The city counted 13,468 residents in 1960, and by some counts held nearly 2,000 private swimming pools that same year, one for every six people who lived there, the highest concentration anywhere in the country. The postcards of that decade show turquoise water, palm trees, and movie stars stepping out of convertibles in sunglasses. They do not show the square mile at the center of town where none of that water ever reached, ground the desert’s first people had held for generations. This is the story of a city that built one of the most concentrated luxury landscapes any American desert has ever seen and quietly burned away the part of itself that did not fit the postcard, to keep the rest of it looking exactly like that.
Before any of that water was pumped into a swimming pool, the desert had another kind of water and another people. The Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians, and the generations who came before the tribe took that name, had lived around the hot mineral spring at the center of the valley for at least 5,000 years, some estimates run longer still. They called it sehi, boiling water. It fed a spring and canyon life that had nothing to do with palm trees on a travel poster.
Palm Canyon, Murray Canyon, Andreas Canyon, Tahquitz Canyon: shaded corridors cut into the mountains above the valley floor, each one watered, each one lived in. The Cahuilla hunted deer and rabbits in the canyons, gathered agave, yucca, acorns, and mesquite beans on the slopes, and returned generation after generation to the same spring at the center of what would later be called Palm Springs. That deep history was not what shaped the map. In 1876, President Ulysses Grant signed an executive order creating a reservation for the Agua Caliente in a pattern that had nothing to do with the tribe’s long presence in the valley and everything to do with a railroad.
The Southern Pacific needed an incentive to lay track through the Colorado Desert, a stretch of country with little water and less profit in it. The federal government’s answer was to survey the land into a grid of one-square-mile sections and hand them out in alternating order: odd-numbered sections to the railroad, even-numbered sections to the tribe. A mile for the railroad, the next mile to the Cahuilla, the one after that to the railroad again, checkerboarded across the desert floor. In 1877, President Hayes expanded the reservation to roughly 31,000 acres under the same alternating scheme.
The arrangement made Palm Springs the only place in the country where a tribal reservation was interlaced square mile by square mile with land that belonged to somebody else entirely. It also meant the Agua Caliente never held one contiguous piece of ground. Their reservation was not a territory with a boundary drawn around it. It was a pattern stitched into a railroad’s land grant, and the pattern would go on deciding who owned what in this valley for more than a century after the ink dried on Grant’s order.
The first permanent non-native settler arrived eight years later. John Guthrie McCallum was a San Francisco lawyer who came to the desert in 1884 on a doctor’s advice, hoping the dry air would help his son Johnny, who had tuberculosis. Over the next eight years, McCallum bought more than 6,000 acres around the springs and, working alongside Cahuilla laborers he hired and came to know well, built the region’s first irrigation system, drawing water down from the Whitewater River into what he called Palm Valley. The adobe house he raised for his family still stands, the oldest building left in Palm Springs.
Eight years before McCallum arrived, a Scottish physician named Wellwood Murray had already made the same bet on the same air. Murray had come to the region in 1876 for his own health, and in 1886 he bought five acres in Palm Valley and began raising the town’s first hotel, a single-story lodge that opened its doors with room for 26 guests, the whole of Palm Springs’ hospitality industry under one low roof. To give his guests something worth the trip, Murray leased the hot spring itself from the Agua Caliente, the same spring the Cahuilla had called sehi for thousands of years, and built a bath house over it. The rent was $100 a year.
That was the deal sitting at the foundation of the resort. The valley’s history would keep repeating the pattern: a settler paying the tribe $100 annually to bathe in water that had belonged to no one but the Cahuilla for longer than anyone could measure. It was a small transaction, hardly worth a line in any ledger, but it set a pattern almost as durable as the checkerboard itself: the valley’s oldest resource passing through white hands for a price, while the people who had always owned it kept the deed and watched a town grow up around them. The dry air that had drawn Johnny McCallum here and filled Wellwood Murray’s 26 rooms was about to draw a great many more people who believed the desert itself could cure what their doctors could not.
