What it is
The Hotel San Carlos is a seven-story hotel at Central Avenue and Monroe Street in the middle of downtown Phoenix, opened on March 19, 1928, and still taking guests. It was designed in the Italian Renaissance style by George Whitecross Ritchie and sold, when it opened, as the most modern hotel in the Southwest: the first high-rise hotel in Arizona with elevators and air cooling, which in a Phoenix summer before refrigeration was the whole pitch. Hollywood came through on the way to the ranches and the Biltmore, and the hotel kept the register: Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Gene Autry. Their names are set in gold stars on the sidewalk outside.
It is also the most haunted building in downtown Phoenix by reputation, which the hotel has made peace with, and which our haunted Scottsdale note takes seriously enough to recommend a night.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale’s hotel history begins in earnest in the 1950s, with the Valley Ho and the resort boom; the only 1920s hotel in the metro that still works as a hotel the way it was built to is this one. You come downtown to see what a Phoenix hotel looked like when the city had thirty thousand people and the Biltmore was a year away. You also come because it is in the middle of everything downtown offers that Scottsdale does not: a ten-minute walk to Chase Field and the Mortgage Matchup Center (the Suns arena, formerly Footprint Center), a few blocks to the Orpheum and Symphony Hall, and two of the best bars in the city, Hanny’s and Bitter & Twisted, within four blocks.
The practical version
Twenty-four minutes from Old Town, or the light rail to Central and Van Buren. 128 rooms and five suites, priced below most Scottsdale hotels. The rooms are 1928 rooms: small, old windows, charm over square footage. The pool is closed for renovation as of October 2026, and the owner has announced a major renovation plan, so check the website before booking. There is an Irish pub on the ground floor, and you can walk the lobby and the sidewalk stars without being a guest.
When to go
Downtown Phoenix is a fall-through-spring place for walking, and so is this hotel. October through April, a night here pairs with a Suns or Diamondbacks game, a show at the Orpheum or Symphony Hall, or a First Friday on Roosevelt Row a mile north. In summer the hotel is a cheap, air-conditioned base for the ballpark, which has a roof, and not much else; the sidewalk stars can wait for a cooler month.
What to do here
Three things. First, the lobby and the sidewalk: walk in from Central Avenue, look at the ceiling and the old elevator doors, then walk the perimeter on Central and Monroe and read the stars, which are set at the curb for the hotel’s 65th anniversary. Second, a drink: the ground-floor Irish pub has been a downtown fixture for years and is the pre-game bar for the arena crowd. Third, the ghost version: book a room, ask the front desk which floors have the stories, and read our haunted note first so you know what you are listening for. If you want cocktails rather than pints, Bitter & Twisted is four blocks south on Jefferson, and Hanny’s is two blocks south on 1st Street.
With kids
A hotel lobby and a sidewalk of stars take ten minutes with children and are fine; the ghost stories are a judgment call. For a family night downtown, the hotel’s location works: the Arizona Science Center and the Children’s Museum of Phoenix are a short walk east, and Chase Field is ten minutes on foot. The rooms are small for a family of four.
The neighborhood
This is the historic core of Phoenix, the blocks between Van Buren and Washington where the city’s first hotels, theaters and department stores went up. Most are gone; the San Carlos, the Luhrs Building and Tower, the Orpheum and the Hanny’s building are the survivors, all within a five-minute walk, and seeing them together is the point of coming here.
The story
The corner of Central and Monroe held Phoenix’s first school, a four-room adobe schoolhouse that opened in 1874 and was replaced by a brick building in 1879. By 1916 the school was condemned and the city was thinking about a hotel. Ground broke on August 17, 1927, and the San Carlos opened seven months later on March 19, 1928, designed by George Whitecross Ritchie in the Italian Renaissance manner, with the elevators and the air cooling that made it, for a few years, the most modern hotel in the Southwest. The Biltmore opened a year later and took the carriage trade, but the San Carlos had downtown, the trains and the movie stars who stopped in Phoenix on the way to Palm Springs or the dude ranches.
The hotel’s second story began within weeks of its first. A young woman is said to have jumped from the roof in the hotel’s first weeks, and the building has carried her, and the children’s voices that guests connect to the old school, ever since. By the 1980s the San Carlos was a tired downtown hotel in a downtown that had emptied out; the Phoenix Historic Property Register listing in 1987 and the Historic Hotels of America membership in 1991 marked the start of its rescue, and the gold stars went into the sidewalk in 1993 for the 65th anniversary. A million-dollar remodel in 2003 bought another twenty years. In 2023 its owner, Columbus-based Rockbridge Capital, announced an $80 million renovation with a destination restaurant, a lobby bar and more rooms, and the city gave a $500,000 preservation grant in exchange for a 40-year conservation easement on the exterior. As of October 2026 the hotel is open and taking bookings, with the pool closed for renovation; the larger project’s schedule is the thing to check before you commit.
The Scottsdale connection
In 1928 Scottsdale was a farm town of a few hundred people, and a visitor to the Valley stayed downtown or at the Ingleside Inn and the Jokake Inn out toward Camelback. The San Carlos is the surviving piece of the downtown half of that equation, and our 1920s history page puts it alongside the Biltmore and the first Scottsdale guest ranches. The Hollywood names on the sidewalk are the same names that turn up in Scottsdale’s own resort registers a generation later, when the stars moved out to the desert and the city’s hotels followed them.
Getting there
From Old Town, west on McDowell Road to Central Avenue, then south to Monroe Street; the hotel is on the northeast corner, with valet and nearby garages. The light rail runs down Central with a stop at Van Buren a block north, so a Scottsdale visitor staying near the Camelback corridor stations or in Tempe can arrive by train. Our getting around note has the light rail and rideshare details; for a game night, the train beats the parking.