James W. Reid

Born in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada in 1851, James William Reid was an architectural prodigy who studied classical design at McGill University in Montreal and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. After completing professional apprenticeships in Boston, Reid formed an architectural partnership with his talented brothers, Merritt and Watson Reid, establishing a sterling regional reputation in Indiana.

In late 1886, Elisha Babcock commissioned James and Merritt Reid to travel to Southern California and create blueprints for a seaside hotel that would be "the talk of the civilized world." Arriving on the barren dunes of Coronado, Reid embraced the Queen Anne revival style, designing a breathtaking sprawling wooden palace with dramatic multi-tiered conical roofs, deep wrap-around verandas, and a central tropical garden courtyard.

Reid’s engineering triumph was the majestic Crown Room, measuring 160 feet long by 66 feet wide. Drawing upon traditional maritime shipwright carpentry, Reid designed the monumental sugar-pine ceiling without a single interior support pillar, securing structural timbers with intricate mortise-and-tenon joints and hardwood pegs. Reid also designed the charming 1887 Glorietta Bay Boathouse as an architectural prototype for the main hotel.

Following the completion of Hotel del Coronado, Reid moved his architectural firm to San Francisco, where he designed numerous iconic civic monuments, including the Spreckels Building, the Fairmont Hotel repairs following the 1906 earthquake, and the First National Bank. Reid lived to the age of ninety-one, revered as one of the true master architects of the American West.