Dr. Alexander John Chandler was no ordinary physician. The Canadian-born veterinarian had arrived in Arizona Territory in 1887, eventually becoming the first veterinary surgeon in the territory. But his true passion lay in land and water. He accumulated 18,000 acres of ranch land in the Salt River Valley and watched as irrigation transformed the desert into agricultural promise. In 1912, he platted a new townsite on his holdings and named it, with characteristic modesty, after himself. The hotel he commissioned would bear a different name: San Marcos, honoring Fray Marcos de Niza, the Franciscan friar who became the first European to enter the Salt River Valley in 1512. Chandler understood that for his town to thrive, it needed a destination that would draw wealthy winter visitors escaping colder climates.

To design his resort, Chandler hired Arthur Burnett Benton, a Los Angeles architect known for his work in Riverside and Santa Barbara. The San Marcos would be Benton's only project in Arizona, and he crafted something remarkable. The two-story reinforced concrete structure rose within a precise 17-foot by 17-foot structural grid, its Z-shaped footprint measuring 187 by 221 feet. Flat roofs with parapet embattlements gave the building a fortress-like presence, while arcades with segmental arches created shaded walkways perfect for the desert climate. Towers topped with red tile roofs punctuated the composition. Inside, the monolithic cast-in-place floor and ceiling slabs featured elongated arched coving painted with Indian and Spanish American motifs. Benton and Chandler conceived the 35-room structure as merely the first phase of a 200-room complex, with the unusual parapet embattlements designed to serve as the foundation for additional floors that never came.

The San Marcos quickly earned its reputation as a winter getaway for celebrities, dignitaries, and luminaries. In 1924, Chandler brought in another Los Angeles architect, Myron Hunt, famous for designing the Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena. Hunt designed sixteen bungalows west of the main building, eventually numbering thirty scattered cottage accommodations that offered privacy to famous guests. The open spaces formed by the building's Z-shaped mass became a patio and garden, the patio framed by a pergola of Tuscan columns and heavy timber trellis work. For decades, the resort offered guests what Chandler had promised: the most modern in efficient accommodations, with telephones in every room and all the amenities that made desert living comfortable before air conditioning transformed the Southwest.

The Great Depression forced Chandler to sell the hotel in the 1930s, though he remained president of the San Marcos Hotel Corporation. The property changed hands multiple times over the following decades, eventually becoming a Crowne Plaza property under InterContinental Hotels Group, later owned by Interwest Capital after 2013. In January 1982, a team of historians submitted the hotel to the Arizona State Historic Preservation Office, citing its national significance for architecture and community planning. Today, the San Marcos still anchors the corner where it has stood for over a century, its Mission Revival arches and red-tiled towers a reminder of when one doctor's ambition and three miles of copper wire transformed a desert townsite into a destination.