Travel - Central Texas Weekend Trip, Part 1 - The Emily Morgan Hotel

Over the July 4th weekend, my wife and I took a trip to San Antonio and environs to celebrate her birthday.  We stayed at the Emily Morgan Hotel on Alamo Plaza, in one of their Alamo-view rooms.  I narrowed the choices for this stay to the Emily Morgan and the Menger; both are excellent historic hotels with their own stories, and my choice boiled down in the end to the fact that I have a Hilton Honors account and the Emily Morgan is a Hilton hotel.

The Emily Morgan is on the north side of Alamo Plaza adjacent to the courthouse and post office, and consists of two wings of fourteen stories each, in a V-shape, with a bell tower or lookout on top of the junction of the V.  There is a pool on the second floor; while it was open, we did not use it.  We also did not take advantage of the hotel restaurant, Oro, or the bar or room service, so I cannot comment on any of these amenities.  We stayed in Room 407, on the southeast corner of the south wing, so we had windows on east and south faces of the room.

The first thing to get out of the way: The Emily Morgan is not cheap.  For a king-bed Alamo-facing room, our rate ran between $230 and $300 depending on whether it was weekday or weekend rate.  Their less-expensive rooms run about half that.  There are other hotels, farther from the Alamo and slightly less convenient to downtown San Antonio, that are less expensive with sufficient amenities, so what about the Emily Morgan justifies this price?

First, of course, is the view - because Texas law and custom doesn't allow a shadow to fall on the Alamo, Alamo Plaza is wide-open, unlike most of downtown.  From our room we could see all the way to the bridge on I-37, about half a mile away.  We could also see both the wall of the old chapel, what most people think of as the Alamo (Mission San Antonio de Valero, better known as the Alamo, is the complex, not the chapel), and the cenotaph from where we were.

View of the Emily Morgan Hotel from Alamo Plaza. Photograph courtesy of Patricia Darby.

A corollary to the view is the location, which of course all rooms in the hotel share; it is possible to spend a week in San Antonio without visiting the same spot other than a hotel twice, and Alamo Plaza is at the center of that.  The Emily Morgan is within a five-minute walk of the Riverwalk and ten minutes from Hemisfair Plaza.  Within that span lies a good chunk of San Antonio's history and most of its upscale restaurants and retail shops.  From here, you can quickly and easily visit the Alamo, go to the movies, eat until you cannot stand, stroll along the Riverwalk, or shop for almost anything that comes to mind.

Then there is the history.  The site of the Emily Morgan is atop where the Mexican batteries formed in the days prior to the final assault on the Alamo, and the lobby is about where the Mexican column formed before dawn on March 6, 1836 to assault the north wall.  In the days between that day and the beginning of the Civil War, the site of the Emily Morgan was part of Fort Sam Houston, or the San Antonio depot of the US Army during that period.  The hotel itself opened in 1926 as a hospital and was converted to hotel use in 1984.  The combination of battlefield site and hospital has led to stories of the hotel being haunted; we saw only the slightest hints of this, mostly bathtub jets that would mysteriously turn on by themselves at random times in the morning.  It could have just as easily been programmed, but it was certainly startling, given the jet-engine sound the bathtub jets made.

Then there is the room itself - is a $300 room really three times as good as a $100 room? Well, strictly speaking and without considering anything outside the hotel, no, but it absolutely was a notably better room than I was expecting, and I was expecting quality.  It had all the essentials - couch, desk, bed, bathroom - but they were all of good quality and in most cases a cut above what I had expected even at that price.  My wife, who is a notoriously difficult sleeper, liked the bed and had no problems sleeping in it - a feat which doesn't even always happen at home.  The couch, while it included a standard fold-out, also included a chaise lounge, which thanks to years of not having one still is a quick way to signal luxury to me.  The jetted tub was large enough to fit two very friendly people - no, we did not test this! - and despite what several other reviews indicated, there was no problem with either water temperature or pressure; I tend to like my showers considerably hotter than my wife does, and I had to dial the temperature back from the top end.  I cannot speak directly to it, but have it on good authority that the aerating jets are very aggressive, so be aware of this before using them.

The room's decorations were tasteful and well-coordinated.  Often in hotel rooms, in an effort to be interesting, the art is either offensively bland or on the other end, subtly garish.  Yes, I know that sounds like a contradiction in terms, but sometimes hotel art and hotel wall color choices just don't quite match and you can't quite put your finger on why.  That was not the case here; the art over the bed was actually spotlit, and the room was decorated in subdued oranges, brass, and brown, giving it a very retro feel.  This extended to the hotel as a whole - lot of brass rails, an antique mail chute that ran through all the lodging floors to the basement, rounded fixtures, and an emergency phone that mimicked a pre-WW2 rotary phone in the landing of each floor.

My favorite feature of the room was, ironically, one that I did not use, but deeply appreciated: in the corner, over the counter and mini-fridge, stood a set of bookshelves, modestly well-stocked with a variety of books for occupants to read.  I didn't use them because I both brought a book with me, and didn't have time to read as it stood, but the fact that they had a set of bookshelves in their rooms really appealed to me as a well-known bookworm.

All in all, if you have the money to spend on it, the Emily Morgan Hotel lives up to its price.  I have stayed in a fair number of historic or luxury hotels at this point, and there are only a handful of them that I have liked as much as the Emily Morgan.