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A different kind of Eden: gay men, modernism, and the rebirth of Palm Springs

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A different kind of Eden: gay men, modernism, and the rebirth of Palm Springs

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A DIFFERENT KIND OF EDEN:
GAY MEN, MODERNISM, AND THE REBIRTH OF PALM SPRINGS

by

John Paul LoCascio

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION

August 2013

Copyright 2013 John Paul LoCascio
ii

To David.

iii

Acknowledgements

This thesis would not have been possible without the assistance of a number of
very generous people. I would like to first thank my thesis committee, Professors Ken
Breisch, Jay Platt, and Kevin Starr, for their interest and guidance; and Graduate Heritage
Conservation Program Director Trudi Sandmeier for her gentle prodding and
encouragement. In Palm Springs, I am grateful for the participation of those who took
the time to answer my questions and share their experiences and insights: Jacques
Caussin, Chair of Modernism Week; Donald Ettinger, former owner of El Mirasol Villas;
William Kopelk, former president of the Palm Springs Preservation Foundation; Chris
Menrad, president of the Palm Springs Modern Committee; and Sidney Williams,
Curator of Architecture and Design at the Palm Springs Art Museum. Jeff Clayton at the
Palm Springs Public Library was an invaluable help in my research. And a special
“thank you” goes to the late Huell Howser for returning my call, answering my questions,
and sending me a collection of his “Palm Springs Week” videos.
Closer to home, I must thank Sian Winship, president of the Society of
Architectural Historians/Southern California Chapter, for her help and encouragement;
Greg Grammer and Marcia Hanford of The Glendale Historical Society, who picked up
the slack during my last year as that organization’s president, while I pursued my degree;
and Peyton Hall, FAIA, and my colleagues at Historic Resources Group who did the
same on the work front. Finally, and most importantly, I could not have accomplished
this without the love, patience, and support of my husband, David Brooks. The topic of
this thesis was his idea.
iv

Table of Contents

Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Figures vi
Abstract viii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: A Shimmering Reflection of an Optimistic Age 6
Health Spa 8
Winter Resort 11
Hollywood’s Playground 15
Desert Modern 18
Post-war Boom 21
The Alexanders 29
Decline and Neglect 32
Chapter 2: Fairy Dust 33
In the Desert with Dinah 36
Warm Sands 38
Pride and Profit 41
The White Party 44
Chapter 3: Cool Again 47
Frey Revisited 48
Hollywood’s Playground, Take Two 51
As the Crows Fly 52
O, Pioneers! 55
Restoring the Icon 59
Chapter 4: The Symbol of the City 64
ModCom Goes to Palm Springs 68
The Battle of the Tramway Gas Station 70
Fin de Siècle 79
Chapter 5: The Colonial Williamsburg of Modernism 82
Scholarly Pursuits 83
Cultural Tourism 86
The Great Alexanders 92
v

Show and Sell 95
Conclusion 98
Bibliography 106

vi

List of Figures

Figure 1.1: McCallum Adobe 7
Figure 1.2: Palm Springs Hotel, c. 1901 9
Figure 1.3: Desert Inn, c. 1940 11
Figure 1.4: Remnants of the Oasis Hotel 13
Figure 1.5: Reconstructed tower of the Hotel El Mirador 14
Figure 1.6: La Plaza 17
Figure 1.7: Kocher-Samson Building 19
Figure 1.8: Grace Miller House, c. 1938 20
Figure 1.9: Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr. House, 1947 22
Figure 1.10: Raymond Loewy House, 1947 24
Figure 1.11: Frank Sinatra House, 1949 25
Figure 1.12: Entrance canopy of the Spa Hotel 27
Figure 1.13: Palm Springs City Hall 28
Figure 1.14: Palm Springs Aerial Tramway Valley Station 28
Figure 1.15: Alexander house, Las Palmas 30
Figure 1.16: Alexander steel house 31
Figure 2.1: The Hideaway, formerly the Town & Desert Hotel 35
Figure 2.2: El Mirasol Villas, Warm Sands Drive 39
Figure 2.3: Rainbow flag over Arenas Street 44
Figure 3.1: SAH/SCC tour, 1992 50
Figure 3.2: Korakia Pensione 54
vii

Figure 3.3: Alexander steel house 57
Figure 3.4: Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr. House, 1998 62
Figure 4.1: Desert Fashion Plaza 65
Figure 4.2: Reconstructed tower of the Hotel El Mirador 66
Figure 4.3: Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr. House, 1998 67
Figure 4.4: Tramway Gas Station (Palm Springs Visitors Center) 71
Figure 4.5: Tramway Gas Station (Palm Springs Visitors Center) 74
Figure 4.6: Fire Station No. 1 80
Figure 5.1: Alexander steel house 85
Figure 5.2: Orbit In, formerly the Village Manor Hotel 89
Figure 5.3: Alexander house, Las Palmas 93
Figure 5.4: Alexander house, Las Palmas 94
Figure C.1: Town & Country Center 100
Figure C.2: Santa Fe Federal Savings and Loan 101

viii

Abstract

The contribution of the gay community - and gay men in particular - to the cause
of historic preservation in the United States has long been tacitly accepted, but seldom
documented. This thesis fills part of that gap by documenting, as a singular case study,
the role played by gay men in rediscovering, rehabilitating, and reviving the faded resort
city of Palm Springs, California.
Over the course of the 20th century, Palm Springs developed from a modest spa
town into an exclusive winter resort, and, after World War II, into a popular vacation
destination for the growing middle class. The city’s popularity, and its period of greatest
development, peaked in the two decades after World War II, coinciding with the rise of
Modernism in the United States, before declining dramatically in the 1970s, leaving Palm
Springs a virtual ghost town that yet boasted the largest and finest concentration of mid-
20th century Modern architecture in the country.
This thesis documents how, at its popular and economic nadir, Palm Springs was
rediscovered largely by gay men - many in the fields of architecture, design, and
publishing - who built a community, rehabilitated neglected Modern houses, led the effort
to recognize and preserve the city’s unique architectural heritage and, in so doing,
fostered the city’s economic, cultural, and political renaissance.

1

Introduction

The desert resort city of Palm Springs, California is located 107 miles east of Los
Angeles, in Riverside County’s windswept Coachella Valley. The city has a permanent
population of 45,279,
1
which practically doubles each winter with the influx of seasonal
residents,
2
and annually welcomes more than 1.6 million visitors attracted to the area’s
warm, dry climate and stunning desert scenery.
3
With more than 350 days of sunshine a
year and an average annual rainfall of a scant 5.2 inches
4
, Palm Springs offers practically
unlimited year-round outdoor activities such as swimming, tennis, golf, hiking, and
horseback riding, as well as shopping, dining, bars, nightclubs, and even a casino, owned
and operated on tribal property by the local band of Cahuilla Indians.
Besides the obvious particulars of geography and climate, Palm Springs is
distinguished from other, similar resort destinations around the country by two quite
remarkable factors. The first is that the little city boasts what is widely acknowledged to
be the largest and finest concentration of mid-20th century Modern architecture in the
United States, ranging from individual masterpieces designed by world-renowned
architects, to neighborhoods of modest tract houses built by visionary developers. The
city’s second distinguishing factor is that it has an inordinately large population of gay
men and women, estimated to comprise at least 40% of the city’s combined permanent

1
John E. Husing, Ph.D., City of Palm Springs 2012 Annual Economic Report, October 15, 2012, 4,
http://www.palmsprings.ca.gov/index.aspx?page=847 (accessed December 31, 2012).
2
Palm Springs Bureau of Tourism, “Fast Facts,” Palm Springs, California,
http://www.visitpalmsprings.com/page/fast-facts/8181 (accessed December 31, 2012).
3
City of Palm Springs, “City Profile,” Palm Springs, http://www.ci.palm-springs.ca.us/index.aspx?page=30
(accessed December 31, 2012).
4
Palm Springs Bureau of Tourism, “Fast Facts,” Palm Springs, California,
http://www.visitpalmsprings.com/page/fast-facts/8181 (accessed December 31, 2012).
2

and seasonal residents; some analyses suggest that the number could be as high as 57% of
the city’s population, or 15 times the national average.
5

These two seemingly random attributes are in fact closely related, for it was this
combination of gay men and Modern architecture that, beginning in the late 20th century,
helped revitalize the faded resort after decades of decline and neglect. The Palm Springs
story illustrates the pervasive stereotype of gay men as pioneers of gentrification -
beautifying decrepit buildings, increasing property values, and making formerly marginal
neighborhoods “safe” for “normal” families. As Dwight Young of the National Trust
wrote several years ago, “In city after city, as any savvy observer of the urban scene can
tell you, the first sign that a shabby block might be on the brink of rebirth has been the
appearance of new residents driving cars (or, more recently, SUVs) with pink-triangle or
rainbow-flag bumper stickers, emblems of gay pride.”
6

Yet there are almost no studies to prove - or disprove - this widely-accepted
perception. The very few works that attempt to touch on the subject of gay men and their
penchant for historic preservation fall far short of serious documentation. In A Passion to
Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture, Will Fellows sets out to prove this perceived
connection as archetype rather than stereotype;
7
yet his narrative is heavily anecdotal in
relating the stories of individual gay men and their personal preservation projects, and
resorts to speculation on the sexual orientation of long-dead preservationists. And while

5
Mariecar Mendoza, “How gay or straight is Palm Springs?,” The Desert Sun, September 13, 2011,
http://www.williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/how-gay-or-straight-is-palm-springs/ (accessed
December 31, 2012).
6
Dwight Young, “Out in Front,” Preservation, November/December 1999,
http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/1999/ou-in-front.html (accessed April 6, 2013).
7
Will Fellow, preface to A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture (Madison: The University of
Wisconsin Press, 2004), x.
3

the gay community is commonly known to have played a major role in the preservation
of Miami Beach’s Art Deco South Beach neighborhood in the 1980s, M. Barron Stofik’s
Saving South Beach dispatches their participation, and indeed the entire connection
between gay men and historic preservation, in a single paragraph.
8
This thesis begins to
remedy this scholarly shortcoming by documenting the rediscovery by gay men of Palm
Springs’ mid-20th century Modern architecture in the 1980s; the effort, led largely
though not exclusively by them, to rehabilitate the city’s unique architectural heritage and
recognize its significance in the development of the Modern movement; and the faded
city’s consequent economic, social and political revival.
Chapter 1 provides a brief developmental history of Palm Springs and describes
how this small desert community became such a center of Modern design in the first
place. Within a span of less than fifty years, Palm Springs grew from a frontier spa town
for tubercular patients into an exclusive winter resort for East Coast millionaires and
Hollywood film stars; then, in the two prosperous decades after the second World War,
into a popular and world-renowned vacation destination for the upper and middle classes,
with its most significant period of development coinciding with the peak of Modernism’s
popularity in the United States.
Chapter 2 describes the growth of the gay community in Palm Springs in the
1970s and 1980s, during the city’s years of decline. Beginning with the lesbian-oriented
activities associated with the Dinah Shore Golf Tournament and the opening of the first
exclusively gay male resorts on Warm Sands drive, gay people began to discover the

8
M. Barron Stofik, Saving South Beach (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 176-177.
4

warm weather, desert scenery and affordable real estate of the Coachella Valley. They
bought properties, opened businesses, and stimulated the city’s stagnant economy, in the
process building a community in which they could live open, active lives. The chapter
concludes with the launch of the spectacularly successful annual White Party in 1989 and
its role in promoting Palm Springs as a gay destination.
Chapter 3 chronicles the wider rediscovery of Palm Springs and its Modern
architecture in the 1990s, amidst a growing vogue for mid-century design. Led first by
architectural historians, then by figures from the publishing, fashion, entertainment and
design industries - many of them gay men - who purchased and restored some of the
city’s fine Modern houses, the renewed interest in Palm Springs sparked a national buzz
that soon grew into an international media sensation. The chapter includes a discussion
of the restoration of Richard Neutra’s Kauffman House and the publicity it generated.
Chapter 4 covers the development in the late 1990s of an activist movement
dedicated to the preservation of Palm Springs’ Modern architecture, sparked by the
threatened demolition of the Albert Frey-designed Tramway Gas Station. Fostered by the
Los Angeles Conservancy, the movement coalesced into two local organizations, the
Palm Springs Modern Committee and the Palm Springs Preservation Foundation, which
individually and jointly promoted Palm Springs as a center of Modern design.
Chapter 5 focuses on the culmination of Palm Springs’ transformation in the first
years of the 21st century, as the city’s Modern architecture attracted a new wave of
cultural tourism. Palm Springs embraced its architectural legacy as a cultural and
economic asset with the development of Modern-themed tours, symposia and special
5

events, attracting tens of thousands of participants, annually injecting millions of dollars
into the city’s economy, and driving up the value of vintage properties.
It is important to note that this thesis focuses only on developments in the city of
Palm Springs. While gays and lesbians were simultaneously gaining ground throughout
the Coachella Valley, and Modern architecture was being rehabilitated in other area
cities, particularly Cathedral City and Desert Hot Springs, Palm Springs remained the
epicenter of this phenomenon of rediscovery and rebirth.

6

Chapter 1
A Shimmering Reflection of an Optimistic Age

The earliest inhabitants of the Coachella Valley were the Cahuilla Indians, who
established summer settlements in the palm-lined mountain canyons around the valley,
moving each winter to thatched shelters clustered around the mineral hot springs on the
valley floor.
1
The Cahuilla were left largely to themselves until the early 1860s, when
the Bradshaw stagecoach line began to cross the desert from Banning en route to the
Arizona territories, stopping at the oasis of palm trees and hot springs that the line’s
operators called Agua Caliente (“Hot Water”).
2

The valley’s first permanent Anglo settler was John Guthrie McCallum, a San
Francisco attorney and former State Legislator who moved with his wife and five
children to Agua Caliente in the spring of 1884, five years after a typhoid epidemic left
his eldest son, Johnny, with tuberculosis; the family doctor advised McCallum that the
boy’s only hope for recovery was to relocate to a warm, dry climate.
3
The family
entrained first for Los Angeles, and thence to Banning, where a local Indian guide named
Will Pablo led McCallum through the San Gorgonio pass to Agua Caliente.
4

McCallum was not a farmer, but he saw “from the sunshine, rich soil and
abundant life-giving waters that flowed from the canyons, a vast future development not

1
Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, “Cultural History,” Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, A
Sovereign Tribal Government, http://www.aguacaliente-nsn-gov (accessed November 26, 2011).
2
Lynn J. Rogers, “Pioneer Courage Built Desert Center,” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 1939, E2,
http://www.proquest.com (accessed September 25, 2012).
3
Jane Ardmore, “Memories of a Desert Pearl,” Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1966, W54,
http://www.proquest.com (accessed September 25, 2012).
4
Ardmore, “Memories,” W54-56.
7

only for abundant crops, but for the earliest fruits in the world.”
5
He purchased an initial
64 acres of railroad land near the hot springs - he would ultimately acquire nearly 1,800
acres
6
- and built a small adobe house; when it was complete McCallum fetched his
family from Banning, with the youngest, four-year-old daughter Pearl, perched on the
back of her father’s saddle.
7
With Indian labor McCallum dug a 19-mile irrigation ditch
to divert the waters of the Whitewater River to his orchards of apricot, orange and fig
trees, his fields of alfalfa and his vineyards nestled at the base of Mt. San Jacinto.
8

Figure 1.1: The McCallum adobe, relocated and reconstructed a block south of its original site. Photo by author.
For several years the family and their desert ranch flourished; but in 1890 young
Johnny McCallum relapsed and died early the next year at 26. Soon after, a flood washed

5
W.H. Bowart with Julie Hector, Sally Mall McManus and Elizabeth Coffman, “The McCallum Centennial -
Palm Springs’ founding family,” Palm Springs Life, April 1984, http://www.palmspringslife.com/Palm-
Springs-Life/April-1984?The-McCallum-Centennial-Palm-Springs-039-founding-family/ (accessed
September 25, 2012).
6
Bowart et al., “The McCallum Centennial.”
7
Ardmore, “Memories,” W51.
8
Ardmore, “Memories,” W56.
8

out the fields and orchards, followed by a devastating drought that was to last eleven
years. The final blow came when the McCallums’ second son, Wallace, died at 29 in
1896; emotionally broken and in mounting debt, John Guthrie McCallum died in 1897.
Four years later Pearl McCallum finished her schooling in Los Angeles and returned to
the ruined ranch to care for her widowed mother.
9

Health Spa
John McCallum’s dream of turning the desert into an agricultural paradise ended
in failure, but he did succeed in encouraging other hearty pioneers to settle in Agua
Caliente and sowed the seeds for its ultimate transformation into a different kind of Eden.
Desperately believing, in the words of his daughter Pearl, that the “dry healing climate”
was “the answer to his prayers that his son might be healed,” McCallum promoted Agua
Caliente as “an absolute cure for all pulmonary and kindred diseases.”
10
Soon after
settling his ranch he persuaded Dr. Welwood Murray to move from Banning to establish
a health resort in Agua Caliente; Banning built a hotel with accommodations for 20
guests near the palm-fringed hot springs. Murray called the place the Palm Springs Hotel
and it soon attracted visitors, including such notables as author Robert Louis Stevenson,
naturalist John Muir and U.S. Vice President Charles Fairbanks. Some visitors stayed,
and soon a little town began to sprout up around the hotel and the McCallum ranch, and
it came to be known, after the hotel, as Palm Springs.
11

9
Bowart et al., “The McCallum Centennial.”
10
Bowart et al., “The McCallum Centennial.”
11
Western Resort Publications, Palm Springs Area Yearbook (Palm Springs: Ferris H. Scott, 1954), 15.
9

