Transcription
In the early 1930s, the heads of Hollywood's biggest studios sat around a corner table at the Musso and Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard and agreed on a clause that would accidentally build a city. The clause was simple. Every actor under contract had to remain within 2 hours of Los Angeles during production, available on short notice if called back to set. The studios meant it as a leash. The actors heard it as a dare. 2 hours from Hollywood in any direction, what was the farthest point you could reach? To the north, nothing. To the west, the ocean. To the south, more suburbs. But due east, at the absolute outer limit of a 2-hour drive, past the San Gorgonio Pass, where the wind tears through the gap between two mountain ranges, there was a small desert village of maybe 2,000 people sitting on hot springs at the foot of a 10,000-ft mountain. Its name was Palm Springs, and within a decade it would become the most glamorous small city in America. Not because anyone planned it, not because it had an industry or a port or a railroad hub, but because a contractual technicality turned it into the farthest place a movie star could legally run.
That's the thing about Palm Springs that makes it unlike any city in the country. It was never built on what it produced. It was built on what it offered people who produced things elsewhere, an escape, a fantasy, a place to be someone other than your public self. Every boom in Springs came from outside. Every bust came when the outsiders found somewhere else to go. And the architecture, those flat-roofed, glass-walled, mountain-framed houses that would become the city's most famous legacy, that architecture was almost an afterthought, the set dressing for a party that everyone assumed would last forever. It didn't. But the set dressing survived. And decades later, when everything else about Palm Springs had faded, the buildings themselves became the reason anyone came back at all.
The city's story begins though, not with movie stars, but with a woman who arrived half-dead. In December of 1908, Nellie Coffman stepped off a wagon in Palm Springs with a persistent cough, a husband who was a doctor, and an older son. She had come for her lungs. The village she found was barely a village. Roughly 10 white settlers, about 50 members of the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians, a general store, a small hotel run by a man named Welwood Murray, and not much else. What it had was air. Dry, thin, hot, utterly clean desert air. The kind that opened your chest and made you feel, for the first time in months, like breathing wasn't work.
Nellie didn't just recover, she fell in love with the place. She later described what drew her as the four S's: space, stillness, solitude, and simplicity. She and her husband Harry bought an acre and 3/4 across the road from Murray's hotel for about $2,000 and opened a small health sanatorium, a cluster of wood-framed tent houses for tuberculosis patients. Harry served as the physician. Nellie ran everything else. The operation was modest. The original property stretched only 75 ft along Main Street and 290 ft toward the mountain. But Nellie Coffman had an instinct for hospitality that went beyond what the building looked like. She understood that people recovering from illness needed more than medicine. They needed to feel they were somewhere worth being. Guests came back year after year, and they told friends. By the 1920s, Fanny Stevenson, widow of Robert Louis Stevenson, had stayed and written letters raving about the climate. Artists arrived. Writers arrived. Word spread in the way it did before mass media.
Slowly, through personal testimony, gathering weight with each telling. By the mid-1920s, Nellie had outgrown her tent houses. With a loan from oil tycoon Thomas O'Donnell, she hired architect William Charles Tanner to design a proper resort in the Spanish Mediterranean Revival style with over 110 rooms. The new Desert Inn opened in 1927 and the social, civic, and charitable life of Palm Springs revolved around it. One biographer wrote that the town literally and figuratively grew up in the shadow of what had been Nellie's boarding house. She brought a natural gas line to the town in 1929. She was the first to sign the petition to incorporate Palm Springs as a city in 1937. A year earlier, in November 1936, Nellie had been invited to cut the ribbon at La Plaza, then called Palm Springs Plaza, one of the first unified shopping centers in Southern California with a parking garage on three levels holding 141 cars, the largest in Riverside County. She didn't fund it, but her presence at the ribbon cutting reflected what everyone in town understood. Nothing of consequence happened in Palm Springs without Nellie Coffman's blessing.
