloon, and storefronts.

Stanyan Park's competitors have been demolished except for two apartment-hotels which years ago reverted to ordinary apartments.

Over the years, the hotel has had many owners, from the 1876 Irish immigrant, Harry Heagerty, to some Italian poultry dealers, to the Salvation Army's business manager. It has attracted customers by its proximity to Golden Gate Park, Kezar Stadium, and the University of California Hospital. It survived as a hotel through the 1960s Flower Children years and through the subsequent gentrification of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

The years were not always kind to the Stanyan Park Hotel. The building was stripped of most of its ornamentation and covered with imitation brick paper. A handsome corner dome and roofline balustrade were removed. Luckily a historic photograph exists, probably from about 1908-1910. The owners [in 1983] restored the hotel to conform to the photograph.

Still operating as a hotel, it now it stands to benefit from the popularity of small hotels in attractive antique buildings away from downtown.

Adapted from the NRHP Nomination Form.