The Allure of Palm Springs

The Allure of Palm Springs

Nearly two hours into one’s drive eastwards from Los Angeles on Route 10, the freeway speeds through dry desert flanked by even drier, treeless mountain ranges on both sides. No visual cues pop up to signify that you are approaching any sort of travel destination until dozens of exuberantly waving windmill blades suddenly appear in the distance, announcing the imminent appearance of the lonely Palm Springs exit sign. Nor does the exit road deliver anything more promising—its barren, empty verges offer not a single clue that you are approaching a lively resort town; more likely, you took the wrong exit and you’re headed nowhere. Traversing many talus cones of tumbling boulders, the right side of the road skirts the undulating flank of Mount San Jacinto for so many miles that you begin to give up hope of arriving anywhere at all.

Then, all at once, a single small but striking building appears on your right. Jutting out at a perpendicular angle to the steep slope of the nearby mountainside, Its uplifted triangular roof resembles the open mouth of an alligator or the snapping beak of a pelican. This building is, for all intents and purposes, Palm Springs’ the entry gate. Designed in the mid nineteen fifties by celebrated Palm Springs architect, Albert Frey, its original purpose was, appropriately enough, a gas station, but in recent years it has been rehabilitated into the Palm Springs Visitor Center.

Once you pass the visitor center, a handful of palm trees appears on your left and another on your right, but their procession is no more majestic than what has come before. Only after another mile or two does the commercial thoroughfare of Palm Canyon Drive announce itself with its double line of marching soldiers, the California Fan Palms. When I observed this tableau for the first time at dusk, I distinctly remember thinking that it had hardly been worth the effort to make the trek from the glamour of Los Angeles, with its sparkling beaches and tawny mountains. First impressions, though, are not everything, and my hasty negative judgment turned out to be wrong. When I woke the next morning, the sun had already risen into a cloudless firmament of towering blue, and when I ventured out into the gleaming sunshine, I gazed up into the dancing fans of a radiant grove of palm trees. There was no more disputing it: I had arrived in a delightful oasis called Palm Springs.

For Seattleites and Portlanders alike, Palm Springs in winter has an irresistible allure, and I have heard people joking that every other pedestrian on Palm Canyon Drive has just arrived from the gloomy skies, chilly air, and dripping sidewalks of the Pacific Northwest. There in the desert, many of them remain for all of five months and twenty-nine days, only to board the same flight home, with the shared purpose of avoiding the California income tax that is imposed upon visitors who remain for more than six months. Indeed, the allure is so strong that the State of California recently extended its tax-free timeline to nine months.

Part of the allure is due to the fact that the liberal clusters of palm trees have not been imported from Florida or Hawaii.  In the canyons bordering the town, you can easily find native palms in abundance. Snaking along perennial springs, they have been used by the Cahuilla band of the Agua Caliente Indians since time immemorial. The actual hot spring for which Palm Springs is named still pops up in the exact center of town, at the corner of Indian Canyon Drive and Tahquitz Canyon Way. The fact that it is now entirely hidden, having been covered by a khaki-colored modern stucco building housing the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum, does not detract from the fact that it is, to this day, a destination spa called “Sec-ha” in the Chahuilla language. You enter it by a door off to the side of the museum.

But if the spring for which the town is named is no longer visible, you can find similar ones threading through the Indian Canyons on reservation land just south of town. Last month, when I hiked the Murray Canyon trail, I crossed its stream five or seven times on my way to the waterfall at its source in the headlands. Fan Palms provide the very symbol of an oasis: they thrive in standing water and mushy soils, their brown castoff fans interlaced in piles along the muddy banks. The creeks are as lush as the facing canyon slopes are bare, and when my rugged hike approached a nearby ridge bearing a perpendicular trail, I was greeted by a sign reading, “Beware: no water and no shade beyond.” Needless to say, I avoided that trail, but I stopped to enjoy the view over the entire Coachella Valley, all the way to the far-off flank of the northerly mountains that announce the high Mojave Desert and the backslopes of Joshua Tree National Park. In the near distance, I gazed over the ranks of artificially planted palm trees that delineate Palm Springs’ street grid while simultaneously providing evidence of its population’s reliance on the far-off dams of the Colorado River.

