Palm Springs' day in the sun lasted decades during its mid-20th-century reign as the quintessential desert resort. From its swanky heyday, however, the place gradually went from being it-girl to has-been: By the 1980s, Palm Springs--not unlike a few starlets who retired out this way--was famous more for being famous than anything else.
For some of us, that was just fine. Two hours from Los Angeles, Palm Springs and the neighboring Coachella Valley resort cities recalled a golden era of American desert resorts. Here you could still find old, Spanish-style Hollywood haunts set up against bare rocky mountains that dropped to the edge of the city's older neighborhoods. In minutes, you could walk from the villagey downtown onto trails that switchbacked up the San Jacinto Mountains to palm oases and towering waterfalls hidden in canyons.
And then there were all those anachronistic, not–politically correct, good-life indulgences that never went out of style in this part of California: golf (the valley's 100th course just opened), air-conditioning, the Rat Pack, V-8 engines, red meat, swimming pools (10,000 by some estimates), martinis, topiaries, and lots of not-so-quaint midcentury modern architecture that most of us still thought of as pretty cool, prevailing tastes notwithstanding. Cruising along Frank Sinatra Drive or Dinah Shore Drive, blasting period-piece tunes like "Music to Watch Girls By" (broadcast without irony for the benefit of the large retiree community) felt like a true getaway--more so than, say, a stay at another Victorian bed-and-breakfast.
With 1990s America recycling not just its newspapers but its culture as well, all of these guilty pleasures have come back into fashion. So has Palm Springs, riding a revival of appreciation for its kitsch appeal, as well as a more serious and sincere understanding of its unique architectural style and its relationship to the desert landscape.
"A lot of us go on too much about the modern architecture," says interior designer Brad Dunning of Palm Springs. "But the location is really the thing. If you love the sun and solitude and mountains and spirituality and architecture, you just can't help but become a vocal fan of this place."
A starlet from the start
Palm Springs was plenty hip and happening long before those terms even existed. Consider this roster of early visitors: Albert Einstein, Sir Winston Churchill, Al Capone, Greta Garbo, Rudolph Valentino. As far back as the 1920s, it was an easy getaway for Hollywood types looking for a little privacy, and this golden era lives on at select spots.
In the hills just above downtown, a historic Mediterranean villa that was once home to William Randolph Hearst's mistress Marion Davies has been converted to the Willows, an upscale bed-and-breakfast inn. We spent a weekend here, mostly lounging poolside beneath the bougainvilleas, watching silhouettes of bees and hummingbirds dance across the top of our umbrella, made translucent in the desert sun. In three days we never bothered to use the car.
At the southern end of the valley, La Quinta Resort & Club is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. Even as it has grown from 20 casitas into a 750-room full-service resort, La Quinta has held on to the character it had when first constructed from 100,000 handmade adobe bricks.
With the jagged Santa Rosa Mountains edging the grounds of the resort, La Quinta's setting is one that takes hold of its visitors. When he left office in 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower came here immediately after John F. Kennedy's inauguration. Director-writer Frank Capra, who first developed the script for It Happened One Night during a desert visit, superstitiously returned to work at La Quinta again and again after the film went on to sweep the Academy Awards. Mexican painter Diego Rivera came here often as well, sometimes paying for his lodging with drawings that are now on display just off the main lobby.
Natural oases on the edge of town
The area's growth from frontier outpost to Hollywood hot spot happened in a little more than a generation: The first permanent European settler didn't arrive until 1884. But for at least two centuries before then, the Coachella Valley was largely inhabited by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, which today remains Palm Springs' largest landowner. Its holdings range from a casino and hotel to some magnificent natural areas, including palm canyons on the edge of town.
Cool and shaded, the canyons defy the stereotype of the desert as a barren place. They are filled with palms, including the Washingtonia filifera, the only palm species native to the state.
And then there is Tahquitz Canyon, where sycamores grow along a creek fed by a 60-foot seasonal waterfall and where bighorn sheep often venture down along granite ridges. In 1969 the canyon shut down, overrun by motorcyclists, students, and assorted rowdies. The closure, however, couldn't prevent the spread of umbrella bush and fountain grass, which migrated from nearby communities, threatening native vegetation. The tribe has reopened the area for guided hikes and, according to Agua Caliente official Ron De Luna, has plans to propagate indigenous plants to help restore the canyon ecosystem.
Like the palm oases, Tahquitz reveals the sometimes complex set of relationships that exist in Palm Springs, where wilderness meets city and Native American traditions bump up against the modern world.
An aesthetic all its own
Not far from Tahquitz Canyon and just above the Willows, a tiny modern house with glass walls and a corrugated aluminum-and-steel roof stands on a cliff overlooking the city.
A couple years back, I paid a visit to this house to talk with its owner and designer, architect Albert Frey, shortly before his death at the age of 95.
Born in Switzerland, Frey had come to Palm Springs when the only paved street in town was Palm Canyon Drive. He designed one of the area's first notable modern structures, the Kocher-Samson Building, in 1934, the first of a series of buildings--Palm Springs City Hall and the Valley Station for the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway--that would later help define the city's aesthetic. The Kocher-Samson Building, though internationally honored, received an unenthusiastic response locally. During a time when period revival architecture was the rage here and in the rest of Southern California, Frey's spare, clean designs ran counter to prevailing tastes.
From Frey's perspective, however, "the only native architecture in Palm Springs is the Indian brush shelter." And the desert provided an architectural blank slate. "There should be a reason behind everything you do," he told me. His reasons are plain to see: His work is a synthesis of influences, from the local environment to the modernist ideals he brought from Europe. He drew inspiration from the coloring and textures of the mountains, and tried to work with the climate by incorporating overhangs and using modern materials.
With renewed interest in Frey and other leading modernists who worked here, including John Lautner and Richard Neutra, Palm Springs is waking up to a unique architectural heritage that has long been ignored. This month, the Palm Springs Desert Museum will host a two-day symposium and home tour focusing on the area's modern architecture. A few years back, the landmark gas station that Frey designed on the edge of town was threatened with demolition. It has since been turned into the Montana St. Martin Gallery. Neglected period motels and hotels are being renovated. Some have capitalized on their modernist designs with an almost theme-park styling. Others have attempted more serious restorations. One of the most successful is in the nearby Coachella Valley town of Desert Hot Springs, a vintage resort town straddling mineral springs that bubble to the surface through fissures created by the nearby San Andreas Fault.
On a nondescript street away from the center of town is the Hope Springs resort, which takes a minimalist approach, with polished concrete floors, no televisions, no phones, and--amazingly enough in one of the country's hottest climates--no air-conditioning. Even on a 115° summer day, we found the swamp cooler (evaporator) and desert breeze to be enough. With its vintage furniture, glass walls, and pit fireplace in the lobby, the resort certainly delivered the retro-modern goods.
After a nighttime dip in a thermal pool, we went to sleep beneath a sky bright with constellations, listening as the wind fluttered the linen drapes and coyotes called from the hills.
It was a nice reminder. Out in Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley, the best pleasures are still sometimes the pure and simple ones.