When the city officially incorporated in 1938, the estimated population was 2,500. The community called her Mother Coffman and they weren't being sentimental. They were being accurate. She had built the town's identity as surely as if she'd laid every brick herself.
But even as Nellie's Desert Inn flourished, a man named Prescott Thresher Stevens was placing a much larger bet. Stevens had moved to Palm Springs from Colorado in 1912, originally for his own respiratory problems, and had pivoted to real estate. In 1926, he formed a partnership with a developer named Alva Hicks and a group of investors. And together, they spent nearly $1 million, a staggering figure for a desert village, to build the El Mirador Hotel just north of downtown. Designed by the Los Angeles firm of Walker and Eisen in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, it was a 200-room resort on 20 acres with an Olympic-sized swimming pool, tennis courts, stables, and a bell tower that rose 68 ft topped with imported Italian tile. El Mirador means the lookout in Spanish. And from the top of that tower, you could see the entire Coachella Valley spreading east toward the Salton Sea with the San Jacinto Mountains rising behind you like a wall. The hotel opened on New Year's Eve, 1927, with a gala party that cost $15 a head, roughly $260 in today's money. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were there. Lillian Gish, Gloria Swanson, Eddie Cantor. The guest list read like a casting call for the entire silent film era.
And Stevens had made a crucial decision about whom to welcome. While other resorts in the area maintained restrictive guest policies, he insisted on an open door. Jewish movie stars and the studio chiefs who were often Jewish themselves, the Marx Brothers, Al Jolson, Albert Einstein during his California visits, flocked to a hotel that didn't make them feel like guests on probation. The area near the El Mirador became known in trade papers and fan magazines as the movie colony, a name that stuck to the neighborhood for the next century.
Then the stock market crashed. The Great Depression hit the El Mirador hard. By 1931, Stevens was forced to sell to bondholders. The property went at auction for $300,000, less than a third of what he'd spent building it. Stevens died the following year broke, having gambled everything on a hotel in a desert and lost. But the El Mirador didn't die with him. The new owners hired a publicist named Anthony Burke, who had an idea that was either brilliant or desperate. He invited newsreel cameramen from Paramount and Pathe to stay at the hotel for free, rooms and meals included, with one condition: They had to film what they saw. What they saw were movie stars lounging by that enormous pool under that bell tower, and the footage went out to theaters across the country. Palm Springs became, for the first time, a place that people who had never been there could picture in their minds.
And then came the 2-hour rule. The studio contracts funneled actors toward the desert beginning in the 1930s, and by the late 1930s and 1940s, Palm Springs was filling with celebrity homes. But it was two actors, not studio executives, not investors, who created the institution that would define Palm Springs social life for three decades. Charlie Farrell and Ralph Bellamy were tennis obsessed. They both rented homes in Palm Springs, but the only courts belonged to the Desert Inn and El Mirador, reserved for hotel guests. So, in 1934, they bought 200 acres of sand-swept desert land at 30 cents an acre and built two tennis courts and a dressing room. That was it. No pool, no bar, no overnight rooms, just two courts and a place to change your clothes. They called it the Racquet Club, and on opening day, they took in $18. But, the guest list on that first day told a different story. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks showed up. Marlene Dietrich, Ginger Rogers, Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy, Carole Lombard. The Racquet Club wasn't planned as a club at all. Farrell later said, "Places like it don't get planned, they just happen." But, happen it did.
They added a swimming pool in 1935, enlarged the dining room in 1937, built cottages along the banks of a creek that wound through the grounds. Membership started at $50 and climbed to $150, then to $650 with a waiting list. Bellamy sold his share to Farrell after 3 years. He felt the business was cutting into his acting career. And Farrell ran it for the next four decades, greeting every guest with a kiss. Women on the lips, men on the cheek. Everyone. The Racquet Club became famous for what it wasn't as much as for what it was. It wasn't exclusive in the usual sense. Unlike many establishments in Palm Springs at the time, Farrell and Bellamy welcomed Jewish and black patrons. The atmosphere was democratic in the way that only a place run by people who didn't care about social hierarchy could be. Humphrey Bogart drank at the Bamboo Room bar. Bing Crosby dropped by. Judy Garland. The legend, and it may well be true, is that Marilyn Monroe was discovered at the Racquet Club pool, where photographer Bruno Bernard brought a young unknown model in a blue bikini and shot her on the diving board. William Morris agent Johnny Hyde noticed. The rest is film history.
