Clockwise
from top:
The Lodge
at Torrey
Pines; a bay-
view room
and patio at
Catamaran
Resort Hotel
and Spa; the
beach at
Bahia Resort
Hotel and
one of the
company’s
two stern-
wheeler
boats (in
the distance)
expansion over the last few decades and a
steady stream of guests all point to a suc-
cessful enterprise with no signs of slowing
anytime soon. The company announced
in late 2015 that it would partner with
SeaWorld to explore the opportunity
of building a hotel at the theme park in
Mission Bay. Even with these grand plans
on the horizon, sometimes looking back on
the journey from humble beginnings is the
best part.
THE EARLY YEARS
In the mid-1940s, a Chamber of Commerce
committee suggested developing Mission
Bay as a recreational area to draw tourists
and broaden the city’s mostly military-based
economy. “The city issued a formal request
for proposal, inviting developers to apply to
lease land to build a hotel,” Evans says. Her
late husband and co-founder, William Evans,
decided to apply to construct 52 beach cab-
ins, a restaurant, bar and swimming pool—
with a telephone in every room.
Though he had previous experience run-
ning his father’s walk-up apartment build-
ings and managing a fraternity house at the
University of Southern California, the Bahia
Resort Hotel was the first property Evans
developed; it opened in 1953 after the Evanses
were awarded the first long-term lease on
Mission Bay, which was mainly marshland
and mud flats at the time. “Not everyone
could see what Mission Bay was going to be,
but he could,” Evans says. Eventually, crews
would dredge 25 million cubic yards of sand
and silt to create the land areas of Mission Bay
Park. In those early days, as work on the hotels
progressed, Evans shares that her husband
went around to older neighborhoods offering
to remove their pesky palm trees. Remove
them he did—and the trees have grown with
the Bahia Resort Hotel ever since.
The Bahia was the Evanses’ only hotel
until the owners of the Braemar estate, a
mansion belonging to the Scripps family,
offered to lease land to Evans Hotels in
1958. The following year saw the opening
of the Catamaran Hotel (the name later
changed to the Catamaran Resort Hotel and
Spa)—an 82-room inn on the northwest cor-
ner of Mission Bay.
Because there were then two hotels,
William Evans formulated another innova-
tive idea: He wanted an alluring way to dif-
ferentiate the properties, to transport guests
from one hotel to the other and to increase
event space for both properties. His solution
was the purchase of a 45-foot ferry boat that
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