Figure 1.2: The Palm Springs Hotel, about 1901. Courtesy of USC Libraries.
Nellie Coffman, the wife of a Santa Monica doctor, first visited Palm Springs in
1908 and was immediately impressed with the little town’s potential as a winter health
resort.
12
The following year Nellie, her husband Dr. Harry Coffman, and their sons
George Roberson (Nellie’s son by her first marriage) and Earl and Owen Coffman,
13

bought a bungalow on just under two acres up the road from the McCallum adobe and
opened a boarding house. Nellie rented the bungalow’s three bedrooms to guests, mostly
respiratory patients escaping harsh winters, and put up a tent for herself and her family,
adding more tents for additional guests as needed.
14
Dr. Coffman cared for the medical

12
“Mrs. Coffman, Palm Springs Developer, Dies,” Los Angeles Times, June 11, 1950, 3,
http://www.proquest.com (accessed September 25, 2012).
13
“Mrs. Coffman,” 3.
14
Palm Springs Area Yearbook, 15.
10

needs of their guests
15
while Nellie managed the housekeeping and the books, and soon
gained a reputation for her culinary skills after stuffing two traveling reporters from the
Los Angeles Times with chicken soup, lamb chops, hot biscuits and strawberry jam.
16

Those first years were a struggle; Dr. Coffman, who did not share Nellie’s vision,
left after a few years,
17
and in 1917 George and Earl went off to fight in World War I.
18

Oddly, it was the war that turned things around for Nellie Coffman and for Palm Springs:
wealthy Eastern families, unable for the duration of the conflict to take their customary
travels in Europe, searched for a new destination and discovered the exotic spa town set
amidst the beauty and solitude of the surrounding desert. Another wave of well-healed
visitors came during the lethal post-war influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, fleeing the
contagion of the big cities for the dry, healthy desert air.
19
When George and Earl
returned from the war they saw the town’s potential, not as a health spa for asthmatics
and consumptives but as an exclusive winter resort for the well-to-do, and went into
business with their mother.
20
Over the next few years Nellie and her boys acquired more
land and transformed the boarding house into the luxurious Desert Inn, a “vast grassy
haven”
21
with a Spanish Colonial Revival-style main building and twenty-nine

15
Ernie Pyle, “Persistence for Eight Years,” Daily Boston Globe, March 27, 1942, 23,
http://www.proquest.com (accessed September 25, 2012).
16
Bess M. Wilson, “Noted Desert Hostess Traces Rise to Fame,” Los Angeles Times, January 5, 1941, D10,
http://www.proquest.com (accessed September 25, 2012).
17
Pyle, “Persistence,” 23.
18
Frank S. Nugent, “It’s No Mirage, It’s Palm Springs,” New York Times, December 14, 1947, SM36,
http://www.proquest.com (accessed September 25, 2012).
19
Pyle, “Persistence,” 23.
20
Pyle, “Persistence,” 23.
21
Ernie Pyle, “Never Undignified,” Daily Boston Globe, March 30, 1942, 11, http://www.proquest.com
(accessed September 25, 2012).
11

bungalows set amidst thirty-five acres of lush gardens,
22
a swimming pool, and tennis
courts.
23
The millionaires came, as Nellie and her sons knew they would, and in short
order the Desert Inn became one of the most renowned hostelries in the country,
transforming “the hot little hamlet from obscurity to world fame” and earning Nellie
Coffman the title of “Mother of Palm Springs.”
24

Figure 1.3: One of the buildings of the Desert Inn, about 1940. Courtesy USC Libraries.

Winter Resort
The success of Nellie Coffman’s Desert Inn inspired the development of two even
more spectacular hotels in the 1920s and cemented the town’s growing reputation as one
of the country’s premier luxury winter resorts. The first of these was the Oasis Hotel,

22
Nugent, “It’s No Mirage,” SM36.
23
Alma Whitaker, “Undaunted Woman’s Effort Rears Noted Desert Place,” Los Angeles Times, April 24,
1933, A6, http://www.proquest.com (accessed September 25, 2012).
24
Ed Ainsworth, “Desert Misses ‘Mother’ of Gay Palm Springs,” Los Angeles Times, June 14, 1950, A5,
http://www.proquest.com (accessed September 25, 2012).
12

built in 1924 on the site of the McCallum family adobe.
25
Pearl McCallum, by that time
the only surviving child of John Guthrie McCallum and heiress to his barren ranchlands,
had in 1914 married Pasadena real estate mogul Austin G. McManus; as Palm Springs
grew McManus encouraged and guided his wife as she developed into an astute
businesswoman, selling off the McCallum acreage piece by piece.
26
But Pearl kept the
McCallum homestead, and in 1924 the McManuses became the first patrons of Modern
architecture in Palm Springs when they hired Lloyd Wright to design a hotel on the
property and incorporate the family’s adobe into the complex as a memorial to Pearl’s
father.
27

Wright, who had previously experimented with concrete techniques while
working on his father’s textile block houses in Los Angeles, used a novel “slip-form”
construction technique for the Oasis: twelve-inch courses of concrete were poured
between forms and, when the concrete had set, the form was “slipped” up and the next
course poured, until the full height of the wall was completed. Pearl McManus later
remembered that “It took a year to complete and was so beautiful that many people
offered to buy it or lease it before it was finished.”
28
The hotel’s entrance was marked
with a four-story tower topped with stepped corner piers, decorated with abstract patterns
cast into the concrete and supporting a pyramidal roof that echoed the profile of Mt. San
Jacinto beyond. The glass-walled dining room was built around two pre-existing

25
Bowart et al., “The McCallum Centennial.”
26
Bowart et al., “The McCallum Centennial.”
27
Bowart et al., “The McCallum Centennial.”
28
Alan Weintraub, Lloyd Wright: The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr. (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
Inc., 1998), 239.
13

sycamore trees, which grew through openings in the roof; the adjacent McCallum adobe
served as the hotel’s lounge, with comfortable chairs clustered around the hearth.
29
The
hotel grounds featured a lush lawn with a large brazier, surrounded by lounge chairs,
where bonfires were lit each night;
30
and a “Persian” swimming pool set amidst the
surviving fruit trees of the McCallum orchard.
31

Figure 1.4: The remnants of the Oasis Hotel, 2012. Photo by author.
Author and historian Alan Hess has called the Oasis Hotel “one of the great
neglected buildings of California architecture” and “one of the first defining statements
about a Modern architecture in the desert,”
32
but its radical modern aesthetic would not
be repeated in Palm Springs for a decade. The city’s third major resort of the 1920s, the

29
“Resort Notes,” Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1927, F10. http://www.proquest.com (accessed October
6, 2012).
30
“Resort Notes,” Los Angeles Times, November 28, 1926, G12. http://www.proquest.com (accessed
October 6, 2012).
31
“Resort Notes,” Los Angeles Times, November 1, 1925, G12. http://www.proquest.com (accessed
October 6, 2012).
32
Alan Hess and Andrew Danish, Palm Springs Weekend (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001), 28-29.
14

grand Hotel El Mirador, was built in sumptuous Spanish Colonial Revival style by a
tubercular millionaire cattleman from Colorado, Prescott Thresher Stevens, who spent the
then-astronomical amount of $1 million on the resort.
33
Designed by the Los Angeles
firm of Walker & Eisen, who also designed the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the pink-walled
El Mirador was set in lush gardens a mile north of the center of town and featured an eye-
catching bell tower topped with Moorish tiles, two hundred luxurious guest rooms filled
with hand-carved furniture, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a tennis court, stables, and
the Coachella Valley’s first golf course.
34

Figure 1.5: The reconstructed El Mirador tower. Photo by author.

33
Dennis McDougal and Mike Meenan, “It’s Check-Out Time for Palm Springs’ El Mirador,” Los Angeles
Times, November 27, 1977, P120, http://www.proquest.com (accessed July 29, 2012).
34
Jenifer Warren and Scott Harris, “Fire Destroys Palm Springs’ El Mirador Hotel,” Los Angeles Times, July
27, 1989, http://www.articles.latimes.com/print/1989-07-27/news/mn-184_1_el-mirador (accessed July
29, 2012).
15

El Mirador opened with an extravagant party on New Year’s Eve, 1928;
35
ten
months later the stock market crashed, throwing the country into the depression and
wiping out many of the Midwestern and Northeastern industrialists who were the hotel’s
targeted clientele. El Mirador teetered on the brink of bankruptcy but was ultimately
saved by its popularity as the favorite retreat of Hollywood film stars, who had
discovered the joys of winter in Palm Springs and made the hotel “one of the most
prosperous, orgiastic symbols of extravagance in the midst of national poverty.”
36

Hollywood’s Playground
Hollywood had first discovered Palm Springs in the early 1920s, when the
surrounding desert had been used for location shooting of numerous silent films set in
Middle Eastern or North African locales, including Rudolph Valentino’s legendary 1921
epic The Sheik.
37
(Valentino would later honeymoon at the Desert Inn, only to be evicted
by the no-nonsense Nellie Coffman after he and his bride caused a disturbance in their
bungalow.
38
) By the end of the decade Palm Springs was becoming a favored winter
weekend retreat for the burgeoning film industry; only a few hours by car from Los
Angeles, the isolated desert village offered privacy and relaxation, warm winter sunshine
and stunning natural beauty. The film stars and studio moguls flocked to the extravagant
El Mirador in the 1930s: Ralph Bellamy, Claudette Colbert, Gary Cooper, Marlene
Dietrich, Charlie Farrell, Clark Gable, Paulette Goddard, Mary Pickford and Douglas

35
Bob Colacello, “Palm Springs Weekends,” Vanity Fair, June 1999, 205.
36
McDougal and Meenan, “It’s Check-Out Time,” P120.
37
Kevin Starr, The Dream Endures: California enters the 1940s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997),
24.
38
McDougal and Meenan, “It’s Check-Out Time,” P120.
16

Fairbanks, Rudy Vallee, John Wayne.
39
Johnny Weissmuller, Duke Kahanamoku and a
very young Esther Williams swam and posed for photographers in El Mirador’s pool;
and each winter for several years, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll broadcast their
popular Amos n’ Andy radio program from a small studio in the hotel’s bell tower.
40
So
many of the stars built weekend homes in the surrounding neighborhood that it became
known as the Movie Colony,
41
and the fame of these celebrity residents inevitably made
the town itself famous. “Through radio broadcasts, fan magazine layouts, movies and
publicity shots,” writes Alan Hess, “Palm Springs was defined by the media in the
national consciousness to a degree out of proportion with its size or the number of people
who had actually visited it.”
42

The 1930s saw Palm Springs blossom, as more and more celebrities made it their
winter weekend getaway and more and more businesses sprang up to entertain and divert
them. In 1934 actors Charlie Farrell and Ralph Bellamy, frustrated at the difficulty in
securing El Mirador’s only tennis court, built two of their own and opened the Racquet
Club a few blocks north of the hotel; it was so popular with their celebrity friends that it
soon expanded to 12 courts, along with a swimming pool, restaurant, guest bungalows
and the Bamboo Bar, where four seats were permanently reserved for Farrell, Clark
Gable, William Powell and Spencer Tracy.
43
A few years later Pearl McManus built her
competing Tennis Club at the south end of town, with multiple courts, an elegant oval

39
Colacello, “Palm Springs Weekends,” 205.
40
McDougal and Meenan, “It’s Check-Out Time,” P120-121.
41
Hess and Danish, Palm Springs Weekend, 39.
42
Hess and Danish, Palm Springs Weekend, 38-39.
43
Colacello, “Palm Springs Weekends,” 205.
17

swimming pool and “movie stars and business moguls sunning themselves on the
bougainvillea-laced terraces.”
44

Figure 1.6: La Plaza, 1938, Harry Williams, architect. Photo by author.
The town’s first nightclubs, the Chi Chi and the Ranch Club, opened in 1938;
45

and an exclusive, illegal casino, the Dunes, flourished “way out in the desert” in
Cathedral City, banished there at the insistence of Nellie Coffman, who would tolerate no
such unsavory activity anywhere near the village.
46
Palm Springs’ first shopping center,
the Spanish Colonial Revival-style La Plaza on South Palm Canyon Drive, was financed
by Desert Inn regular Julia Carnell and designed by Dayton, Ohio architect Harry
Williams, who had designed several factories for the National Cash Register Company,
owned by Carnell’s husband.
47
When it opened in 1938, La Plaza, with its picturesque
stucco-and-tile buildings flanking a central parking area, was one of the earliest

44
Bowart et al., “The McCallum Centennial.”
45
Colacello, “Palm Springs Weekends,” 205.
46
McDougal and Meenan, “It’s Check-Out Time,” P121.
47
Colacello, “Palm Springs Weekends,” 205.
18

automobile-oriented retail developments in Southern California.
48
That same year Palm
Springs was incorporated as a city, with a permanent population of 5,336.
49

Desert Modern
Except for Pearl McManus’ daring Oasis Hotel, Spanish and Mediterranean
revivals remained the dominant architectural expression of Palm Springs throughout the
town’s first golden age of the 1920s and 1930s. International Style modernism did not
make its first appearance in Palm Springs until 1934, with the construction of the Kocher-
Samson Building on North Palm Canyon Drive. The two-story mixed-use building, with
medical offices on the ground floor and an apartment above, was designed by New York
architect A. Lawerence Kocher and his Swiss-born business partner, Albert Frey, for
Kocher’s brother, Dr. J.J. Kocher.
50
Frey, who had worked briefly in Paris for Le
Corbusier before emigrating to the United States in 1930,
51
had designed the building in
response to its desert setting as a cluster of square and rectangular forms enclosing a
series of patios and small gardens.
Frey traveled to Palm Springs at the end of 1934 to supervise construction of the
Kocher-Samson Building and was instantly attracted to the desert landscape.
52
He stayed
in Palm Springs, he later explained, because “it was pioneering in a general way...

48
City of Palm Springs Historic Site Preservation Board, Palm Springs Historic Architectural Highlights
[brochure], undated.
49
Colacello, “Palm Springs Weekends,” 205.
50
Joseph Rosa, Albert Frey, Architect (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1990), 35.
51
Susanna Sirefman, “Fast-Forward Frey,” Architecture 88, 1, January 1999, 57. http://www.proquest.com
(accessed August 4, 2012).
52
Rosa, Albert Frey, 36.
19

California was about new things.”
53
The partnership with Kocher was amicably
dissolved and in 1935 Frey formed a partnership with a young California architect, John
Porter Clark, that was to last for nearly 20 years.
54
The duo produced both traditional and
modern home designs
55
and experimented with adapting the rigid tenets of the
International Style to the desert landscape and climate.

Figure 1.7: The remodeled Kocher-Samson Building today. Photo by author.
Clark and Frey remained the only architecture firm in Palm Springs until 1941,
when La Plaza architect Harry Williams returned permanently;
56
but in the late 1930s a
few outside architects, mainly from Los Angeles, also designed modern houses in the
desert. Adrian Wilson and Earle Webster designed the large Streamline Moderne house
called “Ship of the Desert,” its nautical imagery incongruously perched on a rocky

53
Diana Marcum, “Gas Station Fuels Fight in Palm Springs,” Los Angeles Times, May 27, 1997, A24.
54
Rosa, Albert Frey, 36.
55
Rosa, Albert Frey, 37.
56
Colacello, “Palm Springs Weekends,” 205.
20

hillside, in 1936;
57
and in 1937 Richard Neutra designed an exquisite small house for St.
Louis socialite Grace Lewis Miller. To maximize the little house’s livability, Neutra
designed the living room to also function as an exercise studio for Miller’s “rhythmic
body training” practice, with a north-facing wall of translucent glass that flooded the
space with light while providing privacy. Walls of sliding windows and doors, shaded by
wide overhangs of the flat roof, ensured cross ventilation, while a small reflecting pool
helped cool the screened porch and cast shimmering reflections on the ceiling.
58

Figure 1.8: The Grace Miller House, photographed by Julius Shulman. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission.
Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute (2004.R.10)
By the time the United States entered World War II in December of 1941, the
architects working in Palm Springs had begun to experiment with the development of a

57
Mayer Rus, “Ship Of The Desert,” House & Garden, November 2001, 134-35.
58
Thomas S. Hines, Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970 (New York: Rizzoli
International Publications, Inc., 2010), 375. See also Stephen Leet, Richard Neutra’s Miller House (New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004).
21

distinctly desert brand of Modernism that reflected the warm climate, dramatic landscape
and relaxed lifestyle of the exclusive resort town. But its fruition would have to wait; the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought all non-military construction to a halt, in Palm
Springs and throughout the country, for the duration of the conflict.
59

Post-war Boom
Peace returned to Palm Springs just in time for the winter season of 1945-46, and
so did the Hollywood movie stars and Eastern industrialists, to resume basking in the
winter sunshine. Along with them, in ever-increasing numbers, came ordinary tourists;
the growing prosperity of the post-war years and the rise of the car culture had created a
leisured, mobile middle class that sought, in Palm Springs, the good life that had
previously been available only to the very rich. This surge of visitors and seasonal
residents - by 1951 the city’s winter population swelled to almost 30,000
60
- coincided
with the peak of Modernism’s popularity; the desert climate and casual lifestyle all but
demanded unconventional design, and clients were more accepting of, even sought out, a
more adventurous style in the resort atmosphere of Palm Springs than they would have in
their permanent homes.
61
A cadre of talented young architects - William Cody, William
Krisel, Donald Wexler - along with the town’s established practitioners Frey and Clark
and Harry Williams (who was joined in practice in 1946 by his two sons, Roger and