Then the war came, and for a few years the desert served an entirely different master. In 1942, the army purchased the El Mirador Hotel for $425,000, less than half what it had cost to build, and converted it into Torney General Hospital, a 1,600 bed facility primarily for troops wounded in General Patton's North Africa campaign. The luxury guest cottages became wards. The famous Coral Room, where Clark Gable had sipped cocktails and Johnny Weissmuller had lounged between swims, became a nurse's recreation hall. Across the broader Coachella Valley, Patton established the Desert Training Center, one of the largest military training grounds in the world, where troops learned to fight in conditions that matched the Sahara. Palm Springs became a place where damaged bodies came to heal, which, if you think about it, was exactly what it had been when Nellie Kaufman arrived in 1908. The purpose was the same. Only the scale of the injury had changed.
After the war, the El Mirador reopened as a hotel, but it never fully recaptured its pre-war glamour. The energy had shifted. A new generation of stars wanted something different from Spanish tile and formal gardens. They wanted the desert itself, the openness, the light, the feeling that the landscape was part of the room. It was into this world, the post-war moment when Palm Springs was looking for a new identity, that Frank Sinatra walked in the spring of 1947 eating an ice cream cone and wearing a white sailor hat. He had just made his first million dollars. He wanted a weekend home for his family, somewhere close enough to Hollywood but far enough to feel like an escape. He walked into the office of architect E. Stewart Williams and announced what he wanted. A Georgian mansion, brick, columns, something that announced arrival. Williams, a young architect steeped in European modernism, was politely horrified. He drew up two sets of plans, one Georgian, one modern, and presented both. The modern design was a radical thing to put in front of a client in 1947. A 4,500 square-foot house with four bedrooms, seven bathrooms, walls of glass that brought the desert inside, soaring ceilings of tongue and groove Douglas fir, and a swimming pool shaped like a piano. Two tall palm trees already stood on the lot at 1148 East Alejo Road, and Williams designed the house around them. He called it Twin Palms. Sinatra, to his credit, looked at both plans and chose the future.
That single decision, a singer choosing a building style on the advice of an architect he'd just met, changed the trajectory of a city. Sinatra's Twin Palms became his primary residence from 1948 to 1957. It appeared in the background of Joan Crawford's 1950 film The Damned Don't Cry. Architectural photographer Julius Shulman shot it, and those images circulated through design magazines for years. Sinatra lived at Twin Palms during some of the most turbulent years of his life. He shared it with his first wife, Nancy Barbato, and their children. But, it was also the stage for his volcanic marriage to Ava Gardner. Gardner later wrote in her autobiography that Twin Palms was the site of probably the most spectacular fight of their young married life, and she knew that was saying something. One of the original bathroom sinks still has a crack in the basin where Sinatra hurled a champagne bottle at her. The house held both his best and worst selves. It was where he threw lavish parties for Hollywood royalty, and where he retreated to the master suite, which occupied its own wing, deliberately set apart, seeking the privacy that fame had made impossible everywhere else.
More importantly, Sinatra's presence in Palm Springs drew the Rat Pack, and the Rat Pack drew everyone else. Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter Lawford. If Nelly Kaufman had given Palm Springs its first identity as a health resort, and the El Mirador had made it a destination for the wealthy, Sinatra made it the place where fame went to relax. And by choosing a modern house instead of a Georgian one, he gave permission to every architect and developer who followed to build in the desert as if the desert mattered. Not to paste borrowed Eastern styles onto a landscape that wanted no part of them.
