What it is
The San Marcos is the hotel that started the Arizona resort business. Dr. Alexander J. Chandler built it as the anchor of the town he opened in 1912, hiring the California architect Arthur Burnett Benton for a Mission Revival building on the west side of the square and starting a golf course beside it before the hotel was finished. It opened in November 1913 with about 500 guests and the vice president of the United States in the room, and it has been taking winter visitors ever since, which no other resort in the state can say.
Today it is a roughly 249-room golf resort operating under IHG’s Crowne Plaza flag, the Crowne Plaza Phoenix–Chandler Golf Resort on the booking sites and the San Marcos to everyone who lives here. The original building, the palm courtyard and the 1920s bungalows by Myron Hunt are on the National Register; the course, on the ground where Arizona’s first grass greens were seeded in 1914 and relaid in 1928, is public. In the basement is The Ostrich, a speakeasy that is the best bar in downtown Chandler, and the square’s breweries and restaurants are a block from the lobby door.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale’s resort history starts in the 1920s and 1930s with the Jokake and the Camelback, and its oldest surviving hotel is the 1956 Valley Ho. The Ingleside Inn, the Valley’s first resort of any kind, is gone. The San Marcos is the one place left where you can sleep in the building that proved rich Easterners would come to the desert in January, and it costs less than most Scottsdale rooms. Our where to stay note is honest that it is a historic hotel, not a spa resort; that is the point.
The practical version
Thirty-five minutes from Old Town via the 101 and the 202. Park once; downtown is on foot. Come for a night in the cool season, a round at sunrise, or just a drink in the lobby and the basement on a Chandler evening.
When to go
October through April, which was the whole idea in 1913 and still is. The courtyard is at its best on a winter afternoon, the course is green, and downtown Chandler’s farmers market and Third Thursdays run in the same months. December is worth a night for the Tumbleweed Tree in the park outside the door. Summer rates drop hard, the pool is the reason, and the course is a 6 AM proposition; our golf note explains summer golf in the Valley, which applies here with the bonus of 1928 fairways at a fraction of a Scottsdale rate.
What to do
- The lobby and courtyard. Benton’s 1913 building is the thing; walk the arcades and the palm court before you check in.
- The course. Public, historic, inexpensive by Scottsdale standards; book the first tee time.
- The Ostrich. The speakeasy in the basement, with a hidden door and a proper cocktail list; its Scottsdale sibling, The Goose, is covered in our speakeasies note.
- The square. SanTan Brewing and The Perch are a block away, the restaurants on Arizona Avenue two, and the Chandler Center for the Arts three; our downtown Chandler guide has the walk.
Staying
Ask for the original building and a courtyard-facing room; the later wings are ordinary. The hotel has two restaurants and a bar, a pool and the bungalows, and runs a wedding and convention business that fills the courtyard on Saturday evenings. Weeknights are the quiet stay.
With kids
The pool and the square’s park are the draws, and the Arizona Railway Museum, ten minutes south on Arizona Avenue, is the weekend-afternoon outing from September through May. It is not a children’s resort; there is no waterslide and no kids’ club.
The story
Alexander Chandler held 18,000 irrigated acres south of Mesa by 1911 and understood something his neighbors did not: the money in the desert winter would come from visitors, not cotton. He laid out his town with a square and a hotel site, hired Arthur Burnett Benton, the architect of the Mission Inn in Riverside, and broke ground in 1912. The hotel was named for Fray Marcos de Niza, the Franciscan who crossed Arizona in 1539. Work on a 100-acre golf course began in September 1913, two months before the hotel opened to a party of 500 and Vice President Thomas Marshall. The country club formed in March 1914 with nine holes of sand greens; Bermuda grass went in that July, and Arizona had its first grass course.
The San Marcos made Chandler and then nearly broke him. Steam heat came in 1923, Myron Hunt, Pasadena’s great architect, was hired in 1924 to design the bungalows and additions, a taxi airfield opened in 1928 and a new course was laid out the same year; the Illinois governor Frank Lowden announced his presidential candidacy from the hotel in May 1928. But the 1920 cotton crash had started the slide that cost Dr. Chandler the property to his creditors, and the hotel passed through decades of owners while the town around it grew from a farm square into an Intel city of a quarter million. It was listed on the National Register in 1982, changed hands repeatedly, and was sold again in 2013 to Interwest Capital under the Crowne Plaza flag it still carries.
The Scottsdale connection
Every resort in Scottsdale is, in a sense, the San Marcos’s descendant. The formula it proved in 1913, a grand hotel, a grass golf course, a warm January and a train from the East, is the one the Jokake Inn, the Camelback Inn and the Arizona Biltmore followed in the 1920s and the one the Phoenician and the Princess scaled up in the 1980s. The Ingleside Inn, out by the Arizona Canal, was the first resort in the Valley by a few years, but it was a ranch retreat and it is gone. The San Marcos is the one you can still check into.
Getting there
Loop 101 south from Old Town to its end, Loop 202 east to Arizona Avenue, then south about two miles to the square; San Marcos Place is the block west of the park and the hotel entrance is at its north end. Thirty-five minutes with no traffic, fifty from North Scottsdale. There is a hotel lot and city parking around the square. No rail, so it is a car or a rideshare; the advantage of staying the night is that the car does not move again until morning.