Chandler began in 1912 as one man’s planned town around a park, and the heart of that plan is still on this map. The San Marcos Hotel, the Chandler Commercial Historic District and the Silk Stocking Neighborhood Historic District are printed here, along with Chandler High School, the Suhwaro Hotel and the Chandler Downtown Library. The neighborhoods reach from Colonial Coronita out to Prado del Sol. You’ll find the Eastern Canal printed as well.
Chandler is in Maricopa County, about 22 miles southeast of downtown Phoenix.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief of the landscape comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data, and the streets were drawn from Census Bureau files. Chandler covers 65.55 square miles and had 275,987 people at the 2020 census, which makes it the fourth most populous city in Arizona, after Phoenix, Tucson and Mesa. Chandler High School, the Chandler Commercial Historic District and the Silk Stocking Neighborhood Historic District are on the National Register of Historic Places, and we checked them against National Park Service records.
Dr. Chandler’s ranch
Alexander John Chandler was born in Coaticook, Quebec, in 1859 and trained at the Montreal Veterinary College. He came to the Arizona Territory in 1887 to look into cattle disease for the territory’s livestock board, and he’s remembered as the first veterinary surgeon in the territory. In 1891 he bought 80 acres south of Mesa and took up irrigation engineering, then a new field. He helped build an early canal system in the desert, managed Mesa’s canal under contract and eventually brought together all the canals south of the Salt River. By 1900 his ranch had grown to 18,000 acres.
In 1912 he had planners and architects divide the ranch into a townsite, advertised it across the country and opened the townsite office that May. Trains on the new Arizona Eastern Railroad brought three hundred buyers, who spent $50,000 on lots and had to build on them within a year. The original townsite ran from Galveston Street on the north to Frye Road on the south, and from Hartford Street on the west to Hamilton Street on the east. Chandler pictured an elegant square with a landscaped park in the middle, ringed by businesses with covered walkways out front. By 1913 the Bank of Chandler and the railroad depot stood along two sides of the park. Chandler became a town in 1920, and Dr. Chandler served as its first mayor until one could be elected.
The San Marcos
The San Marcos Hotel opened in 1913, with Vice President Thomas Marshall among the guests, and it was named for Fray Marcos de Niza. Its architect, Arthur Burnett Benton, designed no other building in Arizona. The hotel was built of reinforced concrete in the Mission Revival style, and its National Register nomination calls it one of the earliest reinforced cast-in-place concrete buildings in Arizona. When it opened it was the only electrified building in town, with telephones in every room, and the town page says it had the first grass golf course in the state. In 1924 Dr. Chandler brought in Myron Hunt, the architect of the Rose Bowl, to design additions and sixteen bungalows west of the hotel. The hotel went on the National Register in 1982.
Click to explore a larger preview. The digital watermark does not appear on printed maps.
Names on this map
These names are printed on this map.
Streets and roads: Carver Rd, E Allison Rd, John Wayne Pkwy, Ocotillo Rd, E Airfield Ln, Creek Rd, Maricopa Rd, E Armstrong Way, E Kingbird Pl, Dobson Rd, Processor Pkwy, E Rivulon Blvd.
More street names, A to Z
Brooks Farm Rd, E Blue Spruce Ln, E Cloud Rd, E Eleana Ln, E Flower St, E Germann Rd, Emerald Dr, E Spur Rd, Gilbert Rd, Hunt Hwy, Lewis Rd, Lovebird Ln, Motorplex Loop, Riggs Rd, W Riggs Rd.
Most of Chandler’s economy held up through the Great Depression, but the cotton crash a few years later hit its people much harder. The Bank of Chandler failed, Dr. Chandler lost the hotel to creditors, and about fourteen projects he had planned with his friend Frank Lloyd Wright were never built. He retired to a small cottage on the hotel grounds and died in Chandler in 1950.
Ostriches, cotton and chips
Cotton, grain and alfalfa were the early crops, and cotton paid best, especially during World War I. Farmers also raised ostriches, whose plumes went on women’s hats, and in 1910 Dr. Chandler bought a whole company’s flock and tried to drive the birds like cattle about 27 miles from Avondale to his land. The city still holds an Ostrich Festival every year at Tumbleweed Park to remember those farms. Another tradition began in 1957, when the city lit a Christmas tree made of tumbleweeds.
Williams Air Force Base opened in 1941, but Chandler still had only 3,800 people in 1950. By 1980 it had 30,000, and plants for firms such as Microchip, Motorola and Intel helped drive the growth that followed. Chandler High School’s Old Main went up in 1921 and was dedicated the next year, and Old Main and its small gymnasium were added to the National Register in 2007. The Chandler Downtown Library is printed on the map too. It’s the city’s main library, and the Suhwaro Hotel, on West Buffalo Street, is another National Register building in the Mission and Spanish Revival style.
This Chandler map is a good addition to an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of the area. It’s made for anyone who calls Chandler home, from the old townsite out to Prado del Sol, and KNOWOL created it in 2026 to show the city as it looks today. Zoom in on the preview above to explore the details, then click here to get your copy of the Chandler map.
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