One of the oddest but most evocative aspects of Palm Springs is that its grid of one-mile squares, imposed by the southerly reach of the transcontinental railroad system in the nineteenth century, has a unique dual ownership. Every other square is owned by random citizens, nearly all of them white, but the intervening squares make up the Agua Caliente Indian reservation. The result is that the town’s geographic profile is a checkerboard of urbanized squares alternating with undeveloped ones. If you walk north from Ramon Road on Calle Encilia, or east from Calle El Segundo on Saturnino Road, developed squares give way to long, sandy reaches of desert scrub without so much as a sidewalk.

For this reason, when you buy a condo or a house in Palm Springs, you must do a little research to determine the answer to two important questions: first, is the unit on Indian land? If so, you will only be leasing the land beneath your future home, and the lease will have a specific expiration date. Second, and equally important: has the City permitted short-term vacation rentals on your property? If it has not—and there has been pressure to restrict vacation rentals as a countermeasure to the inflation that already makes the town too expensive for its most important workers, its waiters and bartenders—then you will not be able to rent out your unit during the stifling summers in which the mercury climbs over 100 or even 110, for weeks at a time.

Rugged, tan-colored mountains juxtaposed with the angular geometries of midcentury modern architecture, embodied so perfectly by the jutting beak of Frey’s landmark gas station/visitor center, constitute the first two of four essential elements that comprise what might be called the Palm Springs Style. Its other two ingredients are the persistent and glamorous background presence of Hollywood stars past and present, paired with a sort of gay camp that rejoices in sending up Hollywood and the midcentury vibe in a single stroke.

The unique Palm Springs mashup between modern architecture and Hollywood lore begins with an interesting fact about Hollywood’s storied studio system. Back in the golden age, the leading studios established a rule that no star could wander farther from Hollywood than one hundred miles or two hours (I’ve heard the story expressed both ways.) The effect this had was that if Ava Gardner or Frank Sinatra wanted to get out of town, they could go no farther than the golf courses and watering holes of Palms Springs, which clocks in at just under 99 miles as the crow flies. Undoubtedly, this is why Frank built “Twin Palms,” his marvelous midcentury house between Alejo Road and Via Colusa in “The Movie Colony,” one of Palm Springs’ 52 named neighborhoods identified by themed “blades” installed above the street corner signs.

Twin Palms, with its pool in the abstract form of a baby grand piano, made the career of the celebrated Palm Springs architect, E. Stewart Williams, as I learned on one of the fantastic neighborhood tours led by the Palm Springs Historical Society. As the story goes, one day in 1947, Frank and Ava wandered into Williams’ architectural office licking ice cream cones. Frank was dressed in a sailor suit. “Build me a colonial house,” Frank told Williams.

The latter paused to consider the matter, then gave Frank a striking counter offer. “Tell you what,” Williams said, and I’m paraphrasing here. “I’ll design you a colonial house and I’ll design you a modern house on the same site. You can choose whichever one you prefer.” Luckily, Frank chose the modern version, because, as Williams later reported (and again I’m paraphrasing), “Otherwise, I would never have had a career.” Williams went on to design many of the town’s most iconic modernist structures, including the Palm Springs Art Museum, which is one of Southern California’s most prominent art institutions. This past January, I toured its awesome retrospective of David Hockney paintings, including a whole suite of his colorful iPad paintings.