By the late 19th century, American medicine held that dry air and open sun could treat tuberculosis and the respiratory diseases filling the sanatoriums of the wetter, colder states, a doctrine doctors called the climate cure. Patients who could afford it went west by the thousands, chasing altitude and ocean air, whatever a doctor said might slow the disease eating their lungs. The Coachella Valley sat at the far end of that migration, remote enough to be believed purer than anywhere closer to a railroad line. Into it, in the autumn of 1909, came a nurse and her physician husband who opened a small house at the edge of the settlement to the dying.
In September of 1909, Nellie Kaufman and her husband, Dr. Harry Kaufman, bought the house from a Mrs. McKenzie, and on October 16th opened it as the Desert Inn. Not a hotel in any sense the word would later carry, but a small sanatorium, rooms rented to patients whose lungs had already told them what the rest of their lives would look like.
There was a dry climate, a clean bed, nothing resembling the pools and golf courses the valley would grow into, and a woman running it, certain the desert was going to work. It did. For the next decade, Kaufman kept the inn, taking in patients whose doctors elsewhere had already run out of options. Between 1919 and 1924, she steadily turned the sanatorium into a resort, adding new wings and new guests who had never had tuberculosis at all.
By 1924, financed by a loan from the oil magnate Thomas O’Donnell, she hired the architect William Charles Tanner to rebuild the Desert Inn as a Spanish Mediterranean resort of more than 110 rooms, arcades, and courtyards standing where the sick rooms had been. Kaufman became known across the valley as the mother of Palm Springs, a title earned less for the hotel than for the charity her profits funded. She ran the inn for four decades, watching a sanatorium built for the dying become the seed of a resort town built for the famous, and died in 1950 at 82. While Kaufman’s resort rose in respectable Spanish Mediterranean stone, a different kind of building went up nearby, aimed less at convalescence than at fashion.
In 1925, the architect Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright, designed the Oasis Hotel, the first modernist building in Palm Springs: 24 rooms, a three-story tower under a pyramidal roof, decorative concrete blocks, a glass-walled dining room built around trees. The crew was told to leave one tree standing for a few years until a taller tower rose across town. That taller tower belonged to the El Mirador, and the desert’s scale changed once it opened late in the 1920s. Built by the Los Angeles firm of Walker and Eisen for roughly $1 million, the El Mirador was Spanish colonial and unapologetically grand: an Olympic-size pool, tennis courts, stables, the valley’s first golf course, and a 68-foot bell tower hung with a bell shipped from Italy.
The hotel did not survive its own ambition for long. By 1931, its owners had lost it to creditors, and at auction the hotel’s own lawyer, Warren Pinney, bought it with a businessman named Ralph Leo for $300,000. Pinney took over as managing director and pushed the El Mirador toward a guest list Kaufman’s sanatorium had never been built for. By then, fan magazines had already begun writing about which stars had been seen strolling its grounds.
Cameras had already found this desert for a different industry entirely, long before any star checked into the El Mirador. Filmmakers were shooting silent pictures in the Coachella Valley as early as 1915. Crews worked in Indian canyons before 1918, the year the first film scenes for Salomé were shot here. Through the late 1910s, director Frank Lloyd shot silent westerns adapted from Zane Grey’s novels across the valley’s bare ridgelines.
In 1921, Rudolph Valentino filmed desert scenes for The Sheik, and the following year The Covered Wagon shot nearby, drawing a wave of further productions through the rest of the decade. The desert had already been sold once as medicine. It was about to be sold again as scenery, and scenery, unlike a sanatorium bed, comes with an audience already watching. The film crews that had been renting scenery through the 1920s went home to Los Angeles after each shoot, but the actors who had stood in front of their cameras began looking for a reason to stay.
As the story goes, under the old studio system, contracts held stars on a short leash, keeping them within a set number of hours of the lot in case a picture needed a reshoot or a scene had to be salvaged on a Sunday. Two hours was the figure most often repeated. Palm Springs, roughly 100 miles out along a two-lane road, sat almost exactly on that line: close enough to answer a phone call, far enough to feel like it belonged to nobody in particular. No studio contract naming that rule has ever surfaced.