What followed was one of the most concentrated bursts of modernist architecture in American history. Richard Neutra designed the Kaufmann Desert House in 1946, the same Kaufmann family that had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. Albert Frey, a Swiss-born architect who had worked with Le Corbusier in Paris, arrived and eventually built his own home into the hillside, an 800 square foot structure that incorporated a massive boulder as part of the living room. Donald Wexler experimented with steel-framed houses. William Krisel designed entire neighborhoods of flat-roofed, butterfly-roofed, post-and-beam homes that looked like nothing else in America. E. Stewart Williams, the man who had talked Sinatra out of Georgian columns, designed the Palm Springs City Hall between 1952 and 1957, and later the Aerial Tramway's mountain station, a 35,000 square-foot structure perched at 8,500 ft. Palm Springs became, without anyone declaring it so, the largest concentration of mid-century modern architecture in the world.
But it took a father-and-son construction company to make modernism available to ordinary buyers. George Alexander and his son Robert relocated from Los Angeles to Palm Springs in the mid-1950s. Their first major development, Twin Palms Estates, went up between 1957 and 1958. 229 homes designed by William Krisel with butterfly roofs and clerestory windows and open floor plans starting at around $15,000. The price point was revolutionary. You didn't have to be Frank Sinatra to live in a modern house in the desert. The Alexanders built their homes with post-tensioned concrete slabs, which let them pour a foundation in a single day, and the savings from that efficiency went straight into design features that would have been unaffordable otherwise. They expanded relentlessly. Racquet Club Road Estates, Vista Las Palmas, more than 300 homes in neighborhoods that had previously been the exclusive domain of Hollywood money. Over the next decade, the Alexander Construction Company would build more than 2,200 homes across the Coachella Valley, effectively doubling the size of Palm Springs. The houses sold for $19,500 at the low end, which was middle-class money for a second home or a starter residence in the desert.
Robert Alexander built his own family's home in the Vista Las Palmas neighborhood in the early 1960s, a futuristic composition of hexagons and circles designed by Chrisso that Look magazine featured in a five-page spread in September 1962, calling it the house of tomorrow. The photos showed Helene Alexander crossing an interior brook with Mrs. Zeppo Marx and Robert posing with his Jaguar. The Alexanders had become celebrities of a sort themselves, the couple at the center of a Palm Springs social world that blended real estate ambition with Hollywood glamour. They owned a controlling interest in the Racquet Club. They had bought the Desert Inn property from actress Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst's former mistress, and were planning a modern hotel, a convention center, commercial development, even the city's first skyscraper.
On the afternoon of November 14th, 1965, George Alexander, his wife Mildred, Robert, and Robert's wife Helene boarded a chartered Learjet at Palm Springs Municipal Airport bound for Burbank. The plane had been delivered to the charter company only a month earlier and had logged just 43 flight hours. Weather was deteriorating, rain, low visibility. The jet took off at 5:21 p.m. and crashed into the Indio Hills 13 mi east of the airport, striking terrain at a 55° nose-down angle. All eight people aboard died. Only Robert and Helene's 11-year-old daughter Jill, left behind that afternoon, survived the family. The Alexander Construction Company ceased operations the day of the crash. Every plan the family had for Palm Springs, the hotel, the skyscraper, the convention center, died with them. The Desert Inn property sat in limbo until Home Savings and Loan took it over and built a shopping mall where Nelly Kaufman's resort had stood for six decades. The House of Tomorrow eventually passed through other hands and gained a second life as the home where Elvis and Priscilla Presley honeymooned in 1967. A fact that would have amused the Alexanders who had designed it for cocktail parties, not rock and roll.