When Frank and Ava moved into Twin Palms, it sat by itself so far out into the desert that you could only reach it by an unpaved road. Perhaps that was why, on any given day, Frank found it convenient to raise a Jack Daniels flag on the pole just outside the house, the better to advertise to Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Junior that he was ready to serve them cocktails. You can tour the Frank Sinatra house during Modernism Week, which occurs every February. If you’re lucky enough to do so, you will be shown the built-in console where Frank did some of his recordings. You’ll also see a large chip in the bathroom counter, which was created by the impact made when either Frank or Ava (nobody remembers which) threw a wine glass at it in a fit of pique. This foreshadowed the end of their tempestuous relationship, because you will also be shown the exact spot on the driveway where Frank later threw out all of Ava’s clothes and suitcases, telling her to “Get Out!”

No piece about the allure of Palm Springs would be complete without mentioning four of its other most significant midcentury-modern houses. Three hug the mountain slopes that ring the town, and the fourth backs up to the foothills of Mount San Jacinto. With its long window-wall and seamless indoor/outdoor living, that fourth dwelling would be Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House, designed for the same Pittsburgh department store magnate for whom Frank Lloyd Wright created “Fallingwater.” Meanwhile, the tiny “Frey House 2” is built right into the mountain slope directly behind the Art Museum. Since the museum owns it, you can visit it, and when you do, you can sit at a breakfast nook overlooking the Coachella Valley. There, you can’t avoid touching a wall of solid rock that, like a lava flow, descends right through the ceiling and engulfs the counter next to your seat.

Frey had clearly hit on something new: the idea of allowing natural features to invade the interior of a house was something that the younger architect, John Lautner, exploited when he designed the other two houses I alluded to: the Bob Hope House and its next-door neighbor on Southridge Drive, the Elrod House. On YouTube, you can find a video of Sean Connery entering the house in the James Bond film, ”Diamonds are Forever.” When he does, a beautiful Black wench leaps off an exposed outcrop inside the house and introduces herself to James Bond. “I’m Bambi!” she says proudly. Too bad the Elrod House is never open to the public.

Bambi introduces the fourth element of the Palm Springs style—gay camp—as well as anybody, and you can find more of it in four marvelous shops on Palm Canyon and Indian Canyon Drives:  “P.S. Homeboy,” “Destination PSP,” “Greetings,” and “Just Fabulous.” “Greetings” dispenses the funniest, raunchiest greeting cards you can imagine, nearly all of them portraying vintage Fifties housewives in various states of attire, each one adorned by a  unique thought bubble. The other three shops sell a variety of home furnishings, midcentury-themed attire, and books on Modernism in the desert.

By now I’m sure I’ve given you at least one good reason to visit Palm Springs, but one question remains: why go there when you could travel to Hawaii? After all, the Hawaiian islands offer a tropical paradise as well as desert environments, so why limit yourself to the arid backdrop of Palm Springs? I have a two-word answer: night life. It’s a version of night life with more than a twinge of camp, especially when you get tickets to “The Judy Show,” at the “Purple Room,” the fifties club where the Rat Pack first convened. There’s also more than a hint of camp at “PS Air Bar,” where you sit in a reconstituted jet fuselage on actual airplane seating, listening to live music while watching the board of arriving and departing “flights.” If you don’t like either of those joints, there’s always the Sunday morning drag brunch at Oscars.

Back in the daytime, the relentless aridity of Palm Springs is more than offset by the changing drama of the mountain ranges that form a horseshoe around the town. Mount San Jacinto’s rugged tan profile descends precipitously into the very backyard of the Palm Springs Art Museum, but you can’t see to the top of it until you venture a mile or two east of downtown, where its topmost tier telescopes into view. The mountain ranges on the east and north sides of town appear farther off, but no matter which way you turn, you are confronted with mountains of differing colors and shapes: a hazy bluish-beige ridge to the north and a set of deeply folded orange peaks to the south, where the Elrod and Bob Hope houses climb Southridge Drive. When, in the late afternoon, the palm trees are backlit against the western mountains, sunshine bounces off their glossy tassels as if they’re so many threads of tinsel on a Christmas tree. It is one of the most beautiful environmental effects I have seen anywhere.