What survived is the pattern it produced: a desert town, a two-hour drive from any sound stage, that filled up with the very people that rule was supposed to be governing. Two of them built the place that made it official. Charlie Farrell and Ralph Bellamy were both working actors, not developers. When they opened the Racquet Club on December 15th, 1934, it was two tennis courts and a snack bar on land that had been open desert a season earlier.
Their first day of business brought in $18. Within a year, they had added a swimming pool. Within three, Farrell had bought out Bellamy’s half and owned the club outright. What Farrell and Bellamy had built without quite planning it was the perfect answer to that two-hour math: a court and a pool just far enough from the sound stage to feel like freedom, just close enough that no studio could complain.
Humphrey Bogart came. So did Errol Flynn, Lana Turner, Mary Pickford, and Marlene Dietrich. The same names filling gossip columns started filling the Racquet Club’s guest register instead. By night, the crowd moved a few blocks over to a club that had opened the same year under a different name and grown into something considerably louder.
The Chi-Chi Club had been running since 1935, but it was a new owner, a showman named Irwin Schuman, who renamed it in 1938 and covered the place in napkins, playing cards, and matchbooks in a hula girl motif that had nothing to do with the desert around it. In October of 1950, the Chi-Chi opened its 750-seat Starlight Room with Desi Arnaz on the bandstand. Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Frank Sinatra became regulars before the club finally closed its doors in 1977. For four decades, it ran on the same premise as the Racquet Club a few streets away: bring the stars somewhere close enough to reach, loud enough to forget the two-hour line ever existed.
The photograph that made the Racquet Club pool famous did not need a nightclub. In the late 1940s, the photographer Bruno Bernard caught a young actress named Marilyn Monroe in a blue bikini on the club’s diving board, and the picture went on to outlive nearly everyone in it. It was at the Racquet Club, around that same stretch of years, that Monroe met the agent Johnny Hyde, who took her career under his management and began building the star the photograph had already promised. A tennis club built by two actors on a bet about geography had become, without any studio’s help, the place where a career could start over a poolside introduction.
By the end of the 1940s, that was the pattern the desert ran on: stars who had come for the two-hour rule, staying for the clubs, the pools, the studio-free air. But a rented room, however famous the pool beside it, was still a rented room, one more name in someone else’s guest book. The next generation of arrivals wanted something the Racquet Club and the Chi-Chi Club could not offer them at any price: walls of their own, built to a design nobody else in Hollywood had ordered first. What they wanted, and what a handful of architects were about to hand them, would not look anything like the Spanish tile and stucco already standing across town.
It would be built almost entirely out of glass and steel. The architects who came to build those glass and steel houses were not decorators chasing a fashion. They were solving a specific problem: how to build a house in a place with almost no natural cover from a sun that could reach 120 degrees, using materials that made a virtue of exposure instead of hiding from it. For decades, the desert had handed itself over to hotels, to clubs, to a sanatorium that grew into a resort.
Now it handed itself to private houses, one at a time, and the first of real consequence belonged to a department store magnate from Pittsburgh who had already proven he liked architects who took risks. In 1946, Edgar Kaufmann hired the Austrian-born architect Richard Neutra to build him a winter house in Palm Springs. Nine years earlier, Kaufmann had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build Fallingwater. What Neutra gave him in the desert was almost the opposite gesture: not a house braced against its landscape, but one that gave up on separating itself from the landscape at all.
Four wings pinwheeled out from a central living room, sliding glass walls erasing the line between the room and the ground outside it. Julius Shulman photographed the house in 1947, and the photographs made it a fixture of American design before most Americans had ever seen the desert it stood in. The Kaufmann Desert House stopped being one man’s winter retreat and became the picture of what a desert house was supposed to look like. Albert Frey built the desert differently, less for one client’s privacy, more for the town itself.
