The Senator Hotel opened in late August 1924 at 1121 L Street, directly across from the California State Capitol. Designed by architect Kenneth MacDonald with collaboration from theater architect G. Albert Lansburgh, the nine-story, 400-room building cost $2 million and was modeled after the Palazzo Farnese in Florence. Its L Street facade stretched 165 feet, fronted by a colonnaded archway. Guests entering from L Street passed through hand-painted doors into a skylight-lit lobby where the walls were finished in rough plaster covered with gold beneath tints of blue. The hotel was not merely lodging; it was built as a place where California's state politicians and the people who wanted things from them could occupy the same rooms. The location was intentional, the architecture was aspirational, and the guest list would prove extraordinary.

The hotel's social life centered on three rooms, each with its own character. The Empire Room featured an 86-foot bar designed by Lansburgh and served as the building's main gathering place -- the room where deals happened. The Peacock Room operated as a tea room for women, and the Florentine Dining Room, designed to evoke the Stone Room in the Palazzo Farnese, served as the hotel's formal restaurant. Arthur Samish, whom Collier's magazine once called "the secret boss of California," maintained a suite in the hotel throughout the 1930s and 1940s, running his lobbying operation from rooms that were closer to the Capitol than most legislators' offices. In the 1940s, a young Joan Didion auditioned in the hotel for a Pasadena Playhouse part. William Saroyan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, frequented the bar. In the late 1950s, Stan Kenton and his jazz orchestra played concerts in the Empire Room, filling the space with brass arrangements that divided critics but filled seats.

The Senator Hotel's guest register reads like an index of twentieth-century American life. Silent film star Buster Keaton stayed at the hotel with his production company in the summer of 1927 while filming Steamboat Bill, Jr. on the Sacramento River. Martin Luther King Jr. stayed at the Senator during a visit to Sacramento. Governors Jerry Brown and Ronald Reagan and Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter all spent time in the building across from the Capitol. The hotel opened during a pivotal year for Sacramento -- 1924 also saw the founding of McGeorge School of Law, the opening of the Weinstock and Lubin department store at 12th and K Street, and the introduction of filtered drinking water. The Senator Hotel quickly became the city's most prominent gathering place, a role it held through five decades of California political history.

In May 1979, the Senator Hotel was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Two months later, it was shut down -- closed for 79 fire-safety and building-code violations. Panels went up over the windows, and Sacramento became the only city among the nation's 25 largest metropolitan areas without a major historic hotel. Developer Marvin "Buzz" Oates purchased the building in November 1979 for $2.5 million and spent $15 million over the next eight years transforming it into office space. The building reopened in 1983 as the Senator Hotel Office Building, restoring the irony that had always defined the address: lobbyists could once again walk to the Capitol in minutes, only now they worked where they used to drink. Equitable Real Estate Investment Management bought the property in 1987 for $30 million. The Great Recession eventually caught up with the building, dropping occupancy to 60 percent, and the previous owners lost the property to a Florida-based mortgage holder in 2012.

The Senator Hotel today is an office building, its Empire Room bar long gone, its Peacock Room serving a different purpose. But the structure remains, nine stories of reinforced concrete and Italian Renaissance ambition planted across L Street from the Capitol dome. The colonnaded archway still fronts the sidewalk where Ford took his morning walk and Fromme waited with her Colt .45. The building's story is Sacramento's story in miniature: a city that has always lived in the shadow of its own government, where the real business happens not in the legislative chambers but in the rooms nearby. The Senator Hotel was built to be that room, and for half a century it was. What happens inside the building now is less dramatic, but the architecture remembers what it was designed for.