OLD World, NEW Mission : No, this isn’t a palace in Spain. It’s a hotel in Riverside. The historic Mission Inn has Reopened after a $40-million-plus renovation. But is it worth a stay?

The last time I took a room at the Mission Inn in Riverside, I didn’t leave for 2 1/2 years. From October, 1969, to March, 1972, I lived in that architectural marvel that hotelman and eccentric millionaire Frank Miller built, in a suite called La Covacha de Los Loros, adjacent to the Court of the Birds.

The suite, in which Miller himself had once lived, was on the ground floor next to a soothing waterfall called the Fountain of Castille. I don’t know if Miller had the fountain installed to ease his sleep, but it certainly had that effect on me.

Everything about the hotel was calming. It began as a lush oasis in the desert, and as a city grew up around it, it remained an oasis. As you walked through the vine-covered arches at the Seventh Street entrance into the densely overgrown courtyard, it was like entering a tropical mission. In the arid, smoggy Riverside summers, it seemed 10 to 15 degrees cooler, and even the air breathed easier.

Those years overlapped the best and worst of times for the famous hotel. When I moved in, as part of an overall business arrangement between my employer, Riverside International Raceway, and the inn, it was in deep financial trouble but still fully operational. There were three restaurants and three bars, its banquet facilities were in regular use, and the weddings for which it was world-famous were still being conducted in the ornate Chapel of St. Francis of Assisi at the rate of 30 or 40 a month.

When I left, the restaurants and bars were dark. The boiler had broken down more than a month earlier, leaving the hotel without heat. And no sooner had the new caretaker management turned off the Fountain of Castille (to save electricity) than the toilet in my room developed a curious tic; it would start flushing on its own and not stop for hours. This was not soothing.

Worse, the three floors above me in the 1903 Mission Wing, the first of the hotel’s four major structures, had been turned into dormitory rooms for students at the University of California, Riverside, and the destruction was amazing. The hotel’s corridors had always been lined with the rich and multicultural antiques that Miller had collected around the world, and some of those pieces were suddenly being flung out windows.

To say that the Mission Inn’s future was bleak doesn’t describe it. Despite its history and magnificently eclectic architecture, few people believed it could reclaim its glory. Potential investors had to consider not only a massive renovation bill, but the fact that Riverside had long been replaced by Palm Springs and Las Vegas as desert resorts.

At one point, I read soon after moving out, the Mission Inn was actually scheduled for demolition.

Many of the circumstances that made the hotel untenable 20 years ago still exist. But the condition of the 320,000-square-foot complex, which fills up an entire city block in downtown Riverside, isn’t one of them. In the last seven years, more than $40 million has been spent on renovation, much of that bringing its electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning systems up to date and retrofitting its brick, wood and concrete walls to make it earthquake safe.

When I returned there last week, nearly 21 years to the day after moving out, the hotel looked almost starkly new from the street, like a stucco reproduction of the Mission Inn. The Court of the Birds, where Frank Miller’s wife kept her collection of macaws, is beautifully landscaped, with added walkways and fountains, but it has lost its tropical shagginess. The vines that crawled over the arches had to be torn out for the exterior work, and the weather-beaten campanario , a bell wall copied from one Miller admired at Mission San Gabriel, has been replaced by an identical match.

A replica of a replica.

The vine-covered pergolas that created a shaded path between my room and the front door of the hotel also had to come down for the restoration, and in their place are rows of naked and spectacularly ugly redwood stanchions. George Kaplanis, the Inn’s managing director, says more landscaping is planned to bring back the hotel’s lived-in look, but it will be years before the entrance regains its character.

Inside, however, the Mission Inn is as wondrous as ever. Its surfaces have been spit-shined, and its 240 guest rooms have been redecorated and upgraded with new tiled bathrooms. Otherwise, the arches, recesses, beveled and stained-glass windows, redwood-beamed ceilings, tile work and wrought-iron railings that show up in the rooms, hallways, lobby and interior courts, balconies and patios are just as I remember them.

As I followed one of the volunteer docents on her 1 1/2-hour tour, I felt a combination of nostalgia and envy. I had given more than a few tours of the hotel myself--to say you lived there was to invite the task--and remembered how much pleasure I got from showing people the rest of “my place.” This woman was having a wonderful time regaling us with the hotel’s history, and I knew how she felt.

Nobody knows everything there is to know about the Mission Inn. It was pieced together over 30 years, with no particular design, and often with no concern for anything but Miller’s aesthetic pleasures. The predominant architectural motif is Mission Revival, but look again and you see Spanish Baroque, Moorish, Italian Renaissance, even Chinese and Japanese touches. There are gargoyles, domes, statues, fountains, carved pillars, flying buttresses, a clock tower housing a 1709 clock from Nuremberg, one bell tower and more than 700 bells.

Turn almost any corner on any floor and you’ll see something that Miller, an inveterate traveler and collector who made his money in citrus groves and land speculation, either brought back from one of his trips or had duplicated by his own artists and craftsmen in the Mission Inn workshop.

“The Mission Inn is really an architectural biography of Frank Miller’s life,” says Kevin Halloran, curator of history for the Mission Inn Foundation. “He was a collector and the place evolved over the years to accommodate his collections.”