Working with the architect John Porter Clark between 1952 and 1957, Frey designed the Palm Springs City Hall. Its concrete corner blocks, cut on the diagonal in a repeating pattern, let the building read as a piece of desert light and shadow rather than a government office. It was civic architecture built on the same instincts Neutra had used on a private commission: glass, exposure, a structure unwilling to hide from the sun that defined the place it stood in. Donald Wexler tried to take that instinct further than anyone.
Working with the architect Richard Harrison for the Alexander Construction Company between 1960 and 1962, Wexler designed tract houses built almost entirely from steel: prefabricated panels shipped in and assembled on site, priced at $13,000 to $17,000 each, cheap enough to put a Neutra-grade idea within reach of an ordinary buyer. Thirty-eight of them were planned. Then the price of steel rose, and the math that had made the idea affordable stopped working. Seven houses got built.
All seven still stand, and by the 1990s all seven had been designated historic landmarks, the only tract where every house built survived to be protected. What Wexler tried to do with steel, the Alexander Construction Company did with wood frame and stucco. Between 1955 and 1965, the company run by George Alexander and his son Robert built more than 2,200 tract homes across the valley, doubling the size of Palm Springs. Most of them came off the drafting table of William Krisel of the Los Angeles firm Palmer and Krisel, a personal friend of Bob Alexander’s, who translated Neutra’s language of flat roofs, glass walls, and open plans facing a pool into a house a school teacher could actually afford.
By 1960, the city those houses filled counted 13,468 residents. By some counts, that same small city in those same years held nearly 2,000 private swimming pools, one for every six people who lived there, more pools per resident than anywhere else in the country. A desert does not care what gets built on it. It only tells you eventually whether the thing will hold.
For now, everything Palm Springs put up on it held: the pinwheel houses, the diagonal concrete, the steel panels, the flat stucco roofs facing a mountain range that had not moved in 10,000 years. The architects had finished their work before anyone had fully worked out who was going to live in all of it. It did not take long to find out. The biggest names in the United States were already looking for an address in this particular desert, and the men with the drafting tables had just finished giving them one.
Frank Sinatra got there first. In May of 1947, he walked into the office of architect E. Stewart Williams with plans for a Georgian mansion, columns and all. Williams talked him out of it and drew up something else entirely: low, flat-roofed, glass-walled, built into the desert floor rather than set above it.
Sinatra, to his own surprise, chose the version he had not asked for. The estate on Alejo Road in the Movie Colony neighborhood became known as Twin Palms: 4,500 square feet, four bedrooms, seven bathrooms, and a swimming pool shaped, by accident, Williams always claimed, like a grand piano. Sinatra lived there as his primary residence from 1948 to 1957, and the piano-shaped pool became one of the most photographed pieces of water in the American desert. Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr.
, Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford followed him into the same stretch of streets, clustering their own houses a few blocks away in the Vista Las Palmas neighborhood. Sinatra did not stay the only name on the map for long. On September 16th, 1966, Elvis Presley signed a year’s lease on a glass and steel house on Lera Circle, $21,000 for 12 months, built for developers Robert and Helen Alexander and nicknamed the House of Tomorrow for its space-age design. The following May, after a wedding at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas to dodge a press leak, Presley carried Priscilla over that same threshold as his wife, singing the Hawaiian wedding song as he did it.
Even a president wanted a place in the sand. Dwight Eisenhower became the first sitting occupant of the White House to golf the Coachella Valley in February of 1954, and by 1961 a house designed by Welton Becket, the same architect behind Hollywood’s Capitol Records building, had gone up for him beside the 11th hole of Eldorado Country Club, whose course had been finished only in time for the 1959 Ryder Cup. He wintered there from 1963 to 1968 as an honorary member, asking pointedly to be called General rather than Mr. President.
The desert’s hospitality had limits, and Sinatra found them on March 24th, 1962. Expecting a visit from President Kennedy, he built a guest house, ran a new phone line, and poured a concrete helicopter pad on his property for the occasion. Robert Kennedy, uneasy about his brother’s friendship with a man tied by rumor and by fact to the Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, rerouted the president to Bing Crosby’s house instead. Sinatra took a sledgehammer to the pad, then an axe.
