The InterContinental Mark Hopkins hotel sits exactly where a mansion bearing the same man’s name once stood, even though almost nothing of that building has survived. Most people checking in or popping over for a drink at the Top of the Mark have no idea why this particular hilltop became the place to be in San Francisco, or that the man the building is named after never spent a single night in the house that made it famous.

For about three decades in the late 19th century, the corner of California and Mason streets was the site of one of the most extravagant private homes in California: the Victorian-Gothic estate of Mark Hopkins, one of the founders of the Central Pacific Railroad and part of the “Big Four” railroad titan crew along with Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Collis Huntington. According to an 1878 San Francisco Chronicle article, the site gave the mansion “some advantages over the homes of the other Nob Hill millionaires, towering above the palace of Stanford, and commanding as it does an unequaled view of the city, the bay and the surrounding country.”

A reluctant millionaire

FILE: A portrait of Mark Hopkins Jr. (Sept. 3, 1813 – March 29, 1878).

Of the Big Four, Hopkins was the least interested in showing off, and by some accounts, he was a buzzkill, too. “Hopkins was a lean, unkempt man, painfully penurious,” wrote the San Francisco Call Bulletin in 1891. “No one understood him. No one liked him.” Apparently, it took a lot of persuading from his wife, Mary, to get the spendthrift to agree to anything as ornate as this mansion. Construction began in 1875, however, with the architecture firm of Wright & Sanders in charge of the home’s design.

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Hopkins didn’t live to see the finished job — in 1878, he died in his sleep on a train during a work trip near Yuma, Arizona, right as the house was starting to take shape.

Mary moved in when the........

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