The hotel opened on Thanksgiving Day, 1912. It was designed by Trost & Trost, built by J. E. Lewis and paid for by Zack T. White. Its lobby has a stained glass dome over forty-five feet across, styled after Tiffany glass.
During the 1914 Mexican Revolution, guests watched firefights from the roof terraces. Presidents who stayed here include Taft, Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon and both Bushes. The hotel joined the National Register of Historic Places on January 5, 1979.
A 17-story addition was built on the north side in 1986, and the hotel has 351 rooms. It closed in 2018 for a major renovation and reopened on October 8, 2020, as part of Marriott's Autograph Collection.