The location of the Santa Rita Hotel was on the southeast corner of the insertion of Broadway Boulevard and Scott Avenue in Tucson Arizona.

Tousis and people of means will in the future be able to find accommodation and service of the highest order right here in our beautiful city.

In August 1903 the Tucson city Council passed a resolution to prohibit gambling near the hotel to assure the property would not be “blighted by gambling.” [9] and in December 1903 issued a license to the Santa Rita to have a bar and install a roulette wheel.

[10] In December 1903 and with construction almost finished the Mayor and Council approved an electric streetcar system with the first line to be operated running from the Santa Rita Hotel to the Street Railway Company Park a mile beyond the University of Arizona.

[12] All of the ornamental architectural plaster relief work was designed and fabricated by artist and Henry Trost associate Gustav Zierold.

The local paper reported that “Fashionably dressed women, accompanied by their husbands or friends availed themselves of the excellent opportunity of inspecting this imposing edifice and thronged the lobby, the rotunda and the corridors.” Levie Manning was presented with a chest of silver in token of the appreciation of his efforts.

In 1917, Iaeger, hired Los Angeles based architectural firm William and Alexander Curlett, to design a 160-room wing for the hotel.

The 1917 addition was demolished in 2009 by UniSource Energy Services and their subsidiary Tucson Electric Power, despite the pleas of preservationists.

[17] According to historian David Leighton, in 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. stayed at the Santa Rita Hotel on his visit to Tucson that year.

King's visit, the Santa Rita Hotel barred Larry Doby and his wife from staying there with the rest of the Cleveland Indians during spring training.