He blamed Peter Lawford, his own Rat Pack co-star and the president’s brother-in-law, who had promised Kennedy would stay with him, and never spoke to Lawford again. The Kennedys stopped coming. The desert kept building anyway. In 1966, Walter and Leonore Annenberg opened Sunnylands in nearby Rancho Mirage, a 25,000-square-foot estate designed by architect A.
Quincy Jones. Construction began in 1963 and finished three years later. The press took to calling it the Camp David of the West. Over the Annenbergs’ lifetimes, eight American presidents sat at that table, along with Queen Elizabeth II, proof that one presidential snub had done nothing to slow the desert down.
And in 1963, the valley got away and up, out of itself entirely. The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway opened on a design by Albert Frey, its valley station built like a bridge over a riverbed that only ran in a storm. The idea itself belonged to an engineer named Francis Crocker, who had sketched it out in 1935, nearly 30 years before helicopters were finally brought in to raise four of the tramway’s five support towers, construction work that became known as the eighth wonder of the world. From the tram summit in the evenings, visitors watched the same thing happen without fail: the sun dropped behind San Jacinto, and its shadow slid down the mountain and out across the valley floor.
Across the piano-shaped pool, the golf course at Eldorado, the glass house on Lera Circle where a young couple had just carried in new furniture, and finally the middle of town, where the streets had been sitting in a different kind of shadow long before the tram ever opened. The square mile the brochures never showed had a name: Section 14. It sat in the exact geographic center of Palm Springs, bounded by Sunrise Way, Indian Canyon Drive, Alejo Road, and Ramon Road, one square of the checkerboard that had fallen back in 1876 to the tribe’s side of the line, resting on the same hot spring the Cahuilla had called sehi for thousands of years. By the 1950s, that square mile held more than a thousand homes, churches, and small businesses packed onto streets a few hundred feet from the hotel pools.
It was not a settlement on the edge of town. It was downtown, and the resort city had grown up around it rather than through it. The people who lived there were the resort economy’s other half. Black and Mexican-American families, the cooks, chauffeured, maids, gardeners, and builders who kept the hotels, restaurants, and estates of Palm Springs running, filled Section 14 because almost nowhere else in the city would rent or sell to them.
Section 14 sat outside the ordinary map of that exclusion. It was tribal land held by individual members of the Agua Caliente band, not subject to the city’s own zoning code, which made it, by a bitter accident of the same checkerboard that had once been drawn to box the tribe in, one of the only square miles in Palm Springs where a non-white family could actually build a house. That exemption did not last. In 1959, the city established what it called the Conservatorship and Guardianship Program.
Under it, courts appointed non-native conservators, men with no tribal connection at all, to take legal control of individual Agua Caliente members’ land and finances. A conservator could break a standing lease. A conservator could sign an eviction order on a landowner’s behalf. Owners did not always learn a lease had been broken until after the fact.
Disclosure to the tribal member whose land it was had never been required in any complete sense. What the program called protection functioned on the ground as a legal hand on every lease in the square mile at the city’s center. They burned the first houses on December 5th, 1956: ten former trailer homes near the mineral baths, torched by the Palm Springs Fire Department with the city’s own blessing. They burned more through the early 1960s under Mayor Frank Bogert, who directed the wider clearance of Section 14 and under whose administration the city went on to issue at least 48 demolition and burn permits.
They burned at least 235 homes, churches, and businesses in 1965 and 1966 alone, the worst two years of the campaign, while families went off to their jobs at the hotels a few blocks away and came home to find the lot already cleared. In 1968, the California Attorney General’s office sent Assistant Attorney General Loren Miller Jr. to find out exactly what had happened in Section 14. His report reached Chief Deputy Attorney General Charles O’Brien on May 31st and was made public on June 4th.
