Palm Springs, California

• 1. Introduction

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  Palm Springs, California, reached 124 degrees Fahrenheit on the 5th of July 2024, the hottest temperature ever recorded in the city. Even so, the desert resort is busiest when the weather cools. Between November and March its population triples, as retirees and winter visitors arrive. Most of those snowbirds are Canadian. The 2020 census counted 44,575 permanent residents. The city sits in the Colorado Desert, inside the Coachella Valley. It covers about 94 square miles, more land than any other city in Riverside County. This documentary asks who lived here first and what they called the place. It asks how a desert spring became a retreat for film stars and a showcase for modern architecture. And it asks whose homes were destroyed to make room for the town that visitors see today.

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• 2. The Cahuilla Homeland

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  Some 2,000 years ago, the Cahuilla people became the first humans to settle the land where Palm Springs now stands. For hundreds of years before European contact, they lived in isolation from other cultures. They spoke Ivilyuat, a Uto-Aztecan language. Their own name for the place was Se-Khi, meaning boiling water, a name that points to the hot springs.

  The Cahuilla moved with the seasons. They occupied Palm Canyon in winter and often shifted to the cooler Chino Canyon in summer. Water and shade supported several permanent settlements in the canyons. Men hunted rabbit, mountain goat, and quail, and trapped fish in nearby lakes and rivers. Women gathered berries, acorns, and seeds, and made tortillas from mesquite seeds. In winter, the natural hot springs drew people to the downtown site later occupied by the Spa Resort Casino.

  Their work is still visible. Petroglyphs mark the rock in Tahquitz, Chino, and Indian Canyons, alongside irrigation ditches, dams, and house pits. Andreas Canyon holds pictographs and mortar holes, which were used to grind acorns into meal. Several prominent and powerful Cahuilla leaders came from the area, among them Cahuilla Lion, also known as Chief Juan Antonio. Streets named Andreas, Arenas, Amado, Belardo, Lugo, Patencio, Saturnino, and Chino all carry common Cahuilla surnames.

  The United States government established the Agua Caliente Reservation in 1876. Agua Caliente means hot water. Surveyors divided the land into alternating sections of 640 acres, laid across the desert like a checkerboard. The sections that were not reservation land went to the Southern Pacific Railroad, as an incentive to bring rail lines through the desert. Today the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians is made up of several smaller bands living in the Coachella Valley and San Gorgonio Pass. About 6,700 acres of its land lie inside the city limits, which makes the band the largest landowner in Palm Springs. The tribal council is based in the city as well. Because that land is on long lease beside a high-end community, the tribe is one of the wealthiest in California. Tribal enrollment stood at only 410 people in 2010.

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• 3. Names and Newcomers

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  In December 1823, the Mexican diarist José María Estudillo and Brevet Captain José Romero were sent to find a route from Sonora to Alta California. On that expedition they became the first to record the existence of Agua Caliente at Palm Springs. Mexico had been independent of Spain since 1821. After the Mexican-American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made the region part of the United States in 1848.

  The English name has more than one possible source. Early Spanish explorers may have called the area La Palma de la Mano de Dios, meaning the Palm of God's hand. The earliest known use of Palm Springs appears on maps made in 1853 by United States Topographical Engineers. According to William Bright, a palm in a Californian place name usually means the native California fan palm, Washingtonia filifera, which is abundant here. Other early names included Palmetto Spring and Big Palm Springs.

  The first European resident was Jack Summers, who ran a stagecoach station on the Bradshaw Trail in 1862. Fourteen years later, in 1876, the Southern Pacific railroad was laid 6 miles to the north and left his station isolated. In 1880, a local man named Pedro Chino sold parcels near the springs to William Van Slyke and Mathew Bryne, in a series of questionable transactions. The two buyers brought in W. R. Porter to market the land through the Palm City Land and Water Company.

  By 1885, a San Francisco attorney named John Guthrie McCallum, later called Judge McCallum, had begun buying property. The name Palm Springs was already widely accepted. McCallum had brought his ill son to the dry climate for his health. With partners, he incorporated the Palm Valley Land and Water Company. He hired the irrigation advocate Dr. Oliver Wozencroft and the engineer J. P. Lippincott to build a canal from the Whitewater River to fruit orchards on his land. He also asked Dr. Welwood Murray to open a hotel across the street from his home, and Murray did so in 1886. Murray later became a famous horticulturalist.

  Nature quickly tested the settlers. Record rainfall flooded the crops and irrigation systems in 1893. An 11-year drought from 1894-1905 then did more damage. The McCallum Adobe, built in 1884, survives today as the oldest remaining building in the city.

