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During the winter of 1986-87, the upstairs rooms in the main hotel building were rennovated. Formerly used as employee housing (I lived up there for four seasons), the added guest capacity made it necessary for the "bar" to be returned to its original function as a dining room, and was renamed "the petite dining room." The piano (after some discussion of moving it into the main dining room) was moved out into what was then called the "card room."

Actually, the room is where Estella Washburn had kept her upright piano after she married John Washburn (one of the builders of the hotel) in 1885; thus one of the Wawona's oldest musical traditions has been restored in a round-about way. The image above is a watercolor painting by my wife, Diane Detrick Bopp.