It documented a city that had bulldozed homes without confirming whether an eviction notice had even run its legal course, and it dismantled the city’s own claim that Section 14’s residents had never paid property taxes. They had. The investigation’s conclusion did not soften any of it. What the city of Palm Springs had done to Section 14, the report said, was a city-engineered holocaust.
How many people that put out of their homes has never been settled. Some counts put the number at close to a thousand. Others run to several thousand, counting every family displaced across the full span of the campaign rather than only its worst two years. The records were never kept well enough to say which.
Congress ended the Conservatorship and Guardianship Program in 1972, four years after Miller’s report went public, closing the mechanism that had made the demolitions possible in the first place. By then, the square mile at the center of Palm Springs was mostly gone, cleared and fenced, waiting for whatever downtown redevelopment the city had cleared it for. A few streets away, in those same years, something else about Palm Springs had already begun to change. The first sign wasn’t a bulldozer.
It was simpler than that. The guests had grown old right along with the city. The men who had filled Twin Palms and the Chi-Chi Club and the fairways at Eldorado through the 50s were still coming, still recognizable, just heavier in the face and slower off a tee. Hollywood itself had started looking elsewhere.
Aspen had slopes the desert could never grow. Maui had a coastline no golf course could match. The two-hour rule, real or invented, had never applied to a jet. By the 1970s, the valley had earned itself a new name, one no tourism board would ever print: God’s waiting room.
The cocktail hour that Crosby, Sinatra, and Martin had built the town around thinned into an actual retirement economy. Median age climbed. New arrivals came to slow down rather than to be photographed. The same modernist houses that had defined Palm Springs a generation earlier now looked, to a market that had moved on, simply old.
Flat roofs and glass walls went out of fashion the way everything does. Nellie Kaufman’s Desert Inn went first, and it went hardest. The sanatorium she had opened in 1909 for the dying, rebuilt in 1924 into the resort that gave Palm Springs its first real claim to glamour, came down under the wrecking ball starting in August of 1966. Home Savings and Loan bought the land.
Developer Joseph Eichler built a shopping center over the arcades and courtyards designed by architect Charles Luckman. The Desert Inn Fashion Plaza opened on October 16th, 1967 on the same ground Kaufman had once bought from a Mrs. McKenzie, selling department store men’s wear now where rooms had once been rented to the dying. A building built to save lives had become a mall.
The Kaufmann house fared no better. After Edgar Kaufmann’s death in 1955, the house Neutra had built stood empty for years, then passed through owners with little interest in what Neutra had drawn: the singer Barry Manilow at one point, football owner Jean Klein at another. Walls came down for a media room. A patio was glassed in.
Floral wallpaper went up in the bedrooms. Window units were bolted on wherever the heat demanded, changing the roof line Neutra had spent months getting right. By the early 1990s, a realtor was listing the house for $1. 5 million as a tear-down, telling buyers only the lot still had value.
What the city could not sell off, it tried to police. By the 1980s, every spring brought a different kind of crowd: college students, thousands of them, drawn by cheap motels and no particular reason to behave. On March 29th, 1986, the numbers overran the town. Crowds climbed onto parked cars.
Bottles arced into the street. Police moved through what the local press was already calling a riot, making arrests by the hundreds before the night broke. The city’s answer read like a confession of what had gone wrong. String bikinis were banned.
Water balloons, water guns, and drinking by the pool after 11 at night went with them. Motorcycles were barred from the main strip. None of it worked fast enough. By 1991, the city stopped legislating and started building concrete barricades across Palm Canyon Drive and Indian Canyon Drive.
Spring break in Palm Springs did not end with an ordinance. It ended with a wall. Then, on July 26th, 1989, the tower burned. The El Mirador had opened late in 1927 as the hotel that made Palm Springs look serious, its 68-foot bell tower visible from anywhere in the valley.
It had cycled through uses since: an army hospital during the war, a resort again after 1952, restored by architect Paul R. Williams until around 1972, when it closed as a hotel for good and reopened as Desert Hospital, now serving a city that needed doctors more than lifeguards. A suspicious fire tore through it that night and took the tower down with the rest of the building. The hospital board that owned the site commissioned a reconstruction built to the tower’s original dimensions, finished in May of 1991, rebuilt stone for stone, standing today as the front entrance to Desert Regional Medical Center.