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• 4. Movie Star Playground

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  About 20,000 visitors came to the area in 1922, and most were chasing the weather. Health tourists with conditions that needed dry heat had started arriving in the 1900s. In 1906, the naturalist George Wharton James praised the place in his two-volume The Wonders of the Colorado Desert, citing its "great charms and attractiveness". He noted that Mount San Jacinto shades the area to the west, and that in winter the mountains block cold winds from the San Gorgonio Pass. Early illustrious visitors included John Muir and his daughters, Vice President Charles Fairbanks, and Fanny Stevenson, widow of Robert Louis Stevenson.

  The numbers behind the appeal are striking. Palm Springs gets over 300 days of sunshine and only 4.93 inches of rain in a typical year. The wettest rain year on record ran from July 1926 to June 1927 and brought 17.68 inches, with 10.22 inches falling in three days in mid-February. The coldest temperature ever recorded was 19 degrees Fahrenheit on the 22nd of January 1937. On the 1st of October 2024 the city reached 117 degrees, tying the United States record for October, which Mecca first set on the 5th of October 1917.

  Hotels turned the attraction into an industry. Nellie Coffman and her physician husband Harry opened The Desert Inn as a hotel and sanitarium in 1909, and she remained a driving force in local tourism until her death in 1950. In 1920, J. Smeaton Chase promoted the area in Our Araby: Palm Springs and the Garden of the Sun. In 1924, Pearl McCallum, the judge's daughter, and her husband Austin G. McManus built the Oasis Hotel, designed by Lloyd Wright with a 40-foot tower. The El Mirador opened in 1927 with a 68-foot Renaissance-style tower and drew the biggest movie stars. Silent film star Fritzi Ridgeway built the 100-room Hotel del Tahquitz in 1929.

  By the 1930s, Hollywood stars were building homes in neighborhoods such as the Movie Colony, Tahquitz River Estates, and Las Palmas. Actors Charles Farrell and Ralph Bellamy opened the Racquet Club in 1934, and Pearl McCallum opened the Tennis Club in 1937. Al Wertheimer opened The Dunes nightclub outside the city in 1934, with gambling on offer, and the Chi Chi nightclub followed in 1936.

  Shopping followed the money. Bullock's, a large Los Angeles department store, opened a Spanish Colonial-style resort store inside the Desert Inn complex in 1930. In 1936, La Plaza became the first self-contained shopping center in Southern California. Its three-level garage held 141 cars and was the largest in Riverside County. In 1969, Joseph Magnin Co. opened a 26,000-square-foot store in the Desert Fashion Plaza mall, giving downtown seven department stores.

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• 5. War Years

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  In November 1941, the airfield near Palm Springs became a staging area for the Air Corps Ferrying Command's 21st Ferrying Group. A new field, named Palm Springs Army Airfield, was finished in early 1942. Personnel of the Air Transport Command's 560th Army Air Forces Base Unit lived at the La Paz Guest Ranch. The 72nd and 73rd Ferrying Squadrons trained at the airfield, and the IV Fighter Command's 459th Base Headquarters and Air Base Squadron handled later training.

  The glamorous El Mirador Hotel was fully booked eight months before Pearl Harbor and was adding new facilities. After the United States entered the war, the government bought it from its owner, Warren Phinney, for $750,000. The army converted it into the Torney General Hospital. Italian prisoners of war worked there as kitchen help and orderlies in 1944 and 1945. Through the war, the hospital had 1,500 staff and treated some 19,000 patients.

  The military presence reached far beyond town. General Patton's Desert Training Center covered the entire region. Its headquarters were at Camp Young on Chiriaco Summit, and the 66th Ordnance kept an equipment depot in what is now Palm Desert.

  The airfield itself left a mark on the map. Its western portion later became the Sunmor Estates neighborhood. There, actor and former mayor Frank Bogert bought a house for $16,000 and lived in it for more than 50 years.

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• 6. Desert Modern

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  In 1946, the architect Richard Neutra designed the Kaufmann Desert House. This mostly glass home used the latest building materials, along with natural light and floating planes. Other inventive architects used the city to experiment. They designed steel houses with prefabricated panels and folding roofs, a glass-and-steel house in a boulder-strewn landscape, and a carousel house that turned to avoid the sun's glare.

  The historian Culver argued in 2010 that Palm Springs architecture became the model for mass-produced suburban housing, especially in the Southwest. This Desert Modern style offered open floor plans, wall-to-wall carpeting, air-conditioning, swimming pools, and very large windows. Culver wrote: "While environmentalists might condemn desert modern, the masses would not." Few families could afford a Neutra masterpiece, but many could adopt parts of the style.

  Builders made the style affordable. Between 1947 and 1965, the Alexander Construction Company built some 2,200 houses in Palm Springs, effectively doubling its housing capacity. In Racquet Club Estates, the city's first middle-income neighborhood, it built over five hundred mid-century homes. Donald Wexler's steel houses there have Class One historic designation. The architect William Krisel designed Twin Palms in 1957-58, where 1,600-square-foot post-and-beam homes were given butterfly rooflines and two palm trees per lot. Roy Fey built 110 homes in El Rancho Vista Estates, designed by Wexler and Richard Harrison.