59
Colacello, “Palm Springs Weekends,” 205.
60
Western Resort Publications, “Yearbook,” 16.
61
Jeff Book, “Palm Springs Revisited,” Departures, October 2000, http://www.departures.com/articles/
print/palm-springs-revisited (accessed June 30, 2012).
22

Stewart
62
), as well as several prominent Los Angeles architects, set about meeting the
demand with everything from International Style purity to Googie-style whimsy. Palm
Springs was transformed from a fantasy Spanish village into an incarnation of mid-
century America as nascent superpower hurtling toward the New Frontier, “a shimmering
reflection of an optimistic age.”
63

Figure 1.9: The Kaufmann House, 1947, photographed by Julius Shulman. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with
permission. Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute (2004.R.10)
In 1946 Pittsburgh department store tycoon Edgar J. Kaufmann and his wife
Liliane hired Richard Neutra to design a winter home in Palm Springs. Ten years earlier
the couple had engaged Frank Lloyd Wright to design Fallingwater, their summer home
at Bear Run, Pennsylvania and one of the masterpieces of 20th century American

62
Colacello, “Palm Springs Weekends,” 205.
63
Eric Wills, “Palm Springs Eternal,” Preservation, May/June 2008, http://www.preservationnation.org/
magazine/2008/may-june/palm-springs.html (accessed June 22, 2012).
23

architecture;
64
their desert home would prove equally iconic. Neutra envisioned the
project as the juxtaposition of “a foreign, man-made construct onto a wild, unrefined,
natural setting,”
65
and produced a delicate, machine-like pavilion of aluminum, plate
glass and water to “reflect the dynamic changes [in] the moods of the landscape.”
66
The
plan is a pinwheel, with a massive stone chimney anchoring the central glass-walled
living room, off of which four wings radiate in each direction, embracing the site; these
contain the master suite, guest bedrooms, kitchen and service rooms, and a carport, each
wing defining an outdoor space focused on a particular desert vista. Vertical supports are
minimized, making the metal-edged planes of the flat roof appear to float over the
transparent glass walls; one corner of the living room opens with sliding doors to the
lawn and swimming pool, further blurring the distinction between indoors and out. A
rooftop outdoor room, which Neutra called the “gloriette,” is screened with metal louvers
and at the time provided unobstructed views over the valley.
67
“While not grown there or
rooted there,” Neutra explained, “the building nevertheless fuses with its setting, partakes
in its events, emphasizes its character.”
68

That same year, on a boulder-strewn lot next door to the Kaufmann house, Albert
Frey designed a minimalist house for industrial designer Raymond Loewy, creator of the
Coca-Cola bottle and the Studebaker Avanti.
69
The simple, flat-roofed, L-shaped

64
Hines, Architecture of the Sun, 565. See also Thomas S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for
Modern Architecture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
65
Adèle Cygelman, Palm Springs Modern: Houses in the California Desert (New York: Rizzoli International
Publications, Inc., 1999), 52.
66
Hines, Architecture of the Sun, 569.
67
Cygelman, Palm Springs Modern, 52-56.
68
Hines, Architecture of the Sun, 569.
69
Cygelman, Palm Springs Modern, 40.
24

structure, with the living area in one wing and two bedrooms in the other, frames a
central outdoor space containing a curvilinear swimming pool studded with large rocks.
The pool continues under a sliding glass wall right into the living room, bringing the
outdoors in; actor William Powell once fell in accidentally during a party.
70
Frey would
repeat the Loewy house theme almost twenty years later in his design for his own second
home, Frey House II (1963), a steel-and-glass hillside structure incorporating a massive
boulder in situ as the dominant interior feature.
71

Figure 1.10: Loewy House, 1947, photographed by Julius Shulman. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission.
Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute (2004.R.10)
Modernism’s popular appeal in Palm Springs was cemented with the construction
of the Frank Sinatra house in 1946. The singer walked into the offices of Williams,

70
Cygelman, Palm Springs Modern, 40.
71
Rosa, Albert Frey, 120.
25

Williams and Williams one day that summer and asked for the design of a Georgian
Colonial house, to be completed by Christmas; Roger and Stewart Williams agreed, but
also presented Sinatra with additional plans for a modern house better suited to the Movie
Colony lot marked by two towering palm trees. Sinatra chose the modern design.
72
“We
had a contractor who put three shifts a day in and worked 24 hours around the clock,”
recalled Stewart Williams, “and got it done.”
73

Figure 1.11: Sinatra House, 1949. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. Julius Shulman Photography Archive,
Research Library at the Getty Research Institute (2004.R.10)
The shed-roofed, redwood-clad house, with sliding glass doors opening at the
push of a button to a piano-shaped swimming pool,
74
was called “Twin Palms” (not to be
confused with the later Twin Palms development by the Alexander Construction Co.) and

72
Cygelman, Palm Springs Modern, 72.
73
Colacello, “Palm Springs Weekends,” 205.
74
Cygelman, Palm Springs Modern, 82.
26

captured the public’s imagination as the setting of glamorous Hollywood parties, “Rat
Pack” hijinx, and Sinatra’s notorious alcohol-fueled fights with his second wife, actress
Ava Gardner. The original master bathroom sink still bears a crack, allegedly from the
impact of a Champagne bottle that Sinatra hurled at Gardner’s head.
75

Over the next two decades Palm Springs remade itself in Sinatra’s image - sun-
baked, martini-soaked and carefree - and Modernism was adopted as the vernacular for
housing, hotels, commercial buildings and civic structures.
76
William Cody, a young
USC alumnus recently arrived in Palm Springs, made a name for himself in 1947 with his
playful design for the Del Marcos Hotel, a wood, stone and glass homage to Wright’s
Taliesin West; in 1955 Cody would design the sleek Spa Hotel on the site of the hot
springs.
77
Pearl McManus hired Los Angeles architects A. Quincy Jones and Paul R.
Williams to design a new restaurant at her Tennis Club in 1947, the same year the pair
collaborated on the Town & Country Center, an upscale mixed-use development of
shops, offices, apartments and a fashionable restaurant.
78
Charlie Farrell was elected
mayor in 1948 and soon after hired Albert Frey to expand his Racquet Club with new
Modern bungalows.
79
Frey, with his partners John Clark and Robson Chambers, was
kept consistently busy during those years, designing schools, libraries, hospitals, fire
stations, apartment buildings and houses, as well as three of the city’s most prominent
projects: In the early 1950s the partners collaborated with E. Stewart Williams to design

75
Twin Palms Frank Sinatra Estate, “The House: The History of the Frank Sinatra Estate,”
SinatraHouse.com, http://www.sinatrahouse.com/the-house (accessed November 26, 2011).
76
Book, “Palm Springs Revisited.”
77
Hess and Danish, Palm Springs Weekend, 92-94.
78
Palm Springs Modern Committee, “Town & Country Center,” PS MODCOM, http://www.psmodcom.org
/index.php/town-country-center-architecture/ (accessed October 29, 2012).
79
Colacello, “Palm Springs Weekends,” 206.
27

the new Palm Springs City Hall, completed in 1957, a formal composition of glass,
concrete block, and clusters of sheet metal cylinders forming richly-textured brise-
soleils.
80
The same team simultaneously worked on the Valley Station of the Palm
Springs Aerial Tramway; conceived in 1949 but not completed until 1963, the building is
a covered bridge of glassed-in steel trusses spanning a stream in Chino Canyon.
81
And in
1963, after Clark had amicably left the partnership, Frey and Chambers designed the
dramatic Tramway Gas Station on Highway 111, with its soaring roof, described by Frey
as an “hyperbolic parabaloid,” proclaiming the northern entrance to the city.
82

Figure 1.12: Entrance canopy of the Spa Hotel, 1955, William Cody, architect. Photo by author.

80
Rosa, Albert Frey, 114.
81
Rosa, Albert Frey, 119.
82
Rosa, Albert Frey, 119.
28

Figure 1.13: Palm Springs City Hall, 1957, Albert Frey, John Porter Clark, Robson Chambers and E. Stewart Williams,
architects. Photo by author.

Figure 1.14: Palm Springs Aerial Tramway Valley Station, 1963, Albert Frey, John Porter Clark, Robson Chambers
and E. Stewart Williams, architects. Photo by author.

29

The Alexanders
Along with lavish custom homes and sleek commercial and institutional
buildings, the mid-century Modernization of Palm Springs can be largely attributed to the
work of father-and-son developers from Los Angeles, George and Robert Alexander, and
their young architects, William Krisel and Dan Palmer. After building over a thousand
houses with Krisel’s post-and-beam design in the San Fernando Valley in the early
1950s, the Alexanders cast their eyes on less-competitive Palm Springs. “Nobody was
building tract housing,” Krisel remembered. “There were mostly custom houses or
individual builders doing spec houses.”
83
In 1955 the Alexanders purchased land in the
then-remote Twin Palms neighborhood south of East Palm Canyon Drive (not to be
confused with Frank Sinatra’s Movie Colony house, which was also known as Twin
Palms) and built a Krisel-designed hotel, the Ocotillo Lodge, to attract visitors to the
area. The land behind the Lodge was subdivided and a tract of 39 houses was built, each
with the same Krisel floor plan;
84
but by mirroring the plan and alternating rooflines and
details, Krisel gave the impression of individual, custom-designed homes.
85

The houses sold quickly, and two more phases were completed in Twin Palms,
followed by tracts near the Racquet Club and in the Vista Las Palmas neighborhood.
Over the next decade the Alexander Construction Company built more than 2,200 houses
in tracts throughout Palm Springs,
86
nearly all designed by Krisel and all sharing creative

83
“Making Tracts,” Flaunt, October 2000, 94-95.
84
Mary Anne Pinkston, “It’s An Alexander,” The Desert Sun, October 28, 2001, F1.
85
Sian Winship, “Quantity and Quality: Architects Working for Developers in Southern California, 1960-
1973” (thesis, University of Southern California, 2011), 192.
86
Pinkston, “It’s An Alexander,” F1.
30

variations of the same features: dramatic “butterfly” or A-frame roofs; open floor plans;
high tongue-and-groove ceilings; glass walls and clerestories to admit light and provide
mountain and desert views; and wide overhangs and ornamental screens to shade the
houses from the merciless heat.
87
The houses were modest in size, ranging from 1,200 to
1,600 square feet, with three bedrooms and two baths, except for the larger four-
bedroom, three-bath models in ritzy Las Palmas - apparently a concession to wealthier
residents’ need for maid’s quarters.
88

Figure 1.15: A restored "butterfly"-roofed Alexander in Las Palmas, designed by Krisel and Palmer. Photo by author.
In 1961-62 the Alexanders teamed with Palm Springs architects Donald Wexler
and Richard A. Harrison to develop a tract of 35 experimental steel houses in the north
end of town, sponsored by U.S. Steel.
89
The design of the 1,400 square foot houses was

87
Judith Graffam, “Palm Springs’ mid-century modern architecture,” The Press-Enterprise, October 27,
2001, D3.
88
Pinkston, “It’s An Alexander,” F1.
89
Lauren Weiss Bricker and Sidney Williams, Steel and Shade: The Architecture of Donald Wexler (Palm
Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum, 2011), 21.
31

based on a modular system of a prefabricated structural steel frame, steel roof decking
and insulated wall panels
90
with a factory-built core containing the kitchen, bathroom and
mechanical unit.
91
Only seven two-bedroom model homes were built before a dramatic
increase in steel prices doomed the project.
92

Figure 1.16: One of the seven Wexler-designed U.S. Steel houses. Photo by author.
The Alexanders and their architects demonstrated a commitment to providing
affordable, well-designed homes by adapting the elements of Modern architecture to
mass-produced housing, making Palm Springs one of the few places where this key tenet
of Modernism was realized. Tragically, the Alexander legacy was cut short in 1965 with
the crash of a small plane carrying George Alexander and his wife, Jimmie, and their son
Robert and his wife, Helene, killing all aboard.
93

90
Bricker and Williams, Steel and Shade, 15.
91
Bricker and Williams, Steel and Shade, 23.
92
Tony Merchell, “The Nerve of Steel,” Palm Springs Life, November 1998, 49-51.
93
“Alexanders Die in Crash,” The Desert Sun, November 15, 1965, 1.
32

Decline and Neglect
The Alexander family tragedy marked the beginning of the end of Palm Springs’
golden age, as the late 1960s saw the resort fade in popularity and slide into decades of
decline and neglect. In an era of extreme political and social upheaval - the Kennedy and
King assassinations, the Vietnam war, the “Summer of Love” and the anti-establishment
movement - the Eisenhower-era optimism of Palm Springs must have seemed hopelessly
quaint and outdated. Modernism itself had fallen out of favor and was rejected as cold
and sterile, with its Utopian promise of societal improvement unfulfilled. The older
celebrities had given Palm Springs its unique character were dying or moving away,
while the younger ones traveled to more exotic destinations. New development, in the
form of gated, private country clubs with houses built around golf courses, moved “down
valley” to the wide open spaces of Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells and La
Quinta, which soon “eclipsed Palm Springs in population, wealth and glamour.”
94

As the town withered, hotels and shops closed, houses were abandoned, and by
the early 1970s Palm Springs had become somewhat of a ghost town, “a kind of
geezerville for retirees.”
95
Developers showed little interest in the town for the next
twenty years, leaving its distinct desert Modern architecture almost completely intact, “an
American urban period piece preserved in situ.”
96

94
Colacello, “Palm Springs Weekends,” 208.
95
Wills, “Palm Springs Eternal.”
96
Kurt Andersen, “Desert Cool,” The New Yorker, February 23 & March 2, 1998, 132.
33

Chapter 2
Fairy Dust
Palm Springs languished throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as development moved
to the newer communities further east in the Coachella Valley and tourists spent their
vacation dollars in fresher, hipper destinations. The city aged along with its graying
population and consoled itself with memories of better days, ignored and largely
forgotten save for the thousands of college students who arrived each March for spring
break. Beginning in the 1960s, the annual influx of as many as 15,000
1
had become a
significant source of revenue for the cash-strapped city but had grown increasingly
rowdy. It reached its nadir in 1986 when 1,200 drunken students rampaged through
downtown, blocking Palm Canyon Drive, ripping clothing off passing women, assaulting
shop owners and throwing rocks, bottles and beer cans at police.
2
The riot ended with
530 arrests and cost Palm Springs $40,000 in damage and $100,000 in overtime pay for
law enforcement personnel.
3

One of the few bright spots in those years of decline and neglect was the growth
of an open and thriving gay community in Palm Springs. There had undoubtedly always
been gay men and women in Palm Springs; Hollywood lore is rife with rumored same-
sex couplings involving many of the celebrities who frequented and lived in the desert
resort during its heyday. But because the social mores of the times forced them to live

1
Louis Sahagun, “Palm Springs Plans Curbs on Spring Break Revelers,” Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1987,
3, http://www.proquest.com (accessed July 10, 2012).
2
Eric Malnic and Ross Newhan, “Holiday Youths Run Wild in Palm Springs,” Los Angeles Times, March29,
1986, OC1, http://www.proquest.com (accessed July 10, 2012).
3
Sahagun.
34

mostly closeted lives they did not identify, publicly or (as far as we know) privately, as
“gay” and therefore could not form a distinct and articulate community. The few brave
souls who defied the Hollywood closet and lived openly gay lives generally paid with
their careers. One of these was actor William Haines, one of MGM’s most popular
leading men in the 1920s and early 1930s, who lived quietly but openly with his lover,
Jimmy Shields. In 1932, after being discovered in a public indiscretion with a sailor at a
downtown Los Angeles YMCA, Haines was ordered by his boss, Louis B. Mayer, to
immediately leave Shields and marry a woman in an attempt to cover up the scandal.
Haines refused and was fired, effectively ending his acting career. Known among the
film crowd for his style and impeccable taste, Haines opened an interior design business
and, patronized by his former colleagues, quickly became the leading decorator in
Hollywood. In 1957, Haines and Shields bought a house in the Movie Colony of Palm
Springs; among Haines’s most significant works in later years were the interiors of
Sunnylands, the A. Quincy Jones-designed winter residence of Ambassador and Mrs.
Walter Annenberg in nearby Rancho Mirage.
4

A sadder story is that of James Whale, director of the 1930s film classics
Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, Showboat, The Invisible Man and The Man In
the Iron Mask. Eventually ostracized from Hollywood because of his unapologetic,
militant homosexuality, Whale’s film career was over by the 1940s. He spent his
remaining years traveling, painting, and investing in real estate. In about 1953 Whale
purchased the Town & Desert resort in Palm Springs, a small 8-unit Modern hotel built

4
David Wallace, A City Comes Out: How Celebrities Made Palm Springs a Gay and Lesbian Paradise (Fort
Lee, NJ: Barricade Books Inc., 2008), 151-56.
35

around a 40-foot swimming pool. There Whale painted and hosted nude swimming
parties for handsome young men. In 1957, depressed and debilitated after a series of
strokes, Whale drowned himself in the swimming pool of his Pacific Palisades Home.
5

Figure 2.1: The Town & Desert Hotel, 1947, Herbert W. Burns, architect; now the Orbit In's Hideaway. Photo by
author.
In Haines and Whale’s day there was virtually no public expression of the gay
experience, in Palm Springs or anywhere else for that matter. Only after the upheaval of
the late 1960s did the closet door crack open; the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and similar
protests around the country mark the start of a public activism that began to allow gay
men and women to live somewhat openly and honestly. The Coachella Valley’s first
gay-oriented establishments opened in the late 1960s in then-unincorporated Cathedral
City, which was far less restrictive than conservative, uptight Palm Springs. Bars such as
the Gaf (“fag” spelled backward) and His & Hers
6
, and resorts like the Desert Palms Inn
7