There is a darker chapter in Palm Springs that ran parallel to the glamour and it sits at the center of the city's geography like an open wound. The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians had lived in the Coachella Valley for thousands of years. When the federal government established their reservation in 1876, it used a checkerboard pattern, alternating 1 square-mile sections with the odd-numbered sections going to the Southern Pacific Railroad as an incentive to lay track through the desert. This meant that the reservation was not a contiguous block of land but a patchwork with tribal and non-tribal sections alternating like squares on a chessboard. Palm Springs literally grew up on top of and between Agua Caliente land. Section 14 was one of those tribal squares sitting just east of downtown. Because racist housing policies restricted where people of color could live in Palm Springs, Section 14 became home to the city's black and Latino workers, the cooks, maids, chauffeurs, carpenters, and gardeners who built and maintained the resorts and celebrity homes. At its peak, the community had over a thousand structures and several thousand residents, along with churches, restaurants, and small businesses. The families leased their land from Agua Caliente Alaties.
In 1959, Congress passed the Agua Caliente Equalization Act, which opened the door for tribal land to be leased for 99-year terms, making it commercially viable for the first time. City officials saw the potential. Section 14 sat on some of the most valuable real estate in the desert, steps from downtown. Under the guise of code enforcement and slum clearance, Palm Springs began evicting residents. Between 1962 and 1969, the city issued at least 48 demolition burn permits. The fire department burned and bulldozed at least 235 homes. Families sometimes came home from work or school to find their belongings on the street and their houses in flames. They were not compensated. In 1968, California's Deputy Attorney General investigated and described what had happened as a city-engineered holocaust. The community scattered. Former resident Alfonso Mediano later recalled that after the destruction, the only time former neighbors saw each other was at a funeral or a wedding. The economic strength, the voting strength, the social fabric of the city's black and Latino community was destroyed in the space of a few years, so that the land beneath their homes could be developed for tourism. As late as 2024, the Palm Springs City Council approved $5.9 million in payments to verified survivors. The Section 14 Survivors Group has argued that figure is a fraction of what was lost.
The Palm Springs that emerged from the 1960s looked, on the surface like a city at its zenith. The population had grown from 3,434 in 1940 to over 20,000 by the mid-1960s. The aerial tramway opened in September 1963, a feat of engineering that had taken nearly 30 years from conception to completion. Electrical engineer Francis Crocker had first dreamed of it in 1935 gazing up at the snow-capped peak of Mount San Jacinto while sweating through a desert afternoon. The project required 8.15 million dollars in private bonds, 23,000 helicopter missions to haul men and materials up the sheer cliffs of Chino Canyon, and the labor of 30 to 40 workers who lived on the mountainside for 26 months. Governor Pat Brown cut the ribbon on a tram that carried passengers from 2,643 feet to 8,516 feet in 10 minutes. From the floor of a desert where it might be 115 degrees to a pine forest where it was snowing. Bob Hope had an estate in the hills. Dinah Shore hosted a golf tournament. Liberace owned a house on Cahuilla Road. The population kept climbing past 25,000, past 30,000. The growth rate in the 1960s averaged over 4% a year.
But the forces that had built Palm Springs were already shifting beneath it. The studio system was dying. Television had broken the monopoly of the big studios, and with it went the rigid contract structures that had kept actors tethered to Los Angeles. The two-hour rule, the clause that had funneled a generation of celebrities into the desert, ceased to exist. Stars could go anywhere. And increasingly they went to Aspen, to Hawaii, to Europe, places that offered adventure, not just sunshine and seclusion. The privacy that Palm Springs had provided was less necessary in an era when celebrity culture was becoming more openly managed. The neighboring cities of Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage, and Indian Wells began to siphon off the upscale commerce that had once centered on Palm Canyon Drive. New shopping centers, new restaurants, new country clubs opened to the east, and the fashionable set followed. By the 1970s, Palm Canyon Drive, once the most glamorous commercial strip in the desert, was filling with souvenir shops and t-shirt stores catering to less discriminating tourists. The art galleries left, the upscale restaurants closed or relocated. Vacancy signs appeared in storefronts that had once competed for the chance to sell designer clothes to studio wives.
