History
In 1959 the San Francisco Giants' owner Horace Stoneham developed the property as a spring training camp for his popular Major League Baseball team. The name of the property was taken from the San "Francisco" Giants and Casa "Grande".
During its early years, the hotel was popular with celebrities like John Wayne and Pat Boone. Guests are able to stay in their eponymously-titled suites.
After the Giants were moved to Scottsdale, the California Angels used the facility from 1982 until 1984. The next two years saw the transformation of the baseball fields into football fields, which were used as the training camp headquarters for the USFL's Arizona Wranglers and the Denver Gold.
From 1984 to 2002, the Francisco Grande operated as a destination golf resort. The course was 5,224 yards from the front tees and a long 7,545 yards from the championship tees.
In 2003, the resort was closed for renovations which cost approximately $8.5 million dollars. It reopened in 2005.
Read more about this topic: Francisco Grande
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)