5
Howard Johns, Palm Springs Confidential: Playground of the Stars (Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books Inc.,
2004), 125-26.
6
Wallace, 30.
36

catered to a small, quiet contingent of gay and lesbian tourists and residents. Within a
very few years a public gay community would begin to form in Palm Springs itself.
In the Desert with Dinah
In 1972 big-band singer, film star, television personality and golf enthusiast
Dinah Shore, a longtime Palm Springs resident, lent her name and patronage to the
Ladies Professional Golf Association to launch one of the country’s first major women’s
sporting events, the Colgate Dinah Shore Golf Tournament (later known as the Nabisco
Dinah Shore and today as the Kraft Nabisco Championship.) From its inception the
tournament, played at the Mission Hills Country Club near Shore’s home in Rancho
Mirage, quietly attracted a small following of lesbian golf fans. Primarily older and not
publicly open about their sexual orientation, they gathered discreetly to watch top female
athletes perform and, as their numbers grew, began to augment the four-day tournament
with private parties and gatherings around the Coachella Valley.
8

As word spread in the lesbian community over the next ten years the small,
private following of lesbian golf fans grew into an annual inundation of gay female
spring tourists, increasingly younger, more affluent and more open lesbians who lacked
entrée to the exclusive private gatherings accompanying the sporting event. One of these
young women was Caroline Clone, who managed a Los Angeles dance club and first
attended the Dinah Shore in 1982. Clone was surprised by the lack of lesbian-oriented

7
Jeff Dillon, “Desert environment has always extended an open invitation,” The Desert Sun, April 31,
1996, A8.
8
Steve Pokin, “Lesbian links: Desert an oasis for gay women at Dinah Week,” The Press-Enterprise, March
28, 1993, E1.
37

nightlife in the Coachella Valley, and the following year she organized the first public,
lesbian party associated with the Dinah Shore Tournament. She rented a Cathedral City
restaurant, organized a party which anyone could attend for a cover charge, and promoted
the event to the tournament’s lesbian fans. Clone expected a crowd of 300-400 women;
but on the appointed evening 1,000 lesbians turned out, eager to enjoy each other’s
company in an open, public setting.
9

By the early 1990s the annual extended weekend of lesbian-oriented public events
associated with the tournament had become big business. Known as “Dinah Shore
Weekend”, the events annually attracted to the Coachella Valley as many as 10,000
lesbians who paid $10 to $30 per event to attend the various dances, concerts, stand-up
comedy shows and whipped-cream wrestling matches.
10
With professional event
promoters booking entire hotels and the Palm Springs Convention Center as venues, the
“Dinah Weekend” events had no actual connection to the golf tournament, other than
scheduling and the (by that time) late star’s name. “The event itself has taken on more
significance than the golf tournament,” said lesbian travel agent Stacy Michaels in a 1996
interview with the Desert Sun. “I can assure you that if the Dinah Shore Tournament
went away, the Dinah Shore parties would continue.”
11
The significance of the Dinah
Shore Weekend - and of the Coachella Valley’s atmosphere of tolerance and acceptance -
is made clear in the comments of one lesbian tourist from St. Paul, Minnesota:
Imagine, for 51 weeks out of the year, not being able to hold your lover’s hand or
being afraid to go to certain places with your lover because you’re going to get

9
Pokin.
10
Pokin.
11
Dillon, “Desert environment.”
38

funny looks and dirty words yelled at you. Then you come here for the Shore
weekend and you’re with a huge group of women who are discriminated against
or have to hide for the rest of the year. You can’t imagine how good it feels to be
accepted for who you are instead of what you do.”
12

Warm Sands
While “Dinah Weekend” was attracting increasing numbers of lesbian visitors to
the Coachella Valley, the Warm Sands neighborhood of Palm Springs was at the same
time growing into a popular vacation destination for gay men. Located south of
downtown Palm Springs off of Ramon Road, the area was originally developed in the
1920s as a modest single-family residential neighborhood.
13
By the late 1940s Warm
Sands was sprouting dozens of small hotels, motels and vacation apartments that catered
to the city’s growing number of middle-class winter tourists, for whom the larger, more
lavish hotels would have been off-putting or out of reach.
14
The little family-run
hostelries of Warm Sands were hit hard when Palm Springs slid into its decline; and
when large new resorts began to open in Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage and Indian Wells,
many of these small, modest accommodations went out of business. By the mid-1970s
the neighborhood was “an eyesore of drug dealers, prostitutes and dilapidated
buildings.”
15

One of these rundown Warm Sands hostelries was El Mirasol, a collection of
stucco bungalows and pools set within a walled garden, built in 1947 allegedly by

12
Jeff Dillon and Steve DiMeglio, “Sunshine, fresh air, great views and Acceptance,” The Desert Sun,
March 31, 1996.
13
Warm Sands Neighborhood Organization, “Neighborhood Profile,” Warm Sands Neighborhood
Organization, http://www.pswarmsands.com/profile.html (accessed July 10, 2012).
14
Wallace, 29.
15
Jeff Dillon, “Community builders: gay hoteliers revive Warm Sands area,” The Desert Sun, April 1, 1996,
A8.
39

Howard Hughes to discreetly accommodate his friends and mistresses.
16
In 1975 an
enterprising gentleman named Bob Cannon took advantage of the area’s depressed real
estate values to purchase El Mirasol and spruce it up;
17
he reopened the renovated
property as El Mirasol Villas, and catered exclusively to a clientele of gay men
18
who,
like their heterosexual counterparts of the previous generation, were being drawn to Palm
Springs by the sun, the warm dry air, the searing blue skies and the stunning desert
scenery, so conveniently close to Los Angeles. El Mirasol Villas provided them a safe
and comfortable environment where they could be open about their sexuality.

Figure 2.2: El Mirasol Villas, Warm Sands Drive. Photo by author.
The newly gay El Mirasol Villas was a success, but for eight years remained an
isolated bright spot in the otherwise still-seedy Warm Sands neighborhood. But in 1984
a second gay hotel opened on Warm Sands Drive and the area began a dramatic

16
Wallace, 29.
17
Donald Ettinger, telephone interview by author, July 19, 2012.
18
Wallace, 29.
40

turnaround. Bob Mellen and Peter Tangel, a Los Angeles couple, purchased a small
apartment complex, seven units in a “U” shape around a swimming pool, down the block
from El Mirasol and converted it into the Vista Grande, Palm Springs’s second
exclusively gay hotel.
19
It was also the city’s first clothing-optional hotel
20
, and was
instantly popular with gay men who preferred sunbathing in the nude. Mellen and Tangel
both held weekday jobs in Los Angeles and originally operated the Vista Grande as a
weekend-only establishment, but demand grew so great that the couple soon moved to
Palm Springs full-time and opened the hotel seven days a week. Mellen “fell in love”
with the hotel, noting “I don’t have to wear a tie. Where else is a 50-year-old man going
to get a job where he can work in a bathing suit?”
21

As gay tourism and the corresponding demand for gay-oriented accommodations
increased steadily through the 1980s and into the 1990s, more investors were drawn to
Warm Sands. Attracted by the low prices and inspired by the success of El Mirasol and
Vista Grande, they renovated more and more of the area’s decrepit old hotels. Mellen
and Tangel themselves bought two more properties in order to expand their offerings at
the Vista Grande. By 1996 there were fifteen attractive, well-kept hotels clustered just
around Warm Sands Drive catering exclusively to gay men. The drug dealers and
prostitutes disappeared, and Warm Sands was transformed into a safe and desirable area.
John Connel, a gay Palm Springs businessman, credited the revitalization of Warm Sands

19
Tom Gorman, “Palm Springs makes bid for gays’ dollars,” Los Angeles Times, March 8, 1993, 3,
http://www.proquest.com (accessed July 10, 2012).
20
Wallace, 29.
21
Gorman.
41

entirely to the gay men who had invested in the neighborhood: “They went over to those
rundown properties and put in a lot of fairy dust.”
22

Pride and Profit
The transformation of Warm Sands was only one among many significant and
lasting effects of increased gay tourism in Palm Springs beginning in the 1980s. Many of
the gay tourists who vacationed in the city took advantage of the area’s depressed real
estate market and purchased property, becoming full- or part-time residents. By 1989 it
was estimated that between 20,000 and 30,000 gay men and women lived in the
Coachella Valley.
23
They supported, and in some cases operated, gay-friendly businesses
of every variety - hotels, restaurants, bars, shops, art galleries - which created an
accepting, welcoming environment that drew more gay visitors to the city, many of
whom, in turn, became residents themselves.
24
In at least one sad respect, this migration
echoed Palm Springs’s early days as a health resort for tubercular patients; many of the
gay men who moved to Palm Springs in the 1980s were HIV-positive or had AIDS, and
were drawn to the desert by the warm, healthful climate, affordable housing and readily
available medical services.
25

The growth of this out, active and highly visible community gave rise within the
decade to not only hundreds of gay-owned and -oriented businesses but also three gay
churches, several magazines and newsletters, a bowling league, the Desert AIDS Project,

22
Dillon, “Community builders.”
23
Kelle Russell, “Desert’s gays grow in stature...and pride,” The Desert Sun, July 28, 1989, A1.
24
Dillon, “Desert environment.”
25
Mark Henry, “Another desert scene,” The Press-Enterprise, July 10, 1994, A1.
42

the lesbian-oriented Desert Women’s Association, and the Desert Business Association, a
sort of chamber of commerce for the Coachella Valley’s gay-owned and gay-friendly
businesses.
26
It was the Desert Business Association that sponsored the Coachella
Valley’s first Gay Pride celebration in June of 1986. Gay Pride had been celebrated
annually in major cities across the United States since June of 1970, when gay rights
groups in New York City and Los Angeles organized marches to commemorate the first
anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. The 1986 event in Palm Springs was a comparatively
modest affair, a cocktail party and variety show held in the ballroom of the Hilton Hotel;
proceeds from the event were divided between the Desert Business Association and local
charities.
27
Subsequent events were expanded into annual Gay Pride Weekends, with
parades and festivals held each June or July in various locales in Cathedral City and Palm
Springs and attracting crowds of up to 2,000 visitors.
28
In 1995 organizers sensibly
moved the event to November to avoid the blistering summer heat; attendance more than
doubled to 5,000.
29
By 2001 the three-day celebration was attracting some 50,000
attendees - three-quarters of them out-of-town visitors - and pumping an estimated $7
million to $17 million into the local economy.
30

This spending power had not gone unnoticed in a city that lived or died by the
tourist dollar. In the late 1980s gay tourism in Palm Springs more than filled the void left
when the city cracked down on Spring Break revelry after the 1986 disturbances; hotels

26
Russell.
27
“Gay Pride Day to make its local debut,” The Desert Sun, June 25, 1986, A3.
28
See Tracy C. Correa, “Gays show unity in desert festival,” The Press-Enterprise, July 31, 1989, B3; and
Cecilia Chan, “Gay Pride parade a big draw,” The Desert Sun, November 13, 1995, A3.
29
Chan.
30
Nadia T. Villagran, “Pride event generates millions for economy,” The Desert Sun, November 21, 2001,
E1.
43

and merchants happily discovered that gay visitors “were bigger spenders and better-
behaved guests than the raucous, beer swilling teen-agers” who had previously swarmed
the city each Easter week.
31
Indeed, a 1988 study published by the Simmons Market
Research Bureau confirmed that American gays had higher-than-average household
incomes ($55,430 compared to $32,144); were better-educated (49.6% of gays were
college graduates, compared to the national average of 18%); had better jobs (49% in
professional or managerial positions, compared to 15.9% average); and did more
traveling abroad (63.8% compared to 14%).
32
And it was commonly understood that
without the financial responsibility of children, gay men and women seemed able and
willing to spend more in hotels, restaurants and shops; Palm Springs city officials
estimated that gay tourists spent nearly 25% more per person, per day than the city’s
average tourist.
33

In the sluggish economy of the early 1990s, Palm Springs began to officially
promote itself to the gay market when in 1992 the city’s Tourism department partnered
with the independent Palm Springs Gay Tourism Council, a newly-formed trade
association, to produce and distribute the Gay Guide to Palm Springs. The Guide
included articles on local gay and lesbian tourism, an events calendar, advertisements for
local gay-oriented businesses and a welcome letter from the City’s mayor.
34
Within a
year the city’s tourism director was reporting that 25% of all requests for visitor

31
“Valley greets gay tourists,” The Desert Sun, April 3, 1996, A8.
32
Cecilia Leyva, “Palm Springs cashes in on gay tourism,” The Desert Sun, December 20, 1992, E1.
33
Leyva, “Palm Springs.”
34
Cecilia Leyva, “New trade group busily promoting city,” The Desert Sun, December 20, 1992, E1.
44

guidebooks were for the Gay Guide.
35
By the mid-1990s Palm Springs was annually
attracting almost 80,000 gay tourists who spent more than $13 million each year on
hotels, restaurants, shopping and entertainment,
36
and the city ranked with Provincetown,
Massachusetts and Key West, Florida as one of the top gay resort destinations in the
United States.
37

Figure 2.3: The rainbow flag, an increasingly common site in Palm Springs since the 1980s. Photo by author.
The White Party
In 1988 Jeffrey Sanker, a successful New York City party promoter who had
recently relocated to Los Angeles, attended a Dinah Shore Weekend lesbian party
organized by his friend Caroline Clone at the Palm Springs Marquis Resort. “There were
around 2,000 women,” Sanker said. “A light bulb went off and I thought to myself: ‘If

35
Gorman.
36
Leyva, “Palm Springs.”
37
Jeff Dillon, “Gays feel welcome in valley,” The Desert Sun, March 31, 1996, A7.
45

this can work for the girls, why not the guys?’”
38
Sanker was inspired to launch White
Party Palm Springs, one of the largest and most successful gay “circuit” parties in the
country and perhaps the single most significant development in cementing Palm
Springs’s status as the gay vacation and residential “Mecca” of the 1990s.
Sanker got his start as a party promoter in New York City in the early 1980s,
producing special events at such legendary nightspots as the Palladium and Studio 54.
39

After moving to Los Angeles in 1987 Sanker produced dance parties and special events
for gay clubs such as Arena, Studio One, Probe, Axis and Hollywood Boys Club, as well
as for House of Blues in Los Angeles, Orlando, Myrtle Beach and Chicago.
40
Inspired by
his Dinah Shore Weekend visit to Palm Springs, Sanker modeled his White Party (named
after the event’s required attire) on the series of parties then becoming popular in a string
of cities on the East Coast. Beginning in the mid-1980s as an effort to increase
awareness of HIV/AIDS and raise funds to combat the disease, the events had grown into
a “circuit” of professionally-produced all-night dance parties, sexually charged and
frequently drug-fueled, bracketed in the days before and after by affiliated parties and
events and drawing tens of thousands of gay and bisexual men.
41

About 1,000 people attended Sanker’s first White Party at the Palm Springs
Marquis over Memorial Day weekend, 1989; the following year he moved the event up to

38
Mona M. de Crinis, “The boys are back in town,” Desert Post Weekly, April 12, 2001, 16.
39
White Party Entertainment, Inc., “Jeffrey Sanker’s Biography,” Jeffrey Sanker Presents,
http://www.jeffreysanker.com/bio.html (accessed July 18, 2012).
40
de Crinis.
41
Amin Ghaziani, “The Circuit Party’s Faustian Bargain,” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 4,
July/August 2005, 21, http://www.proquest.com (accessed July 18, 2012).
46

Easter weekend to avoid the heat.
42
Thereafter it grew bigger and more popular each year
through the 1990s; the 1999 White Party drew more than 23,000 attendees from around
the world, with events spread out over four hotels and the Palm Springs Convention
Center, and generated nearly $1 million dollars in bed taxes alone for the city of Palm
Springs.
43
While there were initially some reservations about the effect such an event
would have on the city’s reputation, the financial benefits, the attendant publicity and the
city’s inherent culture of acceptance won out and Palm Springs embraced the White Party
wholeheartedly, working closely with Sanker each year to ensure the events’ success.
44

Palm Springs was to benefit far more than just financially from the influx of gay
tourists and residents in the 1980s and 1990s. Among the tens of thousands of gay men
drawn each year by the throbbing beat of the White Party and the clothing- optional
resorts of Warm Sands, there were countless creative types - architects, artists, designers,
photographers - who cast their discerning eyes on the city’s still reasonably-priced
residential neighborhoods and discovered there the long-neglected architectural gems
from its storied past. In a fortunate coincidence, the “gaying” of Palm Springs coincided
with a national re-evaluation of the art and architecture of the middle of the 20th century;
and it was this union of gay men and Modernism that would by the end of the century
complete the rehabilitation of Palm Springs and restore the city to its historic place as one
of the world’s premier resorts.

