Every grand hotel has stories, but Fairmont Breakers in Long Beach, California, has more than most. Yes, John Wayne used to hang out at the bar and a young Elizabeth Taylor spent the very first of her eight wedding nights there and Charles Lindbergh is said to have once steered himself to safety through the fog by the brightly illuminated “B” on its rooftop. Yet the building also saw years when its stories revolved around the quiet lives of retirees living amid its fading elegance, or when it served as a Red Cross headquarters after a devastating earthquake, or when pillbox structures mounted with guns projected from its rooftop, and later when all its stories seemed to come to an end, its abandoned halls echoing only with silence.

Through it all, the hotel, christened the Breakers Hotel in 1926 when it opened next to the beach, remained an imposing presence in the life of Long Beach’s residents, a Spanish Renaissance Revival landmark with a history that traced the changing fortunes of its hometown.

Pacific6 specializes in environmentally or socially significant projects. The development and investment firm’s partners all hail from the Long Beach area. Although it has a population of nearly half a million and is a center of the region’s oil and shipping industries, Long Beach is an archetypal second city, sitting in the long shadow of Los Angeles. Civic pride tends to run deep in places like that, and John Molina, a founding member of Pacific6, admits returning the Breakers to its original use as a luxury hotel in the heart of the city was a passion project for the firm.

“I passed the building en route to work for three decades, and it was sad to see it being used for other things,” Molina says. “There were alterations that removed much of its historic character. When it was an assisted living center, unless you were a resident or visiting a resident, you couldn’t go into the lobby. We had a beautiful lobby with original wood paneling and a plaster ceiling, and nobody could see it.”

Those plaster details have been restored as touchstones to the hotel’s long history. The Breakers originally opened in 1926 with a grand gala and banquet. Fred B. Dunn, the local banker and developer who built the hotel, addressed attending dignitaries, as did the city’s mayor, and vaudeville artists performed.

Long Beach in the 1920s was a beach town, easy to reach from L.A. How the hotel would have fared had the booming U.S. economy of the decade roared on is unknown, but it was open only three years before the stock market crash of 1929 brought the age of flappers and bathtub gin to an end. Hard economic times were followed by the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, a magnitude 6.4 event in the early evening of March 10 that leveled dozens of buildings, including 70 schools, and killed 120. Authorities felt the death toll would have been much higher if the quake had occurred earlier in the day, when schools were in session. Still standing amid the devastation, the Breakers served as the headquarters for the Red Cross relief efforts in Long Beach. But the disaster, on the heels of the Great Depression, brought the hotel to ruin as the tourist trade dried up. The Breakers declared bankruptcy in 1933.

Its next chapter would bring a touch of Hollywood glamour and the advent of the Sky Room, a restaurant at the top of the hotel that would become a treasured destination for Long Beach residents and guests.

Every renovation that meets modern needs is both a rebirth and a reimagining. In the case of the Breakers, the years of different uses and ownership meant that much of its interior detailing had been lost or well hidden. Recapturing the hotel’s past grandeur meant first working with what was there. “What had happened [was], different owners were less concerned about its historic importance,” says Esteghamat.

In addition to the changes made to match the hotel’s shifting identity, the building also had been significantly altered over time to deal with a recurring fact of life in California: earthquakes. The hotel had survived the 1933 temblor, but over the years, its owners had added concrete shear walls to help it survive future quakes. Further concrete infills took out two banks of windows all the way up the building for 13 stories, which blocked the view from the main-level bar to Ocean Boulevard. The rehabilitation team reopened the large windows in the bar. “Now you have all that natural light, and you can see out to Ocean Boulevard again,” says Pacific6’s Ben Grubb, who managed the project’s construction.

Removing structural concrete elements required finding other ways to reinforce the space. “We had to go downstairs and beef up the structure because upstairs we were taking structure away,” says Grubb. His team came up with innovative ways to retrofit the nearly 100-year-old building, such as using fiber-reinforced polymer wrap, which Grubb jokingly describes as “super-strength duct tape.” The wrap bolsters the structural integrity of the floors and walls while also giving the building greater capability to flex during a quake.

The configuration of key spaces had been significantly altered over the years. The elevator lobby’s space had been visually cut in half, its ceiling lowered to accommodate an additional stairwell. Crews moved the stairwell forward and brought the ceiling back to its original height, which allowed “the space to look like it was originally intended,” says Esteghamat.

Guest-room floors had to be completely cleared out and redone, but “we worked with existing fenestration and [some] existing walls and columns to create the new [larger] room layouts,” Esteghamat notes. Marble thresholds for the rooms and bathrooms, as the hotel had in the past, were installed to recapture the lost sense of refinement.

The team uncovered and restored small treasures throughout the project. Esteghamat is particularly proud of beautiful plaster medallions of sailing ships, which had been hidden behind the reception area during past remodeling, that were reclaimed and moved to a place of prominence in the new first-floor restaurant, Nettuno. The pièce de résistance of the renovation, however, came high atop the hotel in the completely revamped Sky Room.

Conrad Hilton purchased the Breakers in 1938, making it the eighth hotel in his chain. Hilton spent $200,000 on renovations—about $4.5 million in today’s dollars—and it quickly grew into a favorite Hollywood retreat. “Long Beach back in those days was [about] an hour’s drive from Hollywood,” says John Thomas, a preservation consultant for the rehabilitation. “But it wasn’t Hollywood, so you could come here, people would still know you, but you weren’t bothered by them.”

The stars frequented the beach outside the hotel, Thomas adds, giving them a sun-and-sand retreat where they could unwind. Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Rita Hayworth, and Cary Grant were among the stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age who visited the hotel in the late 1930s and ’40s. John Wayne may have been fond of the downstairs bar, but it was the elegance of the Sky Room, along with the nearly 360-degree nighttime views of sea and city, that made it a magnet for celebrities.

The days of glamour were interrupted during World War II, when the room was used on and off as an Air Watch headquarters for Long Beach. Two pillboxes (one of which remains today) with gun mounts were installed on the rooftop. The Sky Room continued as an event destination long after the war—not just for celebrities, but also for Long Beach residents. “It’s safe to say that everybody in Long Beach has a Sky Room story,” says Molina. “When my wife and I were [expecting] our first child, we took my mother, my wife’s parents, and her grandmother there and surprised them with the announcement.”

The Breakers had been sold by the Hilton chain and renamed the Wilton Hotel by the time Conrad “Nicky” Hilton Jr. and his 18-year-old bride Elizabeth Taylor spent their wedding night there in 1950. The hotel changed ownership again before it became primarily a luxury retirement home in the mid-1960s. There was an attempt to return the building to its original purpose as a hotel in the 1980s, but that failed in 1988, and the hotel and Sky Room closed.

All those incarnations still exist in some form in today’s city, but recently, Long Beach civic leaders have been emphasizing hospitality and entertainment—a return, really, to the city’s identity when the Breakers first opened.

Since 1967, the Queen Mary, the British ocean liner that was the queen of the seas when launched in the 1930s, has been docked in Long Beach, serving as a floating hotel and a popular tourist attraction.