Miller was 23 when he bought a two-story adobe inn, called Glenwood Cottage, from his father. In 1902, Miller had the large, U-shaped Mission Wing built around it. The hotel was almost immediately a favorite destination for East Coast and European industrialists and land speculators (anticipating his clientele, Miller built large hallways to accommodate the huge steamer trunks that the wealthy used for their extended trips). Subsequent wings were added as Miller’s travels and collections mounted. The Cloister Wing went up in 1911, the Spanish Wing in 1914 and the Rotunda Wing, with its five-story, open-air circular courtyard, was finished in 1931.

Perhaps the prize surviving trophy of Miller’s collecting is the ornate altar, which had sat in a church in Guanajuato, Mexico, for two centuries before being bought, sight-unseen, by Miller in 1920. When the altar, carved from Mexican cedar and covered with gold leaf, was reassembled in Riverside, Miller is said to have been so astonished by its size and beauty that he decided to build the Chapel of St. Francis of Assisi around it.

Soon, the nondenominational chapel, which also shows off seven Tiffany windows, became the busiest wedding site in Southern California, marrying as many as 900 couples a year. Many of the Hollywood crowd who hung out at the Inn in the ‘30s and ‘40s were married there, too. Among them: Humphrey Bogart (with his first wife, not Lauren Bacall), Bette Davis, Constance Bennett and Linda Darnell. Richard and Pat Nixon were married in the Presidential Suite, and Ronald and Nancy Reagan had their honeymoon there.

The Presidential Suite has since been converted to a bar, the Presidential Lounge. The hotel now hastwo new Presidential suites. One of them is my old room, the aforementioned La Covacha de Los Loros, where my wife and I began our marriage. The Nixons, the Reagans and the Mathews all honeymooning in the same building; almost more excitement than the town could stand. The new management let me take a look at the suite, and while it has been remodeled (gone is the dining room and kitchen, added is another bedroom; out are the antiques, in is the new red oak furniture used in all the guest rooms), the things I remembered most are still there. The huge rooms, high wooden ceilings, Roman arches, stained-glass windows, two fireplaces and its sunken bedroom (now living room) with “Mission pillars.”

To be standing in that room reminded me of the parallel between the Inn and the Raceway. In 1969, Riverside Raceway was flush with capital from a new owner and had increased its racing schedule. Over the years, the Raceway’s business--the parties, receptions, banquets, room rentals--had moved from the Inn to characterless new hotels closer to the track. The reason I was able to live in La Covacha de Los Loros (Cave of the Parrots) was that as the head of marketing and publicity for the Raceway, I brought all that business back.

I had been in love with the Mission Inn from the time I first saw it, as a cub reporter for the Riverside Press-Enterprise. It seemed insane to me for the city’s two main attractions--a world-renowned speedway and the hotel Will Rogers called “the most unique in America”--not to be in bed together. I made it a literal connection.

For the first year of that arrangement, things went spectacularly well, and while the new management touts the guest list names of seven U.S. Presidents, aviation heroes Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindberg, and a few moguls with names like Carnegie and Rockefeller, some nostalgic racing fans may appreciate that the Inn has also hosted Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt, Jackie Stewart and every other notable driver of the era.

A proxy fight and some subsequent ugliness brought on hard times for the Raceway, and it could only afford to throw a party at the Inn when a sponsor could be found. But one thing has to be said for that brief Raceway/Mission Inn marriage: No driver ever put a rental car in the swimming pool, as they had done at motels down the street. Not at the Mission Inn.

As spiffed up and lovely as the refurbished Inn is, you may want to hold off a while before visiting. It reopened Dec. 30 with limited service, and though it now has its liquor license and one operating bar (the Presidential Lounge), services are still limited.

There will be no room service until May, and for the moment, there is only buffet-style dining. The prices are friendly ($6.95, $8.95 and $12.95 for breakfast, lunch and dinner, respectively), but the brightly lighted Spanish Dining Room is a little cool for romantic dining and the quality of the food is wholly dependent on how long a particular item has been sitting over the Sterno. At the same meal last weekend, I had a perfectly moist piece of prime rib and a halibut steak that looked like scar tissue.

The hotel lays out an elaborate Sunday champagne brunch, however, complete with live jazz, for $17.50.

Kaplanis said table-service dining will be introduced in the Spanish Dining Room in the next two weeks. The Squire Arms, which was the elegant dining room when I was living there, won’t be reopened until fall, and there are plans to turn the basement level Glenwood Tavern into a pub, serving the Mission Inn’s own label of beer.

The Windsor Hotel Co., which was hired to manage the Inn for its new owner Duane Roberts--he is a Riverside entrepreneur who bought it from Chemical Bank after another buyer had gone bankrupt--seems to have priced the rooms right for a depressed hotel economy. Standard rooms start at $80 per double, and suites start at $175. (Through March, standard rooms are on special at $65 single, $75 double, breakfast included; see Guidebook.) At the nearby Riverside Sheraton, the city’s only other high-end hotel, rates start at $84.

