MISSION INN FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS

GOOD MORNING AMERICA LIGHTS UP THE HOLIDAYS

Top National News Program will Broadcasts Live from Riverside, California on Friday, November 28, 2009 at the Mission Inn Hotel & Spa’s annual Festival of Lights event. Good Morning America will be highlighting the 15th annual event as part of the upcoming weeklong holiday segment – Good Morning America Lights Up The Holidays. In addition, the Mission Inn Hotel & Spa is proud to welcome GMA Weather Anchor, Sam Champion, who will be broadcasting live from the historic Inn.

The national television segment will broadcast live to more than 7.5 million viewers Friday morning from 7 – 9 a.m. EST/PST and will feature a live “lighting” of the Mission Inn Hotel & Spa’s more than three million lights. Local Riverside residents and out of town travelers alike are invited to experience this exciting annual event and Inland Empire holiday tradition, featuring an elaborately decorated Christmas tree, Dickens Carolers singing cheerful holiday tunes, horses pulling authentic carriages, and more than 250 animated characters dressed in 17th Century costumes entertaining the crowd and evoking the spirit of the season.

Of its seasonal functions, the Festival of Lights is well known for its nearly 3 million Christmas lights, and over 400 animated figures. Although the Festival lasts all throughout the holiday season, the day after Thanksgiving is the lighting ceremony. On this day city officials and the owner of the hotel, Duane Roberts, give speeches before fireworks light up the sky and nearly 25,000 people attend annually to view the unique hotel and its holiday decorations.

The Mission Inn is a historic landmark hotel in downtown Riverside, California. The core of the property was a 2-story, 12-room adobe boarding house called the “Glenwood Cottage”, begun by Christopher Columbus Miller in 1876. It predated the founding of Riverside. Miller’s son Frank expanded the boarding house in 1902 and essentially continued obsessively building, in a wild variety of shapes, until he died in 1935.

Miller built in reinforced concrete and developed an accomplished, expressive vernacular style drawn from random historical styles. Accumulating one section over another, addition upon addition, the result is an enormously complicated and intricate built environment, comparable to the Winchester House, or to a self-contained medieval European city.

The Mission contains narrow passageways like a Tuscan village, exterior arcades, a prominent medieval-style clock overlooking the Spanish patio, a deep but sun-drenched five-story rotunda, innumerable patios and windows, towers, minarets, a Cloister Wing (with Catacombs), a high pedestrian bridge, and a five-story spiral staircase, among many other features. The 1914 Spanish Wing in itself contains a castle courtyard, open arcades, Mexican tiled roofs, flying buttresses and Mediterranean domes.

Miller also traveled and collected over these thirty years, bringing his treasures back to the hotel for display. The various collections and museum-quality artifacts on the property has an estimated value of $5 million. The St. Francis Chapel houses four large original stained-glass windows and two original mosaics by Tiffany, and the Mexican Baroque Rayas Altar, 25 feet tall, 16 feet across, carved from cedar and covered in gold leaf. For his Garden of Bells, Miller collected over 800 bells, including one dating from the year 1274 and described as the “oldest bell in Christendom”.

In the context of other important cultural losses in Riverside, the hotel was closed in 1985, restored at a cost of $55 million, and re-opened in 1992. As of 2006 it is an operating hotel with 4 restaurants, a day spa and 239 guest rooms with 9 rooms designated as presidential suites, each of them with unique views and features. Reportedly the most spacious and comfortable are the Moorish rooms along “Author’s Row”. The hotel’s 4 restaurants include a Mexican style restaurant named Las Campanas featuring fountains and fire pits under the Californian sky. The Mission Inn Restaurant with Californian and Italian cuisine, seating can be requested to view the exceptional Spanish Patio. Bella Trattoria, a small Italian Bistro located on the Main Street pedestrian walking mall. And Duane’s Prime Steak & Seafood, famed as being the only four diamond restaurant in the Inland Valley.

For 125 years it has been the proverbial center of Riverside, host to a number of seasonal and holiday functions, as well as occasional political functions and other major social gatherings. Pat and Richard Nixon were married at one of the two wedding chapels here; the Reagans honeymooned here. The hotel has had nearly 10 presidents stay at the Inn, including President Taft whom Frank Miller had a custom large chair made for Taft to sit in, although it is known he took offense to the size of the chair. The Inn continues to be a getaway for presidents to this day with George W. Bush as the most recent. Arnold Schwarzenegger has also stayed there during his tenure as governor.