Hyatt Regency San Francisco

From the gilded age splendor of the Grand Hotel Tremezzo we now travel to the Gigantor-age style of the Hyatt San Francisco Embarcadero Center.

The Hyatt's sleek, one-sided hallways run rings around the vaguely trapezoidal form of the biggest dang "lobby" you're likely to see in your lifetime.



You immediately feel like an ant. Or an electron circling the giant sculpted ball that fills 1/1000th of the interior space.




That's not all bad, of course. If I were the owner, I'd feel like some 80's master of the universe. But as I'm not, I focused on some smaller items of interest.

1) The feeling-a-little-dated tile floors in the elevators - which from the outside look a lot like they belong to the interior of the Tyrell building in Blade Runner.



2) The not matching the floors of the elevators elevator landing carpet.



3) The button which in most hotels would waft you to the penthouse, but which here promises only a trip to the EQ.



4) The abandoned chat area on the fourth floor. All that was left of what must've been conceived as a little nook for intimate tetes-a-tete was an end table with a phone on it. (Sorry, didn't get a good photo of it.)



5) The sign for the exercise room, which I mistakenly took for a Swastika pointing to a meeting room for the American Nazi Party.



It's a nice hotel. At least my room was nice. A colleague with whom I was traveling claimed her bathtub was ringed with "black mold".

Mine had an exceedingly slow to flush toilet. I don't know if this was an issue with the pipes, or if my unit was an early, inefficient version of a low water usage commode. Either way, one had to be careful or the chamber maid would have an unfortunate surprise.

The Hyatt, being a luxury hotel, charges for wireless internet. (The inverse relationship between room price and internet charge continues!) What made this even more annoying than usual was the glacial pace of the connection. You could enter a url, try to fix the toilet, come back, and it would still be loading. What's worse, when I checked out, I mentioned to the nice lady that the internet was very very slow, and she said, with complete aplomb, "we know, we're trying to fix it". Gee, thanks. How about a warning card in your room before you cough up the dough to "log on"? Something like "Go ahead and pay, sucker, but don't expect anything faster than a 28k dial up modem".

One other thing. The chrome was coming off the drain stopper in the sink. I know the old saying, "the bloom is off the rose". I have a modern replacement: The chrome's off the brass. Doesn't have the same ring, does it?