  In November 1960, the French photographer Robert Doisneau spent ten days in the desert on assignment for Fortune about golf course construction. He submitted around 300 slides of wealthy retirees and Hollywood stars at leisure. At the time, Palm Springs had just 19 golf courses, a number that grew to 125 by 2010.

  Today an energetic preservation movement protects many of these buildings. Modernism Week, an 11-day festival each February, offers films, lectures, and tours of mid-century modern architecture. A four-day preview follows in mid-October.

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• 7. Section 14

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  Section 14 is a square mile owned by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, within easy walking distance of downtown. Its residents were mostly Black people and other people of color, who leased land for short terms from individual Indigenous owners. A 10-year limit on those leases discouraged commercial development. That changed when the Indian Leasing Act was amended in 1959 to allow long-term leases.

  Mayor Frank Bogert and other city officials then urged the conservators who managed the tribe's leases to end the short-term arrangements. They wanted long-term leases to largely white property owners for redevelopment. City funds were used to clear the land, and some homes, which had rented for $20 to $40 a month, were burned. In 1968, Loren Miller, Jr., an assistant California Attorney General, called the displacement a "city-engineered holocaust". He said it deprived dozens of Black and Latino people of generational wealth.

  The tribe took part in the clearing. Tribal allottees and conservators signed burn permits, and Tribal Chair Edmund Siva wrote to the Palm Springs City Council thanking it for its "clean-up campaign". Afterward, the tribe built the Spa Hotel and Casino downtown, and the city built the Palm Springs Convention Center. The tribe also leased land to developers for hotels and condos. Culver writes that during this period the city government, stimulated by real estate developers, systematically removed and excluded poor people and Native Americans.

  Bogert was the city's longest-tenured mayor, serving in 1958-66 and again in 1982-88. He is credited with guiding the city's growth from a small resort town into a larger community. A statue of him on horseback was placed in front of City Hall in 1990. The Palm Springs Human Relations Commission cited Section 14, Bogert's conflict of interest while serving as conservator for tribal land the city was demolishing, and racist comments about the "poor Blacks" who lived there. It argued for the statue's removal.

  The City Council ordered the statue removed in 2021 and formally apologized to the Section 14 residents. Bogert's supporters and family members objected in court, but the courts rejected their objections. The statue was relocated on the 13th of July 2022. The city approved a $5.91 million settlement for verified Section 14 residents and their heirs, and committed to other programs meant to benefit the Black community.

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• 8. Crowds and Communities

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  As the 1970s drew to a close, more retirees moved to the Coachella Valley, and Palm Springs began shifting from a virtual ghost town in summer to a year-round community. Businesses and hotels that once closed in July and August stayed open, and more families with children arrived. Money moved through the city in less respectable ways too. After the recession of 1973-75, numerous Chicago mobsters invested $50 million in houses, land, and businesses in the area.

  Spring break brought a different kind of crowd. The city had been a spring break resort since the early 1950s, and the 1963 movie Palm Springs Weekend glamorized it. In 1969, an estimated 15,000 people gathered for a concert at the Palm Springs Angel Stadium, and 300 were arrested. In the 1980s, 10,000 or more college students came each year. In 1986, police in riot gear had to put down a rowdy crowd. In 1990, after resident complaints, Mayor Sonny Bono and the city council closed Palm Canyon Drive to spring breakers, and downtown businesses lost money. Bono, a former entertainer, served as mayor from 1988 to 1992 and was later elected to the U.S. Congress.

  Today tourism drives the economy. The city drew 1.6 million visitors in 2011 and has over 130 hotels and resorts. Canadians matter greatly. A 2017 study found that 303,600 of them visited the valley that year and spent more than US$236 million. A 2021 study found that they own 7% of the valley's second homes. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, residents of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle also moved in, seeking less dense places to work remotely.

  Palm Springs has one of the highest concentrations of same-sex couples in the United States. In 2010-10.1% of its households were same-sex married couples or partnerships, against a national average of 1%. Former mayor Ron Oden estimated that about a third of the city is gay. The city hosts the Club Skirts Dinah Shore Weekend each March and a Pride celebration each November. In 2017, voters elected the first entirely LGBTQ city council in U.S. history, with one bisexual woman, three gay men, and one trans woman. Christy Holstege became mayor in 2020, the city's first female mayor and the first openly bisexual mayor in the United States. In 2021, Lisa Middleton became mayor, the first openly transgender mayor in California history.

  Above it all, the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway lifts the world's largest rotating cable cars, built by Von Roll Tramways, up from Chino Canyon. They climb to a station at 8,516 feet, where the San Jacinto Wilderness begins.

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