When Bill O’Connell entered the hotel business in Anaheim 50 years ago, “Disneyland was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays” for cleaning and repairs.
Now he has his hand in the ongoing refresh or development of hotels in the resort area, among hundreds that spread out from the park over the decades, an area the city and developers have been pushing to higher-end properties, prompted by Anaheim Convention Center’s recently completed 200,000-square-foot expansion and an ongoing $2 billion in Disneyland Resort upgrades and growth.
Others involved in the area development include Wincome Group, which is working on two properties valued at more than $450 million combined, one of which, Westin Anaheim Resort, is underway next to the convention center.
Meanwhile, Disney Co. plans a 700-room hotel valued at $625 million, including land, near its three others on Disneyland Drive.
Middle America
The growth is partly driven by the 200,000-square-foot Anaheim Convention Center expansion that opened last fall and the upcoming Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge land opening next summer at Disneyland.
Midprice hotels have also gotten into the act.
Parkwest General Contractors based in Anaheim has recently refreshed hotels, including a Wyndham Garden on Katella.
A $14 million renovation of Grand Legacy at the Park across Harbor Boulevard from Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure Park included the first rooftop bar in Anaheim and was completed two years ago.
Now legacy names—including Howard Johnson Anaheim Hotel & Water Playground, also across Harbor from the parks, are joining the renovation surge. As did the four Stovall’s Hotels of Anaheim’s Best Westerns that O’Connell co-owns and runs near Disneyland Resort.
He also owns a third of a DoubleTree Suites around the corner from the convention center and is co-developing a 450-room JW Marriott near the Anaheim GardenWalk restaurant and retail layout on Katella with Orange-based hotelier Ajesh Patel that’s valued at more than $300 million.
O’Connell and Patel plan a second hotel of similar scale next door when the JW project is done.
O’Connell is a living link to Disneyland’s early days to today and between legacy brands and the high-end hotels of tomorrow. He’s also one of the few surviving locals who remember when Walt Disney still ran the place.
The park didn’t begin its “year-round, seven days-a-week operation” until 1985, a spokesperson said.
Premier
“Best Western was a premier chain” when O’Connell started out in the 1950s (see “Family Man,” page 35).
It was founded in 1946 and with other brands of the era began to show its age in the 1980s and 1990s. Phoenix-based Best Western International Inc., independently owned with 4,100 locations around the world, introduced an upgrade in 2011 with a three-tiered product line.
O’Connell’s locations are midgrade Best Western Plus and include two on West Katella and two on South Harbor Boulevard. The four comprise 673 rooms and were renovated under the 2011 modernization, three of them last year.
Service has always been its hallmark.
In the family-road-trip 1950s, “when you left us, we’d say, ‘Let us make a reservation for you,’”—and O’Connell would call up the next Best Western up the road. “It had to be a Best Western.”
Orange Appeal
Unless it was a Howard Johnson’s, which arrived locally that same decade and now has about 350 locations, though its legacy includes decades of ups and downs.
Resort-area growth is pushing the one near Disney higher. Built in 1965, it’s in the midst of a $12 million renovation of many of its 296 guestrooms to conclude next year in time for the Galaxy’s Edge opening. It’s part of the brand’s Renew rejuvenation program that Parsippany, N.J.-based Wyndham Worldwide begun in 2015, this one with the OC touch of a bold palette and Disney-themed art on the walls.
The HoJo—like Disneyland Hotel and big portions of the University of California-Irvine campus—was designed by midcentury modernist William Pereira.
The retro chic look is coupled with Wi-Fi, entertainment systems, Netflix and Pandora streaming, and a water playground with a 30-foot pirate ship and a water cannon.
“The mission is to create the idealized family vacation atmosphere reminiscent of the 1960s,” said General Manager Jonathan Whitehead.
Leaving Legacies
The HoJo joins O’Connell’s Best Westerns, at $25 million, Grand Legacy at the Park, formerly a Ramada, in recent eight-figure renovations.
Just as motor lodges opened alongside Disneyland in the 1950s and 1960s (see related story, “Space Race,” page 35), so their descendants improve as the resort grows.
Grand Legacy co-owner Brandon Garr grew up working in the hotel with his late father, Earl, also a local hotelier for several decades. One full wall in the hotel’s entry and check-in area honors Earl, and Garr also chose “legacy” for the new name for that reason.
Other hotel brands that fell by the wayside over time are now planning major upgrades, including Marriott Corp.’s Sheraton brand, with a handful of locations in OC, and Radisson.
Sheraton’s new look includes “productivity tables” and a combination coffee and alcohol bar for night/day ease of use.
A 326-room Radisson Blu is scheduled to open a mile from Disneyland, east of the Santa Ana (5) Freeway, in 2020.
The Anaheim activity is being reflected nationally.
Retro roadside motels from Jackson, Wyo., to Sarasota, Fla., are being retrofitted for the a new century, many with far fewer than 100 rooms and sitting in dodgy locales the interstate highway system passed by.
Updos commonly include bright colors and touches like tiki huts, brass beds and Adirondack chairs—even Airstream trailers.
Such retro redos are a key part of ex-Sunstone Hotel Investors Inc. Chief Executive Ken Cruse venture Alpha Wave Investors LLC in San Clemente, which is remaking moribund motor lodges and hotels in Oregon and Colorado.
Googie Search
The older Anaheim hotels sprouted after Disney’s 1955 debut—O’Connell remembers shares in the company closed higher the following day as investors bet the company would become more commercially minded.
Cathy Dutton, sales director at Clarion Hotel Anaheim Resort, whose late father, Jack, was an Anaheim mayor and councilman in the 1960s and part of a group that persuaded Gene Autry to bring his baseball team to the city, recalls the late developer “Leo Freedman telling me they didn’t know what to think of the ‘carnival’ being built across the street from his orange groves.”
Freedman built the Melodyland Theater and two hotels in Anaheim in its early decades.
“Obviously, Disneyland became a much bigger success story than anyone could imagine,” Dutton said.
At least a dozen hotels and motor lodges from the era are still in operation, most on South Harbor and West Katella next to Disneyland, including Alpine Inn, Candy Cane Inn, Castle Inn & Suites, Eden Roc Inn & Suites and Tropicana Inn & Suites.
The old Sir Rudimar motor lodge is now a 7-Eleven, and the Peter Pan motor lodge is now the site of a Hyatt Place.
Survivors often retain Googie styling, modernist architecture with a futurist twist that’s evident at the Anaheim alley Linbrook Bowl with its large bowling pin.
Disney’s Lands
Like Disneyland, though, the area is growing—and changing.
“Anaheim’s hotel community has evolved dramatically,” said Elaine Cali, a longtime local tourism pro and owner of marketing firm Cali Communications, whose clients have included the HoJo hotel and water park.
“It’s still a close-knit” group, she said, but the landscape has changed.
In 1991, the 26-room Sir Rudimar, for instance, was about to be sold for $3.7 million, the buyers anticipating a windfall as Disney bought up parcels to expand.
The entertainment giant floated a $3 billion, nearly 500-acre expansion that year that would’ve included a West Coast version of Disneyworld’s Epcot, and the year before a 400-acre Port Disney project in Long Beach around oceanfront attractions the Queen Mary and the Spruce Goose that it held then.
It abandoned the plans, instead opening Disneyland Paris in 1992 and California Adventure in 2001.
O’Connell’s operation sold three hotels during that period as part of the resort’s growth.
“We didn’t know,” for sure, he said, “but it was for Disney.”