Then, spring break arrived. Beginning in the early 1980s, after Fort Lauderdale cracked down on its own student invasion, Palm Springs became the West Coast answer. Every March and April, tens of thousands of college students descended from USC, UCLA, Arizona State, and Midwestern schools that saw the desert as an exotic change from frozen campuses. Some years, estimates topped 100,000 students, quadrupling the local population. They cruised Palm Canyon Drive until traffic froze. Hotels that once advertised serenity pivoted to pool DJs and beer specials. A stretch of East Palm Canyon motels earned the nickname Sorority Row. On Saturday, March 29th, 1986, the tension broke. Palm Canyon Drive was packed with students when a confrontation between spring breakers and police escalated into a full riot. When officers deployed smoke bombs, one rioter shouted to the crowd that it was only smoke and to stand their ground. A sergeant, acting on his own, deployed tear gas. The air cleared, and so did the crowd. But, the damage was done. To property, to the city's image, and to whatever remained of Palm Springs' self-image as an elegant resort. Mayor Frank Bogert vowed it would never happen again, and quadrupled the police presence the following year. But, the spring break problem lingered until 1988, when a new mayor took office and declared war on it.
That mayor was Sonny Bono. His path to politics was pure Palm Springs. He had opened a restaurant called Bono's near the Riviera Hotel, and when the city's sign ordinances prevented him from putting up a sign large enough to attract customers, he decided the most efficient way to fix the problem was to run for mayor and change the rules himself. His candidacy was initially treated as a joke. The guy from Sonny and Cher running a city? But, Bono won, and he governed with a showman's instinct for what the audience wanted. He cracked down on spring break. He pushed to streamline business regulations. He established the Palm Springs International Film Festival, which still runs annually. His tenure was divisive. A recall petition gathered 2,000 signatures in 1989, charging him with breaking promises and being inaccessible. But, the festival alone may have been worth his entire administration. He went on to win a seat in Congress in 1994, and died in a skiing accident in 1998.
What saved Palm Springs was not a single mayor or a single policy. It was a community that arrived quietly, bought cheaply, and restored what everyone else had abandoned. Beginning in the late 1980s and accelerating through the 1990s and 2000s, Palm Springs' LGBTQ community, drawn by the city's long-standing reputation for tolerance, its affordable real estate, and its status as a place where unconventional lives had always been quietly accepted, began buying and renovating the mid-century modern homes that the broader market had forgotten. Alexander homes that had sold for $19,500 in 1957 were available for fractions of their future value. Gay and lesbian buyers formed neighborhood associations, organized preservation efforts, and breathed new life into streets that had been neglected for decades. One writer noted that the city's gayness caused a near tectonic shift in the real estate market. The change wasn't just residential. LGBTQ entrepreneurs opened bars, hotels, and restaurants, particularly along Arenas Road, which became the center of the city's gay nightlife by the early 2000s. The Warm Sands neighborhood, once overlooked, became a corridor of gay men's resorts. By the 2000s, Palm Springs would have one of the highest percentages of LGBTQ residents of any city in the country. And in 2003, it elected Ron Oden as the first openly gay black mayor of any city in California.
Then culture caught up. The television show Mad Men, which debuted in 2007, awakened a national appetite for mid-century modern aesthetics, and suddenly Palm Springs' greatest asset wasn't its climate or its celebrity history. It was its architecture. The very buildings that had been considered ordinary tract housing in the 1960s were now pilgrimage sites. Modernism Week, which grew from a small show and sale event into an 11-day February festival, began drawing over 100,000 attendees a year with tours of Alexander homes and Frey houses and Neutra residences selling out months in advance. Architectural tourism became a real industry. The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival held annually in nearby Indio since 1999 brought a younger generation to the desert. Many of whom discovered Palm Springs along the way. The Alexander homes that once sold for $19,500 now changed hands for $550,000 to $700,000 and up.