42
de Crinis.
43
Gregory V. Harris, “Weekend expected to generate $1 million,” The Desert Sun, April 23, 2000, B1.
44
See de Crinis and Ronnie Lynn, “Diverse groups mingle during long weekend,” The Desert Sun, April 21,
2000, A1.
47

Chapter 3
Cool Again
The “gaying” of Palm Springs in the 1980s laid the groundwork for the resort’s
wider rebirth in the 1990s, when its trademark Modern architecture became once again
fashionable. As the last decade of the 20th century loomed the design aesthetic of the
century’s middle decades was re-evaluated; dismissed by many since the 1970s as sterile,
rigid and insensitive, Modern architecture was newly appreciated for its minimalism,
flexibility and openness. A number of theories have been expounded to explain this
turnabout: the cyclical nature of fashion, through which it seems everything old does
indeed eventually become new again; the nostalgia of by then middle-aged baby
boomers for the “mod, kitschy artifacts” of their childhood and the “giant cocktails,
lounge music, cigars, Sinatra (and) poolside cha-cha-cha” that their parents had enjoyed;
1

or an attempt, in an unsure time, to recapture some semblance of the perceived optimism
and determination of those seemingly halcyon post-war years.
2
And it must at least in
part have been a natural reaction against the pastiche of Post-modernism that had littered
American cities throughout the 1980s.
Whatever the reasons for the revived popularity of Modernism, as the eighties
gave way to the nineties Palm Springs - with its unparalleled concentration of Modern
architecture, preserved by neglect; its growing gay population; its celebrated history and
lingering aura of mid-century swank; and its proximity to Los Angeles and the
entertainment industry - lay poised to be rediscovered and reawakened, first by a small

1
Kurt Andersen, “Desert Cool,” The New Yorker, February 23 & March 2, 1998, 128.
2
Kevin Starr, Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2003 (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 55.
48

cadre of architectural historians and Modernism aficionados - gay and straight - from the
worlds of fashion, entertainment and design; and, after word of these early restoration
efforts had been publicized in what ultimately grew into a media frenzy, by the larger
trend-seeking outside world.

Frey Revisited
As early as 1986, with the publication of Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture
by Alan Hess, the renewed popularity of Modernism spawned, and was in turn further
stoked by, a plethora of glossy tomes and academic monographs celebrating the glories of
mid-century design and designers. Joseph Rosa’s Albert Frey: Architect, published in
1990 by Rizzoli, was the first of these books to focus on the architecture of Palm Springs.
Rosa was teaching architecture at a division of the City University of New York when in
1986 he became involved in an effort to prevent the demolition of Frey’s Aluminaire
House, a wood-and-aluminum prototype portable house located in Huntington, Long
Island.
3
Rosa recognized the significance of the house - it was one of only two American
houses featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal 1932 exhibition of Modern
architecture - and began researching the work of Albert Frey in the course of publicizing
the Aluminaire’s plight.
4

3
Joseph Rosa, “The Aluminaire House, 1930-31,” Assemblage, No. 11, April 1990, 59,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171136 (accessed July 20, 2012).
4
H. Ward Jandl, “With Heritage So Shiny: America’s First All-Aluminum House,” APT Bulletin, Vol. 23, No.
2, Preserving What’s New, 1991, 38-43, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1504383 (accessed July 20, 2012).
49

Rosa’s research eventually led him to Palm Springs - where he spent nearly every
weekend for six months with the still-very-much-alive Frey,
5
then in his eighties - and
resulted in the publication of the book, the first documentation of the architect who
brought International Style modernism to the California desert. The book in turn led to a
traveling exhibition, curated by Rosa, that opened in March of 1992 at the UC Santa
Barbara Art Museum,. The exhibit, the first-ever retrospective of Frey’s work, featured
original drawings, photographs and specially-built models of his works.
6
Between them
the book and the exhibit reintroduced to the design world the “esthetic simplicity and
economy of means” of the “forgotten Modernist”
7
and spurred an international
“hankering to take a little site-specific sightseeing trip”
8
to study the work of Frey and his
contemporaries in mid-century Palm Springs.
In the summer of 1992 Los Angeles architect Rob Rothblatt was teaching an
extension class on Modern architecture for the University of California, Los Angeles and,
intrigued by Rosa’s book and the accompanying traveling exhibit, proposed that UCLA
Extension offer a weekend tour of Modern architecture in Palm Springs; UCLA declined.
Rothblatt, who was then working in the office of architect Frank Israel, shared the idea
with his co-worker Jeff Samudio, a member of the Board of Directors of the Society of
Architectural Historians/Southern California Chapter (SAH/SCC), who thought it would
make a good tour for SAH/SCC. Held on February 6 and 7, 1993, the tour was

5
Joseph Rosa, Albert Frey: Architect (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1990), 5.
6
Maja Radevich, “Goings On Santa Barbara: Untiring Innovator,” Los Angeles Times, March 5, 1992,
http://www.articles.latimes.com/1992-03-05/news/vl-4619_1_santa-barbara (accessed July 20, 2012).
7
Susanna Sirefman, “Fast-forward Frey,” Architecture, January 1999, 56.
8
Josef Woodard, “Sights Around Town: A Lone Visionary,” Los Angeles Times, March 19, 1992, 16.
50

researched and planned by Rothblatt and led by architect Jeffrey Chusid; Samudio drove
the tour bus that carried the 60 participants to more than a dozen significant Modern
structures in and around Palm Springs, including the Oasis Hotel, Frey House II, the
Tramway Gas Station and John Lautner’s Elrod House.
9
The SAH/SCC tour marked the
first significant exposure of Palm Springs Modernism to an outside organization
dedicated to the architectural history of Southern California. The tour also contributed to
the growing study of Palm Springs architecture; one of the tour goers, advertising
producer Jennifer Golub, who met Frey and “fell in love”
10
with his home, was inspired
to research and write the book Albert Frey/Houses 1 & 2, published in 1998.
11

Figure 3.1: The SAH/SCC tour visits Craig Ellwood's Max Palevsky House, Palm Springs, 1992. Photo courtesy of Sian
Winship. Used with permission.

9
Sian Winship, President, SAH/SCC, e-mail message to author, July 25, 2012.
10
M. Melton, “So SoCal,” Los Angeles Times Home Edition, October 25, 1998, 12.
11
Winship.
51

Hollywood’s Playground, Take Two
On January 10, 1990 the inaugural Palm Springs International Film Festival
opened with a screening of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso at downtown’s
historic Plaza Theater.
12
The event fulfilled a campaign promise by Mayor Sonny Bono,
formerly half of the pop duo Sonny and Cher, to use his show business connections to
launch large annual cultural events that would attract big-spending visitors to the resort.
13

Bono had lived in Palm Springs since his 1974 divorce from Cher, operating an
eponymous Italian restaurant in the faded town; his 1988 mayoral campaign was
prompted by a fit of anger over the bureaucratic hoops necessary to install a new sign on
his restaurant.
14
The conservative Bono ran on a platform of revitalizing the town
through relaxing unnecessarily strict codes that stifled the creation of new businesses,
15

but won election in part by reaching out to the city’s gay residents in acknowledgement
of that community’s growing political clout.
16

Ultimately Bono’s record in his four years as mayor was mixed and change came
slowly, but he managed to sow some of the seeds that would eventually help spawn the
city’s revival: antiquated ordinances banning sidewalk lighting and outdoor dining were
repealed to promote a pedestrian-friendly downtown, and the city sponsored a weekly
Thursday night street fair on Palm Canyon Drive featuring food, music and vendors of

12
“Palm Springs International Film Festival Opens Tonight,” Los Angeles Times Home Edition, January 10,
1990, 9, http://www.proquest.com (accessed July 19, 2012).
13
L. Sahagun, “Sonny Bono Seeks to Headline a Political Act,” Los Angeles Times Home Edition, March 28,
1988, 3, http://www.proquest.com (accessed July 19, 2012).
14
B. Weinraub, “Sonny Bono, 62, Dies in Skiing Accident,” New York Times, January 7, 1998, A-16.
15
Sahagun,3.
16
Kelle Russell, “Desert’s gays grow in stature...and pride,” The Desert Sun, July 28, 1989, A1.
52

various wares.
17
More significantly, Bono helped put Palm Springs back into the national
consciousness. His celebrity status and the novelty of his fledgling political career (he
would go on to win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1996) constantly
attracted media attention, which Bono shamelessly exploited with appearances on talk
shows and at special events to keep Palm Springs - and himself - in the spotlight.
18
And
while the Film Festival he founded had a modest start - for its first few years it attracted
a mostly local audience and no major stars - it quickly gained respectability with its
emphasis on high-quality films.
19
By 1995 the event had expanded to eleven days and
was attracting some 60,000 people, including the younger generation of Hollywood stars
and moguls who were thus introduced to the seclusion, seductive climate and Modern
architecture of Palm Springs.
20

As the Crows Fly
Another of the attractions that drew the film, fashion and publishing elite to Palm
Springs in the early 1990s and introduced them to the city’s retro-chic potential was,
oddly enough, not itself a mid-century Modern artifact; it was an exotic, Mediterranean-
themed 12-room bed-and-breakfast inn, the Korakia Pensione, located in a repurposed,

17
Eric Noland, “Spring to Life: L.A.’s Favorite Desert Oasis Has Rebounded Impressively From Its Doldrums
In The 1980s,” The Daily News of Los Angeles, December 19, 1999, www.lexisnexis.comlibproxy.usc.edu
(accessed July 21, 2012).
18
J. Warren, “Sonny Bonaparte? Palm Springs’ Famous Mayor Gets Mixed Reviews After 15 Months in
Office,” Los Angeles Times Home Edition, July 17, 1989, 3, http://www.proquest.com (accessed July 19,
2012).
19
Kevin Thomas, “Palm Springs Festival Blooms Rapidly,” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 1992, 5,
http://www.proquest.com (accessed July 19, 2012).
20
Karen Kaplan, “Film Festivals Are Big Hit With Cities,” Los Angeles Times Home Edition, January 10,
1995, 4, http://www.proquest.com (accessed July 19, 2012).
53

lavish 1920s Moroccan mansion in the Tennis Club neighborhood. The house, originally
called Dar Marroc, had been built by Scottish-born painter Gordon Coutts, who after a
lifetime of wandering the world spent his last years in Palm Springs.
Coutts was born in Aberdeen in the mid-1860s and studied art at the Académie
Julian in Paris, where he distinguished himself with his landscapes and portraits; he later
spent ten years as an art instructor in New South Wales, Australia, and some of his works
now hang in the Australian National Art Gallery, the Adelaide National Gallery and the
Melbourne Art Gallery.
21
Coutts moved to San Francisco with his American wife Alice
about 1900; after their divorce in 1917, he spent several years living in Spain and North
Africa with his second wife, Gertrude.
22
In the early 1920s ill health ended Coutts’
travels and brought him to Palm Springs, whose climate and light reminded him of North
Africa. He built Dar Marroc in 1924, settling there with his wife and daughter and
founding a bohemian salon of artists that eventually grew to include film stars like Errol
Flynn and Rudolph Valentino.
23
Coutts died in Palm Springs in 1937
24
and Dar Marroc
was afterward converted into an apartment building, with suspended acoustic tile
concealing the wood beamed ceilings and Astroturf covering the scored concrete floors.
25

In 1989 the dilapidated villa was purchased by Long Beach designer G. Douglas
Smith, who had previously operated a cafe on the Greek island of Spetsai - frequented by
the likes of former first lady Jacqueline Onassis, rock star Mick Jagger and shipping

21
Anne Sullivan, “There’s A Real Castle In The Desert,” The Desert Sun, May 12, 1978, D1.
22
gordoncoutts.com, “Biography,” Gordon Coutts (1865-1937) Painter, http://www.gordoncoutts.com
(accessed July 21, 2012).
23
Thomas Carney, “Korakia Dreaming,” Architectural Digest, May 1996, 144-45.
24
Sullivan, D1.
25
Carney, 144.
54

magnate Stavros Niarchos - before returning to Southern California to build a successful
career designing Mediterranean-inspired interiors for Orange County clients like the
Irvine Corporation.
26
Palm Springs was then “like a ghost town,” Smith remembered.
“Every other shop was vacant. And the shop that was occupied was a T-shirt shop.”
27

But the desert reminded Smith of Spetsai, and he set about removing Dar Marroc’s
apartment-house accretions and returning the building to some semblance of the villa
Coutts had built. Smith renamed the place Korakia (Greek for “crows”) after the many
crows he remembered from his hikes in the hills of Spetsai, and transformed the house
into an eclectic Mediterranean fantasy of antique featherbeds, thrift-shop finds, Persian
rugs and decorative objects from as far afield as Afghanistan and Italy.
28

Figure 3.2: The Koraki Pensione. Photo by author.

26
Carney, 146.
27
Bob Colacello, “Palm Springs Weekends,” Vanity Fair, June 1999, 192-211.
28
Carney, 148.
55

The Korakia opened in 1992 and, in an echo of Coutts’s salons, its low prices and
funky atmosphere attracted an initial clientele of musicians, writers and artists. Word-of-
mouth soon brought East Coast intelligentsia like writer Annie Leibowitz and
photographers Bruce Weber and Mario Testino;
29
Hollywood celebrities such as Sean
Penn, Susan Sarandon,
30
Laura Dern and Andy Garcia;
31
and fashion designers Tom Ford
and Donatella Versace, who flew in camels for a desert-themed photo shoot at the inn.
32

Within a few years the New York Times had dubbed the Korakia “one of the sexiest
hotels in America.”
33

O, Pioneers!
Many of the guests who stayed at the Korakia in the 1990s, or who traveled to
Palm Springs to attend the Film Festival or the White Party, eventually ended up staying
as part- or full-time residents when they discovered the bounty available in the city’s
residential neighborhoods. The recession of the early ‘90s and the sheer volume of mid-
century properties in Palm Springs - the Alexander tract homes, built between 1955 and
1965, alone totaled over 2,200
34
- combined to create a veritable smorgasbord of
affordable, high-quality Modernism for the trendsetters, many of them gay men, who
were beginning to discover the resort.

29
Sally Horchow, “Palm Springs Gets a Makeover, Again,” The New York Times, December 5, 2004, 5.7,
http://www.proquest.com (accessed July 19, 2012).
30
James Greenberg, “The road to Morocco,” Los Angeles Magazine, May 1998, Vol. 43 Issue 5, 100-101,
http://www.libproxy.usc.edu (accessed July 19, 2012).
31
Noland.
32
Greenberg, 100-101.
33
David Hochman, “Palm Springs,” The New York Times, October 25, 1998, 10, http://www.proquest.com
(accessed July 19, 2012).
34
Mary Ann Pinkston, “It’s An Alexander,” The Desert Sun, October 28, 2001, F1.
56

The vogue for buying and restoring Modern houses in Palm Springs is generally
credited to Jim Moore, the longtime Creative Director of GQ magazine, who in 1993
purchased one of the seven Wexler-designed, Alexander-built steel-framed model homes
of the aborted U.S. Steel tract of the early 1960s.
35
Moore had grown up in the 1960s in
Minnesota, in “an ordinary house my parents had filled with antiques. But my best friend
had a house that was modern and ‘cool.’ There was a tree growing through the roof of
the living room and a couch that wrapped around the tree.”
36
He had been visiting Palm
Springs regularly since 1989 and decided to buy a house, finally finding what he wanted
on a run-down street near the old Racquet Club. “When I saw my house, I knew it,”
Moore later said. “It wasn’t even for sale. I told the agent to stop the car and go ring the
doorbell.”
37

Moore bought the house for less than $100,000
38
and began a complete
restoration, discovering the original carport still intact within a later garage enclosure and
terrazzo flooring under the shag carpet. He filled the house with period items from local
thrift stores. “Palm Springs has the best thrift-store shopping in the world,” he told a
reporter. “Oceans of ‘60s items, in perfect condition...When Modern went out of style,
instead of renovating, rich people just moved on. Their things ended up in secondhand
stores.”
39
Moore’s exacting restoration attracted the attention of the mainstream press -
the house was featured in House & Garden in September 1996 - and met with the

35
Colacello, 201. See also Peter Moruzzi, “A Chronology of the Rediscovery and Preservation of Palm
Springs Modernism,” Palm Springs Modern Committee, 2003; and Eric Wills, “Palm Springs Eternal,”
Preservation, May/June 2008, www.preservationnation.org (accessed July 22, 2012).
36
Diana Ketcham, “Desert Swank,” House & Garden, September 1996, 304.
37
Ketcham, 304.
38
Colacello, 201.
39
Ketcham, 306-307.
57

approval of the architect, then in his late 70s. “It was a time warp, it was amazing,” said
Wexler after seeing the restored house. “It was the house exactly as it had been 40 years
ago. The best thing about it is that the whole neighborhood has (now) changed.”
40

Figure 3.3: One of the restored U.S. Steel model houses, 2013. Photo by author.
Now spending significantly more time in Palm Springs, Moore began staging
many of his magazine’s photo shoots around town, and other magazines soon followed
suit.
41
It wasn’t long before Moore’s friends and associates on both coasts were abuzz
about his mid-century restoration, and he was soon followed into the desert by a string of
fashionable pioneers. In 1994 prominent Los Angeles interior designer Brad Dunning,
whose celebrity-laden client list included fashion designer Tom Ford and who frequently
contributes to GQ with articles on architecture and design, purchased a Deepwell ranch

40
Wills.
41
“Making Tracts,” Flaunt, October 2000, 91-97.
58

house for $150,000.
42
“ What attracted me to Palm Springs was the combination of
modern design and the desert, “ Dunning said.
There is something very modern about the landscape itself. It’s clean and barren.
Modernity really worked out here because of this harsh sunlight and these harsh
shadows. You could also have floor-to-ceiling glass, because you don’t have cold
weather. It really was a great marriage of geography and design. And also, these
were mainly second homes, so they could be more experimental, more
flamboyant. So many houses out here have these tiny kitchens, and then they’ll
have a big wet bar. That tells you what the priorities were... What did people
come out here to do? They came out here to drink, lie in the sun, and fuck each
other crazy.
43

New York fashion photographer and documentary filmmaker Doug Keeve - who made a
star out of his then-boyfriend, designer Isaac Mizrahi, with his Sundance Film Festival
award-winning 1995 fashion industry documentary Unzipped
44
- purchased and restored a
Wexler steel house down the street from Jim Moore’s, as did Los Angeles artist Jim
Isermann and his partner, David Schwartz.
45
Another gay couple, home furnishing
designers Jim Guadineer and Tony Padilla, purchased Frey’s Raymond Loewy house and
began renovations, although they chose to keep some later additions and make a few
discreet changes of their own rather than restore the house to its original condition.
46

And just next door to the Loewy house, Beth and Brent Harris were embarking on a
massive restoration of Richard Neutra’s iconic Kaufmann House, a project that would

42
Colacello, 201.
43
Colacello, 201.
44
Katie Hint-Zambrano, “Isaac Mizrahi Talks Models, Muses, and Fashion Mayhem at the Met,” Stylelist,
http://www.main.stylelist.com/2009/07/23/isaac-mizrahi-talks-models-muses-and-fashion-mayhem-at-
the-met/ (accessed July 23, 2012).
45
Tony Merchell, “The Nerve of Steel,” Palm Springs Life, November 1998, 48-51.
46
Nicolai Ouroussoff, “House Proud: Retrieving the Future Under a Desert Sky,” The New York Times,
December 28, 1995, www.nytimes.com (accessed July 23, 2012) .
59

garner worldwide attention and launch a media frenzy as the poster child for the “rebirth
of cool” in Palm Springs.