What you get as you go up the rate scale at the Inn is not so much more space or more amenities, but more character. I stayed in the $130 Jessie Van Brunt room, named after the stained-glass artist responsible for much of the hotel’s more colorful decorations. Indeed, Van Brunt’s work is on display in her room, on a bank of windows that provides the backdrop to a crescent-shaped sitting room.

The room is like my old one only in the sense that it is also unique. There is a stained-glass window over the curved walk-in closet; I had one over the curved wall of my bathroom. Both rooms have heavy wooden doors, and odd wall recesses. Jessie’s room has a brightly lighted alcove with a desk, and beyond that, a five-foot-high niche carved, for no apparent reason, into an arch that spans the Orange Street sidewalk. There was nothing in my old room like that, but those on an upper level called Author’s Row seemed to be designed around the principle that if direct sunlight was applied to paper, writing would occur.

It is the eccentricities of the building that make the Mission Inn truly special, and which kept it from gaining landmark status until 1976. Every effort made on its behalf before that was turned back by the landmark cops, on the grounds that it was not “architecturally cohesive.”

Much is made of the priceless artwork and artifacts left behind from Miller’s collection, but the truth is that most of the best pieces are long gone. They were either auctioned off after his death in 1935, or stolen by its various owners. The catacombs tunneling beneath the hotel may have housed as many as 50 pianos that Miller collected from around the world. Curator Halloran says the hotel can now account for only six. One of them, however, may indeed be priceless: It’s the only Steinway commemorative grand built in 1876 for the U.S. centennial.

When I was living there, people were constantly trying to make off with a memento, usually a bell. Now that the hotel is back in business, a few of those lost pieces may find their way home. Halloran says one man returned a statue that he’d stolen years ago, saying he had become a born-again Christian and couldn’t live with the guilt. Another man brought back a floor lamp he’d lifted while drunk.

The $42-million question, now that the Mission Inn is in impeccable physical condition, is whether the Windsor Hotel Co., which also manages the Bel-Air Hotel, can sell it as a destination in its own right. Certainly, it is something to behold, and with its meeting facilities and its new 350-space parking garage, it ought to claim a hefty share of whatever corporate business comes to the area.

Weddings, of course, are a given. Kaplanis says he has at least one wedding booked for every weekend for the rest of the year. The first chapel wedding in seven years comes off today. So far, love is showing the way. The hotel was reportedly booked solid for Valentine’s Day, and Kaplanis says that since opening, much of the new Inn’s business is the old Inn’s business: couples wanting to book their honeymoon room for their next anniversary.

Although the Inn is the hinge to downtown Riverside’s revitalization, the city itself can’t do much to help. It’s the kind of town you might like to live in but wouldn’t want to visit. There just isn’t much to do there. You can take a walking tour of its downtown buildings and see a dazzling array of architectural styles, and you can spend some time at the nearby California Museum of Photography.

But everything you see on the street and in the museum is likely to pale in comparison to the hotel.

There is a good reason why couples attach their emotions so strongly to the Mission Inn. It is a shared experience in a unique environment--a small-scale Hearst Castle--with an intoxicating array of surprises. I still remember the look on my future wife’s face when I took her to the fourth-floor patio of the Mission Wing, across from Anton’s Clock, and watched the revolving figures--a California bear, a Native American, Father Serra, Juan Baptista de Anza and St. Francis--that show up on the hour beneath it (unfortunately, it’s currently under repair).

The funny thing about revisiting the Mission Inn is that for years my strongest memories were of the plumbing problems that drove me out. But as soon as I stepped inside last weekend, the overwhelming feeling was how much I had appreciated living there, what an extraordinary experience that was. And what a one-time offer!

La Covacha de Los Loros is a little out of my range now. My rent in 1971 was $200 a month. If you want to rent that same room today, ask for Suite 8 and be prepared to pay $475 a day.

GUIDEBOOK

Inn With a Mission

Getting there: The Mission Inn is at 3649 Seventh St., Riverside (92501). To get to the hotel from Los Angeles, take California 60 to Market Street, go south to Seventh Street, then left one block. From Orange County, take California 91 to University Avenue, straight on the off-ramp to Seventh Street, then left three blocks.

Rates: Standard rooms are $80 per night for a single, $95 double, $90 single/$105 double for a Superior, and $115/$130 for a Deluxe. The Mission Rooms, which have more interesting architectural details (I stayed in the Jessie Van Brant), are $130 single/$145 double; suites start at $175. (Through March, standard rooms are on special at $65 single/$75 double, with breakfast.)

Tours and amenities: Ninety-minute tours of the hotel are held twice a day, at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., except Mondays; more are scheduled on Sundays depending on demand. Cost is $6 per person and reservations are necessary. Call the Mission Inn Foundation at (909) 781-8241.

The hotel has an Olympic-size pool, a fitness room and meeting facilities. Rooms are to have fully stocked minibars in about a week. Several golf courses and tennis courts are in the area. The Mission Inn Museum, containing artifacts, artwork and a chronological history of the hotel’s development, is scheduled to open before summer.

For more information: Call (800) 843-7755 or (909) 784-0300 for reservations, or fax (909) 683-1342.