By the end of the 1980s, the mall stood where the Desert Inn used to be. The Kaufmann House was listed as a tear-down. Concrete blocked the strip where spring break used to run wild. A rebuilt tower marked a fire nobody had fully explained.
What the city did not have was anyone angry enough about any of it to do something. It got one in January of 1986, when a former pop star named Sonny Bono opened a restaurant, Bono’s, on Palm Canyon Drive. What followed was two years of permits, zoning hearings, and a dispute over the size of the restaurant’s own sign, the kind of bureaucratic friction that convinced Bono the fastest way past city hall was to run it. On April 19th, 1988, he was sworn in as mayor, and the crackdown he had promised arrived almost immediately.
He called the spring break economy the city had built and then disowned a nightmare, and the concrete barricades that sealed off Palm Canyon Drive went up on his watch by 1991. He needed a replacement for the tourist season he had just shut down. In January of 1990, with sponsors including American Airlines and Wells Fargo Bank behind him, Bono launched the first Palm Springs International Film Festival: five days, 46 films, eight theaters, more than 17,000 people through the doors. By its fifth year, attendance had reached 42,000, and the festival had grown into the largest world cinema festival in the United States by attendance.
In November of 1994, Bono was elected to represent California’s 44th district in the United States House of Representatives. On January 5th, 1998, he died in a skiing accident at Heavenly near Lake Tahoe at 62. His wife, Mary Bono, was elected to finish his term. While Bono was fighting city hall over a sign, a quieter reversal was already underway a few miles from his restaurant, at the house Richard Neutra had built for Edgar Kaufmann in 1946.
In 1992, investment manager Brent Harris and architectural historian Beth Edwards Harris bought it, and starting in 1993 spent five years undoing four decades of remodeling, room by room, back toward Neutra’s original drawings. In 2022, the restored house sold at auction for $13 million, a record for Palm Springs real estate. The rest of the city’s mid-century stock followed the same arc, late and reluctant. Modernism Week began in 2006 as a sideline event attached to two older architecture programs.
In its more recent years, it has drawn as many as 125,000 people to tour the same steel-framed, glass-walled houses the city had spent the prior decades letting fall apart. Forty minutes away in Indio, a parallel rediscovery of the desert had already started. The first Coachella Festival ran at the Empire Polo Club in October of 1999, drawing 35,000 people to a patch of farmland the festival still uses today. Palm Springs became something else in these same years.
Today, an estimated 40 to 50 percent of its year-round residents identify as LGBTQ, the highest concentration of any city in the country. And on November 7th, 2017, the city elected the first city council in American history made up entirely of LGBTQ members. It was the same office, in the same building, that had once run the Conservatorship and Guardianship Program on Section 14 without asking a single resident’s consent. That building had one more piece of business left.
On September 29th, 2021, the Palm Springs City Council voted to formally apologize to the survivors and descendants of Section 14, calling itself, in its own resolution, deeply sorry for what had been done. The same evening, it voted to remove the statue of Frank Bogert, the mayor under whom the burnings had been ordered, from the ground in front of city hall. Three years later, in November of 2024, the council approved $5. 9 million in direct payments to verified survivors and their descendants, and $20 million more for affordable housing, most of it earmarked for the families who had once lived on that square mile.
None of it rebuilt Section 14. None of it returned a single house. None of it made 1965 not have happened. The tramway Albert Frey helped design still climbs the mountain above the city it once served, having carried more than 20 million passengers since 1963.
Sinatra’s piano-shaped pool at Twin Palms still holds water, rented out now by the night for parties and photoshoots instead of for a man who lived there. The pools of Palm Springs are still turquoise. The postcard still looks like the postcard.
But the square mile at the center of it, the one the postcards never showed, finally has a name spoken out loud, on the record, in the same city hall whose fire department once signed the permits to burn it.