The Desert Inn is gone. Nellie Coffman died in 1950 at 82. Her sons sold the property 5 years later. By September 1967, the entire Inn had been demolished, replaced first by an aborted development plan, and then by a shopping mall that eventually became the complex known as La Plaza. A bronze plaque at the downtown park marks where it stood. The Racquet Club survived Charlie Farrell. He sold it in 1978 to Larry Lawrence, a sale that many blamed for the club's gradual decline. In 2014, a devastating fire damaged the property. A Frey designed bungalow and portions of the original clubhouse remain, designated a class two historic site by the city.
But the El Mirador Tower still stands. The army purchased the hotel in July 1942 for $425,000 and converted it into Torney General Hospital, a 1,600 bed facility for General Patton's wounded troops returning from North Africa. The luxury cottages became hospital rooms. The famous Coral Room became a nurses lounge. After the war, the property never fully returned to its former life. By the 1970s, it had become Desert Hospital. The hotel buildings were gradually demolished to make way for medical facilities. Today, the site is Desert Regional Medical Center, and the tower, that 68-foot bell tower with its multi-colored tile roof and its imported Italian bell, rises incongruously from the grounds of a modern hospital campus. It is one of the tallest structures in Palm Springs. It was designed to watch over a playground for movie stars. Now, it watches over an emergency room.
The population of Palm Springs today sits around 48,000, a number it has hovered near for decades, never quite booming, never quite declining. The median age is in the upper 50s. The median home value is over $650,000. Roughly a third of residents are 65 or older. The city has a vibrancy that is real but seasonal, swelling in winter when the snowbirds arrive and the festival calendar fills, contracting in summer when temperatures pass 110° and the streets go quiet. It is simultaneously a museum and a living city, a place where the past is the product and the present is a kind of curated echo.
Every February, during Modernism Week, tourists line up to walk through homes that were built as affordable tract housing for middle-class families and are now treated with the reverence usually reserved for cathedrals. They photograph the butterfly roofs and the clerestory windows and the piano-shaped pool at 1148 East Alejo Road. They take bus tours past the homes where Dean Martin and Liberace and Kirk Douglas lived, and they peer through the gates at the Kaufmann Desert House, which last listed for approximately $15 million. They are visiting a city that exists in its current form because of a paradox. The things that were built to be temporary, weekend homes, vacation retreats, tract houses for seasonal residents, turned out to be the only things that lasted.
The hot springs still flow beneath the city. The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, who were here 5,000 years before Nellie Kaufman arrived with her cough, now steward over 34,000 acres of ancestral land, including the checkerboard sections that underlie much of Palm Springs, and have opened a cultural museum on North Indian Canyon Drive. The San Jacinto Mountains still keep the clouds at bay, still throw their shadow across the valley floor every afternoon. The tram still runs, 10 minutes from desert floor to alpine forest, 350 days a year. And the tower of the El Mirador, last remnant of a million-dollar hotel that a man from Colorado built because he believed a village of 2,000 people in the middle of a desert could become something extraordinary, still stands at the north end of Palm Canyon Drive. No one goes up to the observation deck anymore. The view hasn't changed. You can still see the entire valley, the mountains, the desert stretching east. But what you're looking at is different. The hotels are medical offices. The club where Marilyn Monroe stood on a diving board is a historic site behind a fence. The shopping mall where Nellie Kaufman served lunch to Albert Einstein is being reimagined again. The homes that a family named Alexander built for $19,500, all four members of that family dead in a a crash before the youngest turned 40, sell now for more than most Americans will earn in a decade. The tower stands. The city it was built to overlook has become something its builder could never have imagined, and then become something else, and then something else again. It has been a sanatorium and a playground and a military hospital and a retirement community and a riot zone and a ghost of itself and a museum of its own architecture. It has been at various moments the most fashionable and the most forgotten small city in the American West. The bell in the tower, the one P.T. Stevens imported from Italy in 1927, has been silent for a long time. The tower keeps watching anyway.