Restoring the Icon
By the time the Harrises purchased it in 1993 for $1.5 million
47
the Kaufmann
House had suffered decades of neglect and a number of insensitive additions and
alterations since the death of Edgar Kaufmann, Sr. in 1955. Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., who
had championed Frank Lloyd Wright for the commission to design the Palm Springs
house and opposed his father’s choice of Neutra, left the place vacant for eight years
while he battled his stepmother Grace (Kaufmann, Sr.’s former nurse, whom he had
married seven months before his death) for control of his father’s estate.
48
The house was
finally purchased in 1963 by Palm Springs realtor Nelda Linsk and her husband Joe,
49

who built several additions that increased the house’s floor area from 3,175 square feet to
4,805 square feet.
50
In the 1970s the house was purchased by Eugene Klein, a former
owner of the San Diego Chargers, who added a pool house and tennis court and replaced
the wood deck of the rooftop “gloriette,” as Neutra called it, with heavy terrazzo, causing
the roof framing to sag and allowing water to pool and penetrate into the living room
below.
51
Klein sold the house in the early 1980s to pop singer Barry Manilow, who
redecorated each room in a separate design theme, including floral and English garden

47
John Hussar, “Manilow’s home sells for $1.5m,” The Desert Sun, August 20, 1993, E1.
48
Kevin Gray, “Modern Gothic,” Men’s Fashions of the Times, The New York Times, Fall 2001, 80-86.
49
Hussar, “Manilow’s home,”E1.
50
Janice Kleinschmidt, “Returning Home,” The Desert Sun, July 7, 1996, D8.
51
Ziva Frieman, “Back to Neutra,” Progressive Architecture, November 1995, 72-79.
60

motifs.
52
Kaufmann himself had remodeled the kitchen before his death, tearing out
Neutra’s cork floors and built-in birch furniture , and over the years doors, windows,
hardware and lighting fixtures had been removed.
53
Worse, the building fabric had
seriously deteriorated under the harsh desert sun, and the neglected roof had leaked,
unchecked, for some time; some of the sliding windows had rusted shut, and “Anyone
walking through the house could see cracks, water damage - big things,” said Beth
Harris.
54

Harris, an art historian and at that time a doctoral candidate in architectural
history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and her husband Brent, an
investment manager, had discovered the house in 1992 while visiting Brent’s parents,
who lived in the Coachella Valley. “We go out and look at important houses and
buildings wherever we go,” she said. “We just went to see it - to peek over the fence.
Brent noticed a small sign saying it was for sale. It was a happy accident for us.”
55
Beth
Harris spent a year researching Neutra’s original drawings and correspondence in
archives at UCLA and Columbia University, and studying Julius Shulman’s photographs
and the house itself, before beginning any work.
56
Ultimately they decided upon a strict
restoration of the house to Neutra’s original vision, to “that pristine moment” of
Shulman’s celebrated twilight photograph.
57
“For us, the work was motivated by that

52
Ouroussoff, “House Proud.”
53
Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Mid-Century Luxe Redux,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, May 23, 1999, 28.
54
Ouroussoff, “House Proud.”
55
Kleinschmidt, “Returning Home,” D1.
56
Ouroussoff, “Luxe Redux,” 28.
57
Gregory Cerio, “On the block: To preserve, protect and defend,” House & Garden, September 2001,
138-141.
61

famous photo,” said Harris, adding, “I don’t think we realized how intense the process
would be until we were well into it.”
58

Working with Santa Monica architects Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner, the
Harrises spent the next 5 years - and a reputed $4.5 million
59
- painstakingly returning the
Kaufmann house to its 1947 condition and appearance. The house was gutted and its later
additions removed. Original shop drawings for the steel doors and windows were
recovered from the grandson of the original contractor so that exact replicas could be
fabricated. Missing plumbing and lighting fixtures were replaced with salvage yard finds
or custom-made replicas. The architects consulted with the U.S. Bureau of Mines to
determine the exact source of the mica used in the glaze that originally finished the
plaster, and laboratory tests identified the quarry that produced the house’s original Utah
Buff stone.
60
The aluminum louvers were reproduced by the original manufacturer, and
a metal crimping machine from the 1950s was located in Kansas City to replicate the
aluminum coping at the edges of the flat roof.
61
The Harrises even purchased two
adjacent undeveloped lots in an attempt to partially recreate some sense of the open
desert setting the house had once enjoyed.
62
Beth Harris convinced her close friend,
landscape and interior designer William Kopelk, to relocate to Palm Springs from New
York City to take on the job of her on-site representative during the restoration work.
Kopelk lived for a time in the Kaufmann House while overseeing the work, and

58
Ouroussoff, “House Proud.”
59
Colacello, 201.
60
Kleinschmidt, “Returning home,” D8.
61
Ouroussoff, “Luxe Redux,” 28.
62
Ouroussoff, “House Proud.”
62

eventually designed and installed one of the property’s distinctive gardens.
63
Kopelk
remained in Palm Springs, launching a successful landscape design business, and would
play a significant role in the promotion and preservation of the city’s Modern heritage.

Figure 3.4: The restored Kaufmann House, 1998, photographed by Julius Shulman. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with
permission. Julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute (2004.R.10)
By the time the exhaustive restoration of the Kaufmann House was completed in
1999, the project had already attracted considerable media attention, beginning with the
local press, then progressing to professional publications (Ziva Frieman, “Back to
Neutra,” Progressive Architecture, November 1995) and major newspapers (Nicolai
Ouroussoff, “House Proud: Retrieving the Future Under a Desert Sky,” The New York
Times, December 28, 1995). The renewed interest in Palm Springs itself had already
sparked a media buzz, from a 1994 article in Condé Nast Traveler magazine (“It’s back,

63
William Kopelk, interview with author, Palm Springs, February 5, 2012.
63

it’s hot, it’s...Palm Springs!” by Ann Magnuson, Condé Nast Traveler 29, No. 9,
September 1994) to a Los Angeles Times article that revealed the joys of shopping in the
city’s consignment stores (“Palm Springs Vintage Point: Hunting for classic clothes and
furniture in an old Hollywood retreat with renewed chic,” by Ellen Uzelac, February 19,
1995). By 1996 even the London Times was aware of the rebirth in progress (“Dream
with the stars,” by Steve Keenan, April 20, 1996).
The buzz grew louder with a New Yorker article in February 1998 that extolled
the “inevitable” rediscovery of Palm Springs and illustrated it with a street-side photo of
the Kaufmann House. In the second half of 1999, with the project complete, the house
was featured in articles in a flurry of newspapers and magazines: Architectural Digest,
House Beautiful, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and
in the United Kingdom, The Observer and The Guardian. Most explosive of all was an
extensive article in the June 1999 issue of Vanity Fair that promised to reveal “Why Palm
Springs is hot, hot, HOT!” Inside, the article covered in great detail the city’s storied
history and cast of characters, and featured a stunning full-color, two-page Shulman
photo of the newly restored Kaufmann House glowing in the desert sunset. The word
was now decidedly out; the ember that had been glowing throughout the 1990s now burst
into a firestorm as Palm Springs was thrust back into the international spotlight with its
Modern architecture, blissful weather, laid-back lifestyle and retro-chic vibe. As the
millennium drew to a close everyone wanted a piece of Palm Springs and the city was, as
Los Angeles Magazine proclaimed, “So hot it’s cool again.”
64

64
Colacello, 201.
64

Chapter 4
The Symbol of the City
Along with the fashion designers, film stars and well-heeled architecture buffs
who breathed new life into Palm Springs by snapping up and restoring its mid-century
houses, the city’s revival in the 1990s was fostered by the efforts of architectural
historians and preservationists who had discovered the resort town as an important period
piece, an intact representation of the United States at its post-World War II peak. Their
efforts in Palm Springs were among the first in the nation to focus on the need to protect
significant Modern architecture from careless alteration, demolition and redevelopment.
As Palm Springs became more popular - and more profitable - in the mid-1990s the
developers who had abandoned the city a quarter of a century earlier came slithering
back, armed with proposals for pseudo-Spanish residential and commercial developments
that would have obliterated much of the city’s Modern inventory - in effect, ripping out
the heart of the recent revival.
Historic preservation efforts in Palm Springs had until then been focused
exclusively on the city’s pioneer and pre-World War II Spanish Colonial Revival
architecture, spurred by the 1978 demolition of the tile-clad ticket booth in the courtyard
of the Plaza Theater.
1
That loss ultimately resulted in a 1981 ordinance establishing the
Palm Springs Historic Site Preservation Board (HSPB), charged with identifying,
recommending designation of, and preventing the demolition or alteration of the city’s

1
Tony Borders, “Historical Panel For City Asked,” The Desert Sun, January 4, 1978, A-1.
65

historic sites.
2
By that time some of the city’s most significant pre-war landmarks had
already been lost or irreversibly altered.

Figure 4.1: The abandoned Desert Fashion Plaza, on the site of the Desert Inn, 2013. Photo by author.
Most of the old Oasis Hotel had been built over with new development in the
1950s, long after Pearl McManus had sold the property;
3
the storied Desert Inn was
bulldozed in 1966 to make way for a suburban-style enclosed mall, the Desert Fashion
Plaza, which is now abandoned and has been called “a cancer at the heart of Palm
Springs;”
4
and the once-grand Hotel El Mirador had been shuttered in 1973 and sold to
Desert Hospital, with all but its main building and distinctive tower demolished to make
way for the hospital’s expansion.
5
The building sat derelict for 16 years, awaiting funds

2
George Rooney, “Historic sites await city preservation,” The Desert Sun, May 23, 1981, D3.
3
Peter Moruzzi, Palm Springs Holiday (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 2009), 24.
4
The Desert Sun, “History of the Desert Fashion Plaza,” mydesert.com,
http://www.mydesert.com/videonetwork/73681843001/History-of-the-Desert-Fashion-Plaza (accessed
July 25, 2012).
5
City of Palm Springs Planning Division and Palm Springs Historical Society, “Celebrate Historic Places: Our
Past for our Future, Preservation Week, May 11-17, 1986,” 1986.
66

for a promised rehabilitation, until it burned to the ground in a suspicious fire in 1989; in
a small measure of compensation, the tower was reconstructed from the original plans
two years later.
6
In 1993 the city’s list of designated Class 1 historic sites - those
protected from demolition or exterior alteration - included only 23 properties, not a single
one of which was constructed after 1939 (except for the reconstructed El Mirador tower);
it was not until 1996, when the Kaufmann House was listed at the instigation of its
owners, that Palm Springs granted a post-war building the protections of designation.
7

Figure 4.2: The reconstructed tower of the Hotel El Mirador on the grounds of Desert Regional Hospital, 2013.
Photo by author.

6
City of Palm Springs Historic Site Preservation Board, Palm Springs Historic Architectural Highlights.
7
City of Palm Springs, “Designated Class 1 Historic Sites,” Palm Springs,
http://www.palmspringsca.gov/index.aspx?page=701 (accessed July 25, 2012).
67

Figure 4.3: The first post-World War II building designated an historic site in Palm Springs: The restored Kaufmann
House, 1998, photographed by Julius Shulman. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. Julius Shulman
Photography Archive, Research Library at the Getty Research Institute (2004.R.10)
The fact was that in the mid-1990s the city government and most residents of
Palm Springs still had little appreciation for mid-20th century architecture, and virtually
no understanding of its value as the prime catalyst of their city’s nascent revival. It was to
them inconceivable that the unfashionable buildings constructed only 30 or 40 years
earlier - within living memory of many residents - could have architectural or historic
significance. And, like most cities, Palm Springs was highly reluctant to say “no” to
developers who were willing to infuse cash into the local economy, no matter how ill-
conceived their projects. But in the 1990s Palm Springs managed to catch the attention
of Los Angeles preservationists , who recognized the city not for its kitsch factor but as a
breeding ground of exceptional Modern design and a subject worthy of serious study.
Their increasing interest buttressed and ultimately merged with the fledgling efforts of
68

the city’s growing band of resident Modern preservationists in the acrimonious and
highly-publicized battle to prevent the demolition of what many considered the very
symbol of the city, Albert Frey’s 1963 Tramway Gas Station. That conflict proved a
turning point in Palm Springs’s relationship to its Modernist heritage, cementing the
city’s cachet as a “Mecca of Modernism”
8
and laying the groundwork for an organized
movement dedicated to the preservation of the city’s mid-20th century architecture.

ModCom Goes to Palm Springs
In 1994 the Los Angeles Conservancy’s Modern Committee (ModCom) was
introduced to, and became deeply involved in the preservation of, Palm Springs
Modernism. John Lautner’s 1968 Elrod House was on the market, rumored to having
been badly altered by subsequent owners since Arthur Elrod’s death in a 1974 car crash.
9

Concerned that the house’s design integrity had been seriously compromised but unable
to arrange with the realtor for an inspection tour, Lautner’s office turned to ModCom for
help. The project was assigned to one of the Committee’s volunteer members, Tony
Merchell, who remembered:
I went out to Palm Springs to talk to the realtor and try to smooth things over -
which was my first time in Palm Springs in 15 years. The only other time I had
been there was when I was working as a private investigator in a law firm and had
to serve a subpoena. It was incredibly hot, and when I ran the air conditioner, my
car would overheat, so I couldn’t use it. I hated Palm Springs and never went
back. But this time I spent a few weekends there talking to people and reading
books about Lautner - trying to understand the importance of this house. I

8
Robert Imber, “Discover Palm Springs Midcentury Treasures with Self-Guided Tour,” Palm Springs Life
Desert Guide, February 2011, http://www.palmspringslife.com/Palm-Springs-Life/Desert-Guide/February-
2011/Discover-the-Desert-rsquosPalm-Springs-Midcentruy-Treasures-with-Self-Guided-Tour/ (accessed
August 5, 2012).
9
“Valley Legends: Arthur Elrod (1926-1974),” The Desert Sun, September 25, 1999, A2.
69

became dumbfounded by all this Modern architecture and started doing some
research and found there was only one book written on it, which was Joseph
Rosa’s Albert Frey, Architect.
10

Merchell worked with the Elrod House’s realtor and helped to mount a publicity
campaign to market the house to preservation-minded potential buyers;
11
in 1996 the
house was purchased for something in the vicinity of $1.8 million by billionaire grocery
store magnate Ron Burkle, who spent millions more - the precise amount is unknown - to
restore the house to Lautner’s original vision.
12

In 1995 Merchell, along with fellow Modern Committee member Bruce Emerton,
helped to organize a Palm Springs home tour for ModCom,
13
the second such excursion
for an outside preservation organization (the first being that of the Society of
Architectural Historians/Southern California Chapter two years earlier.) The same year a
few ModCom members attended a Chicago conference on “Preserving the Recent Past”,
sponsored by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and learned of an organization
called Docomomo (International Working Party for Documentation and Conservation of
Buildings, Sites and Neighborhoods of the Modern Movement); upon their return they
urged Merchell to share with Docomomo his research on Palm Springs.
14
He presented
his paper, “The Modern Movement in Palm Springs, California, USA” at the Fourth
International Docomomo Conference, Universality and Heterogeneity, held in Bratislava,

10
“Making Tracts,” Flaunt Magazine, October 2000, 91-97.
11
Peter Moruzzi, “A Chronology of the Rediscovery and Preservation of Palm Springs Modernism,” Palm
Springs Modern Committee, 2003.
12
Bob Colacello, “Palm Springs Weekends,” Vanity Fair, June 1999, 201.
13
Moruzzi.
14
“Making Tracts,” 92.
70

Slovakia from September 18-20, 1996.
15
Merchell’s presentation was the first serious
discussion of Palm Springs architecture at an international conference, and sparked a
number of articles in the world press.
16
The presentation and its aftermath further
broadened awareness of and interest in Palm Springs and its Modern architecture, just as
the city’s first major Modern preservation effort was getting underway.

