The suburb of Riverside is known for having some of the worst air in the Los Angeles valley. They're the farthest east away from the sea, inland, in a topographical cul-de-sac, and there are factories and interstate truck terminals nearby. And wineries.

But the small downtown grid of Riverside is dominated by a castle, occupying a whole city block, with multiple towers and flying buttresses and a complicated system of arcades, and a roofline that belongs in Disneyland or Bavaria or some Mexican expressionist fantasy. But it's not only real, it's a hotel, so you can explore almost the whole damn thing.

This place is fun.

Thank you God!

With an interesting perilous history which we don't need to fully bother with, right, the core of the property was a 2-story, 12-room abode boarding house, out here in the Californian wilderness of 1876, called the "Glenwood Cottage", begun by civil engineer Christopher Columbus Miller in 1876. It predated the founding of Riverside. Miller's son Frank bought out his father and expanded the boarding house in 1902 and essentially continued obsessively building, in a wild variety of shapes, until he died in 1935. This building comes to us courtesy of an obsessive eccentric.

Miller built in reinforced concrete and developed an accomplished, expressive vernacular style drawn from random historical styles. Accumulating one section over another, addition upon addition, the result is an enormously complicated and intricate built environment, comparable to the Winchester House, or to a self-contained medieval European city. With the courage and panache to produce, for example, a five-story spiral staircase, Miller just kept building, until the Mission Inn occupied the whole central block in the town of Riverside, built up many stories, with exotic treasures, towers and minarets. He was an obsessive eccentric, not quite the accumulative and crazed Mrs. Winchester, but they might have been in therapy together.

The Mission Inn contains narrow passageways like a Tuscan village, exterior arcades, a prominent medieval-style clock overlooking the Spanish patio, a deep but sun-drenched five-story rotunda, innumerable patios and windows, towers, minarets, a Cloister Wing (with Catacombs), and a high Venetian pedestrian bridge connecting to another (currently delapidated) building to the north, among many other features. The 1914 Spanish Wing in itself contains a castle courtyard, open arcades, Mexican tiled roofs, flying buttresses and Mediterranean domes.

The Mission Inn has got to be among the top twenty places in the U.S. for a game of hide and seek. It's crazily complicated. You know, how you feel when complex spaces are happening around you, like in an old hotel, or in a cave, or through a pedestrian space like the Riverwalk in San Antonio, or walking through a Frank Lloyd Wright house or any offbeat and satisfying sequence of spaces, I think of that as haptic complexity. The Mission Inn provides tons of nourishing, luxurious, haptic complexity. If you're sensitive to your surrounding spaces, walking through the Mission Inn is like getting an expert massage.

Part of the pleasure and complexity is unexpected change of scale, because Miller was nice enough to tailor certain portions for his midget sister. And part of the complexity is the clash of styles. Charles Moore was brave enough to try to document the historical references in "Los Angeles: the City Observed", but it's enough to say that the effect is one of those 1920s movie theatres, or a 1920s movie set First of all, this monster from the id is hard to take in all at once. It doesn't have a clear profile as much as it has a solid, blocky presence. Like trying to comprehend an entire town at once.

And the style….Like some of the movie theatres of the same period - and you've gotta think, these industrious Victorian builders hit the architecturally permissive climate and the sudden wealth and the cheap labor and the blank sunkissed canvas of 1910's California landscape, it's like a match hitting gunpowder - the result is maybe best called kitchen-sink exoticism like in the great Broadway LA theatres, but at the Mission Inn it's a real substantive stone building in three dimensions with every style, every kind of historical fantasy but real. Moroccan, Mediterranean, Chinese maybe, Turkish maybe, Babylonian, Orientalist, Italian Renaissance, Gothic-Hawaiian, any style you could dream up or half-remember, jumbled and falling over each other . It has narrow passageways like a Tuscan village, exterior arcades like a monastery, a prominent medieval-style clock overlooking the Spanish patio, a sun-drenched five-story rotunda, innumerable patios and windows, and something like 250 guest rooms hidden away in the fabric somewhere, all of them with their own unique pleasures. Reportedly the most spacious and comfortable are the Moorish rooms along "Author's Row". The place is inexhaustible.

For 125 years it has been the literal center of Riverside, host to a number of seasonal and holiday functions, as well as occassional political functions and other major social gatherings. It's had an obvious positive influence on the rest of Riverside's Spanish Colonial civic bulidings. Pat and Richard Nixon were married at one of the two wedding chapels here; the Reagans honeymooned here. The hotel is a National Historic Landmark and a State of California Historic Landmark.

The building is good to hold in your mind: it's happily imaginable,with a nice clean satisfying perimeter and a hollow courtyard core, but you could spend your lifetime figuring out the spatial configurations.The back, where most large hotel/restaurants only have a stinking ramp, the Mission Inn's stinking ramp is redeemed by a mysterious concrete pedestrian bridge, leading across to an obviously abandoned brick building from Amsterdam or Barcelona.