Hotel Riviera del Pacífico

Prohibition sent North Americans south of their border in search of entertainment and alcohol, developing first Tijuana, then Rosarito, and finally Ensenada as tourist destinations.

The Ensenada Beach Club, S.A. was formed with the goal to build a resort in Ensenada. After the Club dissolved in 1926, a number of its members joined a new company, Club Internationale, S.A., to continue the project, initially called the Hotel Playa de Ensenada (Ensenada Beach Hotel). Architect Gordon F. Mayer was hired to design the hotel; Alfredo Ramos Martínez was hired to do its murals. The Playa Ensenada Hotel and Casino opened on October 31, 1930 with spectacular festivities, including the Xavier Cugat band, under the de facto management of boxer Jack Dempsey. [1] [2]

The hotel was never a financial success, however, partly because the road from the United States was poor, and the end of Prohibition proved fatal. The hotel only ever operated intermittently, and was put to military use during the Second World War.

After the end of the War, one of the original shareholders, Jerome Utley of Detroit, by then an old man and the only remaining shareholder, gave the hotel to a young lady with whom he was in love, Marjorie King Plant. Plant ran the hotel successfully with her Mexican lawyer and husband, Alfonso Rocha, changing its name to Hotel Riviera del Pacífico. Utley had been led to believe that Plant's marriage to Rocha was a "white marriage," that is a marriage of convenience serving only to give Plant the Mexican citizenship she needed to run the hotel, and when he discovered that this was not the case, he pursued Plant and then Rocha with court cases, leading first to Plant's leaving the hotel for the United States and then to Rocha's absconding from the hotel in 1956 to avoid a judgment against him. At this point the hotel was taken over by the Mexican government, which closed and partly demolished it in 1964.[3]