The Battle of the Tramway Gas Station
The first major battle to preserve a significant example of Palm Springs Modern
architecture was fought, fittingly enough, over the 1963 Tramway Gas Station on
Highway 111. Albert Frey’s soaring monument of space-age exuberance - one of the
first buildings visitors see when driving into town - was specifically designed at the
behest of the City Council as a unique, eye-catching landmark to welcome visitors and
formally mark the entrance to the city.
17
The gas station became the cause célèbre of
Modern preservation in Palm Springs in the fall of 1996 when designer Brad Dunning,
who had recently been appointed to the HSPB, nominated it along with five other Albert
Frey-designed buildings for designation as Class 1Historic Sites.
18
On October 2 of that
year the City Council approved designation of five of the six properties - the Loewy
House, Frey House #2, City Hall, the Carey-Pirozzi House and the Aerial Tramway
Valley Station - just in time for Frey’s ninety-third birthday later that week, but delayed a
decision on the Gas Station after the property’s owner, Neil Anenberg, and the station’s

15
DOCOMOMO, “Publications,” Docomomo International,
http://www.docomomo.com/com/publications.htm (accessed July 30, 2012).
16
“Making Tracts,” 92-93.
17
Jon Yates, “Preservation vs. profits,” The Desert Sun, October 14, 1996, A1.
18
Moruzzi.
71

tenant and manager, Robert Meyer, voiced opposition to the designation. Although
owner consent was not required for designation, the City Council tabled the matter for an
unspecified future hearing date.
19

Figure 4.4: Tramway Gas Station, 1965, Albert Frey & Robson C. Chambers, architects. Photo by author.
Meyer objected to the Class 1 designation because it would not permit alteration
to, or demolition or relocation of, the building without prior approval from the HSPB or
City Council; he needed to remodel the building, he claimed, in order to attract a major
supplier like ARCO or Shell
20
(he had already given the station a new coat of paint
without city approval, bright pink - “like underwear that got washed in the wrong load,”
according to architect Frey - with mint green trim.)
21
Meyer noted that in accordance
with state law the underground gas tanks would have to be replaced within two years’
time, and without a major supplier he would be unable to afford the $200,000 cost of the

19
Yates.
20
Yates.
21
Diana Marcum, “Gas Station Fuels Fight in Palm Springs,” The Los Angeles Times, May 27, 1997, A3.
72

required work.
22
“We don’t want to put this guy out of business,” said Dunning, but “we
have to look at the bigger picture of what’s good for the community.”
23

In February 1997 Meyer closed his business and boarded up the station.
24
The
reason behind property owner Anenberg’s objection to the designation soon became
clear: he had leased the property for one year to developer Mark Bragg, with an option to
buy the site for $540,000 at the expiration of the lease or extend the lease for 50 years for
$2.3 million.
25
Bragg was proposing a $200 million, 1,100-acre development,
Shadowrock, that would straddle Tramway Road at Highway 111 and would include a
golf course, clubhouse, and estate homes; on the adjacent Gas Station property he
planned to build a casino and entertainment complex called Odyssey.
26
Bragg wanted the
site cleared to create a landscaped entrance monument for his Mediterranean-style
project: “I’m not having that building drive the look of my entertainment complex. It
doesn’t work,” he said, framing the choice as one between preservation and progress and
threatening litigation should the Council designate the site. “If they want to stop a
dramatic new entry way into the city, one that will create 1,000 new jobs and a couple
hundred million dollars of development, that’s what I might have to do. In our society,
we don’t run around appropriating other people’s property.”
27
From that point, the civic
debate over the gas station degenerated into a nasty, vituperative battle that split Palm

22
Yates.
23
Yates.
24
Steve DiMeglio, “Developer may move historical gas station,” The Desert Sun, May 7, 1997, A1.
25
Douglas Haberman, “Council gets into gas station fray,” The Desert Sun, June 18, 1997, B1.
26
DiMeglio.
27
DiMeglio.
73

Springs in two and, in the process, exposed the city’s widespread ignorance of the value
of its own Modern heritage.
“I never liked it,” said Frank Bogert,
28
who as mayor of Palm Springs in 1963 had
asked Frey to design “something spectacular... something to make people say, ‘Now
here’s an interesting town.’”
29
“Today I would have said Spanish-Mexican-European,”
the 72-year-old Bogert said in 1997. “I don’t like modern, fancy, dad-gum buildings.”
30

The public weighed in on the debate in numerous letters to The Desert Sun; tellingly,
those letters supporting preservation of the gas station came almost exclusively from
outside of Palm Springs, most from Los Angeles and one from as far as London. Many
of them suggested that the city purchase the building and convert it to a new visitors’
center. Nearly all of the letters opposing preservation came from Palm Springs residents
who decried the potential loss of the Shadowrock/Odysssey development, with its
promised jobs and tax revenues, and denounced the gas station as “just plain ugly”
31
and
“outdated,”
32
a “rotting eyesore”
33
and a “monstrosity of concrete and tin” that should
be demolished or moved to make way for “a wonderful, grand-entry display... of
waterfalls, fountains, palm trees and a greeting sign, Welcome to Palm Springs.”
34

Several writers took special umbrage with the out-of-towners who voiced support for
saving the Station - including the Los Angeles ModCom representatives who, at the
invitation of Brad Dunning, had spoken in favor of preservation before the City

28
Haberman, “Council gets,” B1.
29
Marcum, A24.
30
Marcum, A24.
31
Deborah Hardwick, letter, The Desert Sun, May 25, 1997, B5.
32
Geneva Todd, letter, The Desert Sun, June 11, 1997, B5.
33
Josie Blandino, letter, The Desert Sun, June 17, 1997, B5.
34
Leonard Dugdale, letter, The Desert Sun, July 20, 1997, B1.
74

Council,
35
and the 65 British architects and architecture students who had signed a
petition calling for the Station’s preservation
36
- calling them “outsiders from soot-
covered cities...who came into our back yard to open their big mouths and spew their
wisdom/venom.”
37

Figure 4.5: Tramway Gas Station, 1965, Albert Frey & Robson C. Chambers, architects. Photo by author.
When the City Council met on June 18, 1997 to reconsider the proposed
designation just a few speakers opposed it, while over a dozen, mostly from Los Angeles,
spoke in support of preserving the Gas Station.
38
San Fernando Valley resident Mary
Margaret Stratton drove to Palm Springs to tell the Council that, to her, “the Albert Frey
building is the symbol of Palm Springs.”
39
Peter Moruzzi, a former Chairman of LA
ModCom who had earlier lauded the gas station as representing “the most optimistic

35
Moruzzi.
36
Douglas Haberman, “Architects join city ‘space’ station fight,” The Desert Sun, May 28, 1997, A1.
37
Brian Allen, letter, The Desert Sun, July 20, 1997, B1.
38
The Associated Press, “Winged gas station goes historic,” The Press-Enterprise, June 20, 1997, B3.
39
Douglas Haberman, “Architect ‘delighted’ gas station saved,” The Desert Sun, June 20, 1997, A1.
75

vision of the future and it’s unique to Palm Springs,”
40
that evening told the Council that
“it would be very shameful if it [the station] didn’t survive where it is - and remain the
beacon it’s supposed to be.”
41
And fellow ModCom member Bruce Emerton, the
architecture librarian at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona said “If we
don’t work to preserve what makes Palm Springs special...Palm Springs will never
become an architectural destination.”
42
“I was encouraged by all those out-of-town
visitors,” Frey later said of all the young preservationists from Los Angeles.
43

The Council vote of 2-1 in favor of designation, with two abstentions, only added
fuel to the public conflagration. Mayor Will Kleindienst and Mayor Pro Tempore Deyna
Hodges abstained, citing business dealings with developer Bragg,
44
while Council
members Ron Oden and Stan Barnes voted for preserving the Gas Station.
45
Council
member Jeanne Reller-Spurgin cast the sole vote opposing designation, which she
equated with condemnation of the property.
46
The fractured Council vote reflected the
bitterly conflicting positions of the public, and provoked a new wave of angry letters and
editorials in the opinion pages of The Desert Sun. In July Reller-Spurgin urged the
Council to reconsider the decision and proposed that two ballot measures be put to the
public: the first, to allow voters to ratify or overturn the designation of the Gas Station;
and the second, to prohibit the historic designation of a property without owner consent
and require the City to compensate property owners for financial losses due to

40
Haberman, “Architects join,” A6.
41
Haberman, “Architect ‘delighted’,” A1.
42
Haberman, “Architect ‘delighted’,” A1.
43
Haberman, “Architect ‘delighted’,” A1.
44
Haberman, “Architect ‘delighted’,” A1.
45
Douglas Haberman, “Critics rip council over vote to keep old station,” The Desert Sun, July 17, 1997, B1.
46
Haberman, “Architect ‘delighted’,” A1.
76

designation. Reller-Spurgin claimed that designation without owner consent violated
private property rights, and said that “Somebody that has property in the city of Palm
Springs should be able to do with it what they want to do with it.”
47

Reller-Spurgin’s ill-advised ballot ideas went nowhere, but with the public in an
uproar and the developer threatening a lawsuit, Council members Odin and Barnes
wavered, indicating their willingness to reconsider their vote if Bragg presented definitive
plans for his proposed development and challenging preservationists to find a viable use
for the building.
48
In late July Bragg publicly promised that, if the Council were to
rescind the designation, he would not touch the Gas Station for “at least a year, to give
the city time to move it or whatever,”
49
and donated $5,000 toward the costs of
relocating and rehabilitating the building.
50
On August 12, 1997, with Kleindienst and
Hodges again abstaining, the Council voted 3-0 to rescind the designation and
recommended that the HSPB appoint a task force to study options for the building’s use.
“I can live with it being moved,” said Council member Odin by way of explaining his
about-face.
51

The preservationists were furious. Brad Dunning publicly lambasted the City
Council as “the enemy” and described them as “oblivious - or, at best, confused:”
The general public is only now starting to embrace the idiom of the modernists.
How ironic, then, that this emasculation of modernity is currently sweeping
through Palm Springs... There are entire neighborhoods of ‘60s Modern houses by
the developer Robert Alexander that are just as important as the Craftsman

47
Douglas Haberman, “Tram gas station debate simmers,” The Desert Sun, July 14, 1997, B3.
48
Haberman, “Critics rip council,” B1.
49
Douglas Haberman, “City council to revisit Tramway station decision,” The Desert Sun, July 28, 1997, B3.
50
Douglas Haberman, “City weighs options for tram station,” The Desert Sun, July 31, 1997, A1.
51
Douglas Haberman, “Gas station protection rescinded,” The Desert Sun, August 13, 1997, A1.
77

bungalow clusters in Pasadena. Yet, the city is issuing building permits allowing
them to be modified with tile roofs and Mediterranean arches. If profit is a
driving force or an increased tax base the goal, can’t the city see the profit from
having an attractive and unique design angle to market?... Ask a cross section of
Americans to name the most beautiful cities to visit in the United States... San
Francisco, Santa Barbara, Santa Fe, New Orleans and Charleston, S.C. The one
thing all these towns have in common is strict historic and architectural
preservation codes. They realized not only the uniqueness and worth of their
townscape, but also its marketability.”
52

Under this cloud, the seven-member task force met every two weeks beginning in the fall
of 1997. It was composed of HSPB Chairperson Eleanor Corkle; Planning Commission
Chairperson Chris Mills; Janice Lyle, Executive Director of the Desert Museum; John
Connell, a preservation advocate and publisher of The Desert Treasure magazine; Martin
Roos, a former city planner representing developer Mark Bragg; and two local business
owners, Realtor Ingrid Baddour and gallery owner Kirk Campbell.
53
Polarized at the
start, the task force spent four months analyzing various options for the Tramway Gas
Station before coming to a compromise solution: in February 1998 they suggested a
number of possible uses, including a ticket and information center for the Aerial
Tramway, and recommended that the city designate the building a Class 2 historic
resource, which would allow it to be relocated or retrofitted for new uses and would offer
some rehabilitation incentives for the owner, but would not prevent demolition with
proper notification.
54
Task force Chairperson Ingrid Baddour said the group didn’t want

52
Brad Dunning, “Preserving the Optimism of Mid-Century Modern Design,” Los Angeles Times, Home
Edition, June 28, 1998, 1-1, http://www.proquest.com (accessed July 24, 2012).
53
Douglas Haberman, “Panel mulls station’s future,” The Desert Sun, November 20, 1997, B3.
54
Douglas Haberman, “Panel aims to protect station,” The Desert Sun, February 14, 1998, B1.
78

something that “has some aesthetic value to be destroyed without any cause” and felt that
Class 2 designation “offered the owner more flexibility to use his property.”
55

Bragg told The Desert Sun that he “can live with Class 2” designation
56
but, in the
end, the battle over the Gas Station ended not with a bang, but with a whimper: focused
on funding his Shadowrock development, Bragg abandoned plans for the Odyssey and
allowed his lease on the Gas Station property to expire. The boarded-up station sat empty
and in limbo until July 1998, when it was purchased by Montana St. Martin LLC, a San
Francisco-based landscape and garden art business with plans to restore the building as
an art gallery and sculpture garden.
57
Colombia-born sculptor Montana St. Martin and
his partner, former publisher Clayton Carlson, had decided to explore relocating to Palm
Springs after a fruitless search for affordable gallery space in San Francisco; when St.
Martin saw the Gas Station he “knew it was a diamond in the rough... crying out for
help.”
58
To Carlson, the purchase made sense because “Mid-century modernism is the
hottest thing going, and Palm Springs is a time capsule of modernism. People like Albert
Frey... are finally getting their due.”
59
The couple consulted with the 95-year-old Frey,
who gave his approval to the plans; the architect passed away that November, a month
before rehabilitation work began.
60
Over the next 18 months the gas pumps, automobile
lifts and garage work pit were removed and layers of paint were stripped from the
concrete block walls; a new stained concrete floor was installed and a controversial wall

55
Haberman, “Panel aims,” B1.
56
Haberman, “Panel aims,” B1.
57
Todd Henneman, “Tramway station bought,” The Desert Sun, July 10, 1998, A1.
58
Jamie Lee Pricer, “Look what happened to the old gas station,” The Desert Sun, January 9, 2000, E1.
59
Pricer, “Look what happened,” E5.
60
Jennifer Liebrum, “Frey’s striking work revisited,” The Desert Sun, December 22, 1998, B1.
79

was built around the entire building, creating sheltered sculpture gardens but obstructing
the view of the building from the street.
61
On January 6, 1999, with the support of St.
Martin and Carlson and without any controversy, the City Council again designated the
Tramway Gas Station a Class 1 historic site.
62

Fin de Siècle
The aftershocks of the Gas Station fight would reverberate down the few
remaining years of the 20th century, for the bitter conflict had shocked Palm Springs into
an incipient awareness of the value and vulnerability of its Modern architecture and the
interest it aroused in the outside world. As SAH/SCC President Sian Winship recently
wrote, “it often takes an ‘outsider’ to help people recognize what is unique in their own
backyards.”
63
The clash over the Gas Station was the catalyst for the formation of two
organizations dedicated respectively to education and advocacy for historic preservation
in Palm Springs (the Palm Springs Historical Society was founded in 1955 “to record,
preserve and display historical artifacts”
64
but did not actively advocate for architectural
preservation.) In 1997, in the midst of the fight, a group of residents led by Orange Coast
College history professor Carl Prout
65
and Diana “Mousie” Powell were moved to form
the Palm Springs Historic Site Foundation, later called the Palm Springs Preservation

61
Pricer, “Look what happened,” E5.
62
“Tramway gas station gets historic designation,” The Desert Sun, January 7, 1999, B1.
63
Sian Winship, “President’s Letter,” undated, Society of Architectural Historians/Southern California
Chapter, http://www.sahscc.org/site/index.php?function=presidents_letter (accessed August 8, 2012).
64
Palm Springs Historical Society, “About Us,” http://www.pshistoricalsociety.org/about/index.html
(accessed August 9, 2012).
65
Sekai K. Mutunhu, “Structural Art,” The Desert Sun, April 8, 2000, D1.
80

Foundation,
66
a non-profit with a mission “to educate and promote public awareness of
the importance of preserving the historical resources and architecture of the city of Palm
Springs and the Coachella Valley area.”
67
Prout had first visited Palm Springs as a child,
vacationing with his parents in the mid-1950s, and in 1992 had purchased and restored an
Alexander house.
68
Among the Foundation’s other members were William Kopelk, the
landscape designer who had first come to Palm Springs to work on the Kaufmann
House;
69
and Peter Moruzzi, the LA ModCom representative who, while fighting to save
the gas station, had purchased a Modern house in Palm Springs.
70

Figure 4.6: Fire Station No. 1, 1955, Albert Frey & Robson C. Chambers, architects. Designated a Class 1 Historic
Resource in 2000, it still functions as a working fire house. Photo by author.

66
Palm Springs Preservation Foundation, “History,”
http://www.pspreservationfoundation.org/history.html (accessed August 8, 2012).
67
Palm Springs Preservation Foundation, “Our Mission,”
http://www.pspreservationfoundation.org/mission.html (accessed August 8, 2012).
68
Judith Salkin, “Mid-century ‘sheds’ earn architectural respect in new millennium,” Desert Post Weekly,
November 1, 2001.
69
William Kopelk, telephone interview with author, February 5, 2012.
70
Peter Fullam, “Keeping Faith With the Birth of Cool,” Next, March 2001, 68.
81

Moruzzi and Kopelk, along with vintage furniture dealer Courtney Newman and
realtor Chris Menrad, were among the small but vocal group of gas station veterans who
sprang into action in 1999 when the City proposed demolishing Albert Frey’s 1955 Fire
Station No.1 to build a downtown parking garage. Under Moruzzi’s chairmanship the
group founded the Palm Springs Modern Committee (PS ModCom) to advocate for the
preservation of the Fire Station.
71
The group met regularly at Modern Way, the popular
shop Newman ran with his wife Joy, strategizing amidst the Fin Juhl rockers and George
Nelson daybeds.
72

This second effort was very different from the fight over the gas station; the
advocates were seasoned and well-organized and the city had no stomach for another
ugly battle. On June 21, 2000 the City Council voted unanimously to designate Fire
Station #1 a Class 1 historic site.
73
Over the next several years PS ModCom and the
Preservation Foundation would work, individually and collaboratively, to promote and
advocate for the “appreciation and preservation of Desert Modern design.”
74
The two
organizations would simultaneously stoke and ride the whirlwind of public and media
interest in Palm Springs and its Modern architecture, developing a series of enormously
popular and profitable tours, events and programs that would draw hundreds of thousands
of visitors and complete the city’s rebirth as a world-class resort destination.

