Disneyland1970 said:
I'm not sure when the DL hotel was purchased, but I assume it was before the Monorail was extended to it.
Not quite. Disney purchased The Disneyland Hotel in 1987, more than 2 and a half decades after the monorail was extended to it.
The Disneyland Hotel was built by Jack Wrather shortly after Disneyland opened. Walt Disney gave the Wrather Company the exclusive right to use the name "Disney" on hotels, believing at the time that he would never be interested in operating hotels. (This was perhaps the only time in Disney history that one can honestly say a mistake was made by Walt and was later corrected by Eisner). When the monorail was extended to the DL Hotel, Disney charged the Wrather Company a very small fee for their use of the monorail. When WDW opened, they couldn't even use the name "Disney" on their own hotels because of the Wrather agreement. By the time Eisner arrived at Disney in 1984, this was something that infuriated him. The Disneyland Hotel was already starting to look very run down and it drove Eisner crazy that it had the "Disney" name on it. Disney's CFO at the time suggested a rather ruthless move... Raise the fee on the use of the monorail to a ridiculously high amount, leaving the Wrather Company with few options other than to sell the Disneyland Hotel to Disney. The plan worked and Disney got more than they'd bargained for. They ended up purchasing the entire Wrather Company, which gave them not only the Disneyland Hotel, but also the Queen Mary (which they later sold) and a few other properties. This also gave Disney the right to finally put the name "Disney" on their existing hotels. They acted quickly by immediately adding the word "Disney's" to the front of the names of most of their hotels at WDW. They also changed the name of the Golf Resort to the Disney Inn (which was later renamed Shades of Green when it was sold to the Armed Forces).
Unfortunately, the Disneyland Hotel had gotten pretty run down by Disney's standards. So it took years, and millions of dollars, to fix it up. It wasn't financially feasible to give the hotel an elaborate theme. So consequently, it's basically just a hotel, albeit a nice, clean one.
The Paradise Pier Hotel actually started out as the Emerald Hotel, which was a chain of hotels that mostly was prominent in Hawaii. It was later purchased by another company and the name was changed to the Pan Pacific. When Disney purchased it, they changed the name to the Disneyland Pacific Hotel. They later fixed it up and changed the name to the Paradise Pier Hotel shortly before DCA opened. As with the Disneyland Hotel, the entire budget went into fixing the hotel up to Disney standards, so no themeing was done on it.
The Grand Californian is the only hotel at DLR to be built by Disney from the ground up. It's by far the prettiest. And yes, it was designed by the same designer as the Wilderness Lodge but it's no where near as elaborately themed.