71
Palm Springs Modern Committee, “PS ModCom History,” PS ModCom,
http://www.psmodcom.org/index.php/ps-modern-history/ (accessed August 9, 2012).
72
Fullam, “Keeping Faith,” 67.
73
Marie Leech, “Council ‘saves’ Fire Station No. 1,” The Desert Sun, June 24, 2000, B1.
74
Palm Springs Modern Committee, “Who We Are,” PS ModCom,
http://www.psmodcom.org/index.php/who-we-are/ (accessed August 9, 2012).
82

Chapter 5
The Colonial Williamsburg of Modernism
When Fire Station No. 1 was designated a Class 1 historic site in 2000, Courtney
Newman, owner of the Palm Springs vintage furnishings store Modern Way and a
founding member of the Palm Springs Modern Committee (PS ModCom), expressed his
continued frustration at having to fight anew each time one of the city’s Modern
resources was threatened. “I’m very happy we saved the fire station,” he told The Desert
Sun, “but my overall opinion is that the city should recognize modernism as something
important. It’s frustrating that we even had to fight for it.”
1
Newman’s frustration was
justified, for even as the fire station battle was being won PS ModCom was fighting on a
second front to prevent the demolition of the Albert Frey-designed Ralph’s grocery store
(originally an Alpha-Beta) located at Ramon Road and Sunrise Way.
2

Although the preservationists would ultimately lose this particular battle when the
city permitted the demolition of Frey’s supermarket in 2002,
3
PS ModCom - together
with the Palm Springs Preservation Foundation, the Historic Site Preservation Board and
the Desert Museum - would make great progress in promoting and preserving Modernism
in the years bracketing the turn of the 21st century. Capitalizing on the ever-growing
popular interest in mid-20th century design, Palm Springs would at last embrace its
Modern legacy as a valuable cultural and economic asset.

1
Marie Leech, “Council ‘saves’ Fire Station No. 1,” The Desert Sun, June 24, 2000, B4.
2
Leech, “Council ‘saves’,” B4.
3
Peter Moruzzi, “A Chronology of the Rediscovery and Preservation of Palm Springs Modernism,” Palm
Springs Modern Committee, 2003.

83

Scholarly Pursuits
Academic interest in Palm Springs’s “Desert Modern” architecture had continued
to grow as a subject of serious study throughout the 1990s, beginning with the SAH/SCC
tour in 1993 and Los Angeles ModCom tours in 1995 and 1997.
4
Tony Merchell
organized and led annual tours for the faculty and students of California State
Polytechnic University, Pomona from 1996 through 1999 and one for the Museum of
Contemporary Art in 2000; and together with Kaufmann House owner Beth Harris and
architect Leo Marmol, Merchell taught an annual UCLA Extension course on Palm
Springs Modernism from 1997 through 2000.
5
Those years also saw the publication of a
number of books that followed in the wake of Rosa and Golub and focused upon or
featured Palm Springs architecture, including Adèle Cygelman’s Palm Springs Modern
(1999), Barbara Lamprecht’s Neutra: Complete Works (2000) and Palm Springs
Weekend by Alan Hess and Andrew Danish (2001).
In May 1999 Palm Springs hosted the 24th annual California Preservation
Conference of the California Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded
in 1977 to provide statewide leadership and education in advocating for historic
preservation in California.
6
In selecting Palm Springs as the venue for their conference
the CPF recognized the emerging phenomenon of the city reborn through the rediscovery
of its Modernist past. “Palm Springs has more important Modernist buildings than any
other city we could think of,” said CPF Office Manager Sara Klotz de Aguilar. “People

4
Moruzzi, “A Chronology.”
5
Moruzzi, “A Chronology.”
6
California Preservation Foundation, “About CPF: Mission, Vision and Values,” California Preservation
Foundation, http://www.californiapreservation.org/mission.html (accessed August 21, 2012).
84

forget that ‘historical’ can mean not too long ago.”
7
The conference, called
“Transcending the Centuries: Preservation of the Ancient and Recent Pasts,” featured as
its keynote speaker architectural photographer Julius Shulman, whose iconic photos of
significant Modern buildings included the famous twilight shot of the Kaufmann House,
and offered an educational track on the history of Palm Springs Modernism and the
special issues and unique challenges of preserving mid-20th century architecture.
8
The
conference, said The Desert Sun, marked “another milestone in the city’s recent
prominence as a bastion of the postwar Modernist style.”
9

The following year the Palm Springs Desert Museum presented “Modernist
Residential Architecture in Palm Springs,” the first of what was to become a series of
annual symposia focusing on local Modern architecture. The two-day symposium, held
on April 8 and 9, 2000
10
was coordinated by Sydney Williams, the Museum’s Director of
Education and Programs and the daughter-in-law of Palm Springs architect E. Stewart
Williams.
11
Williams assembled panels of “leading architectural historians, architects
and patrons... to define how the desert attracted [Modernist architects] and how they
expressed the modernist spirit and sensibility.”
12
Participants in the presentations and
panel discussions included, among others, Kaufmann house owner Beth Harris,
architects Frank Escher, Leo Marmol and Donald Wexler, architectural historian Barbara

7
Matt Fitzsimmons, “Architecture fans descend on Palm Springs for conference,” The Desert Sun, May 20,
1999, B6.
8
California Preservation Foundation, Transcending the Centuries: Preservation of the Ancient and Recent
Past [brochure], 1999.
9
Fitzsimmons, “”Architecture fans,” B6.
10
Jamie Lee Pricer, “Architecture to strut its stuff,” The Desert Sun, April 4, 2000, D1.
11
Sydney Williams, e-mail to author, June 11, 2012.
12
Pricer, “Architecture to strut,” D1.
85

Lamprecht and Palm Springs Historic Site Preservation Foundation board member Tony
Merchell. The sessions focused on the restoration of the Kaufmann house and the local
works of John Clark, William Cody, Craig Ellwood, Albert Frey, John Lautner, Richard
Neutra, Donald Wexler and E. Stewart Williams, and tours of some of the architects’
representative projects - Clark’s own house; Cody’s Neal house; Ellwood’s Palevsky
house; Frey’s Loewy house; Lautner’s Elrod house; Neutra’s Grace Miller house; and
one of the seven Wexler-designed, Alexander-built U.S. Steel houses.
13

Figure 5.1: One of the seven U.S. Steel houses was among the homes featured in the Palm Springs Desert
Museum’s 2000 symposium “Modernist Residential Architecture in Palm Springs”. Photo by author.
The 2000 symposium’s success led to its repetition the following February and
each year thereafter. “This provides for a larger audience and greater acknowledgement
of the modern legacy of Palm Springs,” says Sydney Williams.
14
This growing interest in
Palm Springs Modernism led Williams, in 2003, to spearhead the formation of the

13
Palm Springs Desert Museum, Modernist Residential Architecture in Palm Springs [brochure], 2000.
14
Williams, e-mail to author, June 11, 2012.
86

Museum’s Architecture and Design Council (ADC) to support education, exhibitions and
programming focusing on local architecture and design. Programs have included
lectures, tours and receptions at significant houses - especially Frey House 2, which
Albert Frey had bequeathed to the Museum at his death in 1998, along with his
architectural archives - in addition to the annual symposia. “Since the ADC was formed
our museum’s collecting interest has expanded,” says Williams, “and we are growing our
architecture and design collection,” with the ADC contributing funds for acquisitions.
15

The Museum’s involvement, in fact, lent a certain legitimacy to the growing cult of
Modernism, “giving it gravitas to prosper as a major cultural attraction.”
16

Cultural Tourism
The burgeoning popular interest in Palm Springs and its mid-20th century
architecture fed a growing industry of design-oriented tourism in the city. Since 1998
Preservation Foundation board member Tony Merchell had been working with the Palm
Springs Tourism Bureau to promote the city to travel and design publications,
17

contributing to the flood of articles that first re-introduced Palm Springs to the wider
world in the late 1990s. Those efforts received a populist boost in 2001 when public
television host Huell Howser began taping annual “Palm Springs Week” segments for
California’s Gold, his hit PBS program chronicling various aspects of life in the Golden

15
Williams, e-mail to author, June 11, 2012.
16
Steven Biller, “Replaying the Classics,” Art Ltd. Magazine, January 2012,
http://www.artltdmag.com/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1325798831&archive=&start_from=&ucat
=34& (accessed September 12, 2012).
17
Moruzzi, “A Chronology.”
87

State.
18
Howser had purchased a vacation home in Palm Springs in the early 1990s as a
retreat from his busy life in Los Angeles
19
and eventually decided to share with his
viewers the unique pleasures of his second home. The episodes featured general tourist
fare such as a ride up the Arial Tramway to the top of Mt. San Jacinto, a hike through
Tahquitz Canyon and a look at the cactus specimens of Moorten Botanical Garden; but
also included such Modern-oriented segments as a visit to the city’s vintage consignment
stores; a tour of Frey House 2; and a conversation about architecture and photography
with Julius Shulman.
20
Along with the flood of magazine and newspaper articles,
California’s Gold, broadcast on public television stations across California and as far east
as Nashville, Tennessee, helped spread the word that something exciting was happening
in Palm Springs.
It wasn’t long before themed tours and accommodations sprang up to cater to the
influx of Modern-seeking visitors. Robert Imber, one of the founding members of PS
ModCom, launched Palm Springs Modern Tours in 2001. Imber had grown up in St.
Louis, Missouri with a passion for architecture, salvaging discarded plans and models
from the trash bins of architects’ offices.
21
After moving to Palm Springs as an adult,
Imber became deeply involved in efforts to preserve the city’s Modern architecture, and
ultimately turned his passion into a highly successful business. For $75 per person,
Imber docents a twice-a-day, three-hour minivan excursion to view the highlights of

18
Moruzzi, “A Chronology.”
19
Huell Howser, telephone interview by author, May 31, 2012.
20
Palm Springs Week with Huell Houser, DVD (Huell Howser Productions, 2003).
21
“Modern Man: Words with architectural preservationist Robert Imber,” Desert Guide, February 2012,
24.
88

Desert Modern architecture, including the Oasis Hotel, the Tramway Gas Station,
Kaufmann House and the neighborhoods of Alexander homes.
22
In 2002 PS ModCom
researched, designed and published their “Modern Palm Springs” map, a full-color,
foldout guide for a self-driving tour of the city’s most significant Modern properties.
23

The first Palm Springs hostelry to capitalize on the Modern revival was
Ballantine’s, which launched a wave of Modern-themed rehabs of deteriorated, post-war
motels. Originally called the Mira Loma, the modest 14-room property had occasionally
served as a surreptitious retreat from the nearby Racquet Club for stars like Marilyn
Monroe and Veronica Lake.
24
British expatriates Fraser Robertson, a venture capitalist,
and his interior designer wife Sarah Robarts had come to California in 1999 seeking to
change their lives and had fallen under the spell of the desert while visiting Palm
Springs.
25
When Robertson discovered the Mira Loma and told Robarts that he wanted
to buy it, she cried. “It was pink stucco. Rooms went for $49 a night. There wasn’t a
lobby, just an opening right onto the street.”
26
Nevertheless, they bought the place and
then spent as much on the remodel as they did on the purchase, adding a proper lobby,
rebuilding the pool and spa and installing new plumbing and electrical systems.
27

Realizing that the city’s Modern revival was centered mainly on private residences and
was therefore out of reach of most visitors, the couple shrewdly re-designed the motel
around a kitschy mid-century theme. “It seemed kind of elitist,” said Robertson. “If you

22
Erica Cerulo, “36 Hours in Palm Springs, Calif.,” New York Times, April 9, 2009, TR12,
http://www.travel.nytimes.com (accessed August 5, 2012).
23
Moruzzi, “A Chronology,” 4.
24
Bernard Weinraub, “Palm Springs Loosens Up,” New York Times, January 14, 2001, 5.11.
25
Weinraub, “Loosens Up,” 5.11.
26
Susan LaTempa, “Riding the Wave,” Palm Springs Life, May 2001, 81.
27
LaTempa, “Riding,” 81.
89

didn’t know the homeowner, you couldn’t see the interior. We wanted to make a place
where you could experience this architecture.”
28
When it reopened as Ballantine’s in
February 2000, the former Mira Loma featured rooms and suites named after Hollywood
stars and furnished with shag rugs, Bertoia chairs and princess phones; its success led
Robarts and Robertson to buy a second property nearby, a 16-room motel designed by
Albert Frey, which they re-opened as Ballantine’s Movie Colony Hotel.
29

Figure 5.2: Village Manor Hotel, 1955, Herbert W. Burns, architect; now the Modern-themed Orbit In.
Photo by author.
A year later Portland real estate developers Christy Eugenis and Stan Amy opened
the Orbit In, Palms Springs’s second Modern-themed boutique hotel; its story closely
parallels that of Ballantine’s. Amy and Eugenis, a fan of mid-century design, were
looking for “a 1950s, eight- to ten-unit compound in a warm climate that we could fly or

28
LaTempa, “Riding,” 82.
29
Weinraub, “Loosens Up,” 5.11.
90

drive to from Portland.”
30
They found it in the Village Manor, a ten-room motel
designed in 1957 by Palm Springs architect Herbert Burns and located in the Tennis Club
District a few short blocks from downtown. Designed for long winter stays, the large
rooms still sported their original kitchenettes and tiled bathrooms. “It was really fun to
find an intact inn with a lot of the original characteristics and be able to bring it back to
what you would fantasize it was like back in 1957,” said Eugenis.
31
To that end the new
owners developed a theme for each room - the Rat Pack Suite, the Eames Studio, Atomic
Paradise, BossaNovaVille - usually around pieces of vintage furniture or artwork.
32
They
also added a steel tube-and-mesh pergola to provide shade by the pool, with its view up
the slope of Mt. San Jacinto to Frey House 2 perched directly above, and a boomerang-
shaped terrazzo bar embedded with bits of green and orange glass to match the colors in
the Orbit In’s logo. In December of 2000, two months before the Orbit In opened,
Eugenis and Amy purchased a second Burns-designed motel just down the street, the old
Town and Desert,
33
the former playground of Hollywood film director James Whale.
The Orbit In opened to great fanfare and instant success in February 2001, the
first winter season of the new millennium. “We’ve been booked since we opened,” said
general manager Bruce Abney a few weeks later.
34
Its sister property, the revamped
Town and Desert, now renamed the Hideaway, opened in April 2002.
35
By that time
Palm Springs had become so identified in the public consciousness with its Modern

30
LaTempa, “Riding,” 78.
31
Mona M. de Crinis, “Orbit In the Rat Pack way of life,” Desert Post Weekly, February 22, 2001, 22.
32
La Tempa, “Riding,” 83.
33
La Tempa, “Riding,” 80.
34
de Crinia, “Orbit In,” 22.
35
Orbit In, “Our History,” Orbit In, www.orbitin.com/history.html (accessed September 8, 2012).
91

architecture, and Modernism had in turn become such a tourist magnet, that even the
city’s myopic officialdom could no longer fail to recognize the phenomenon: on
December 4, 2002 the City Council approved a plan to spend $638,000 to buy the former
Tramway Gas Station, recently vacated by the Montana St. Martin Gallery, for use as the
city’s new visitors’ center.
36
The idea had been one of the many new uses suggested and
rejected five years earlier, during the battle to prevent the Albert Frey-designed gas
station’s demolition, but at that time the Council had difficulty envisioning the derelict
building as much more than a nuisance.
Now, with the building restored closely to Frey’s original vision by its previous
owners, Montana St. Martin and Clayton Carlson, the City could see the potential in the
gas station’s ideal location at the north end of Highway 111 and its dramatic, eye-
catching profile as a potent symbol to arriving visitors of the city’s architectural legacy.
“Architectural tourism is one of the fastest-growing draws in Palm Springs,” said John
Raymond, the City’s Director of Community and Economic Development. “We’re like
the Colonial Williamsburg of mid-century Modern.”
37
Council Member Christopher
Mills, an architect who, prior to his election, had been responsible for the gas station’s
rehabilitation, agreed: “I think everyone understands we have a history here unlike any
other town the size of ours.”
38
It is interesting to note that the Council’s 4-0 vote to
purchase and rehabilitate the station took place in the absence of Council Member Jeanne

36
“Plan to acquire tram gas station approved,” The Desert Sun, December 5, 2002, B1.
37
Jane Lotter, “Last Chance for Gas,” Preservation, October 16, 2003, http://www.preservationnation.org/
magazine/story-of-the-week/2004/palm-springs-tramway.html (accessed September 8, 2012).
38
Lotter, “Last Chance.”
92

Reller-Spurgin, who in 1997 had opposed the property’s initial listing as a Class 1
historic resource and engineered its de-listing a few weeks later.
39

The new Visitors’ Center opened in the fall of 2003, after the City spent an
additional $500,000 for necessary improvements including drought-resistant landscaping,
the construction of public restrooms in an unobtrusive new building separate from the
historic gas station, and the removal of the encircling wall built by the previous owners,
thus restoring the building to full public view.
40
This time around there was no public
outcry, and The Desert Sun welcomed the new facility as “a visual enticement to visitors
to stop and learn more about our valley, its amenities and its rich cultural history.”
41

The Great Alexanders
The renewed interest in Modern architecture, the associated increase in tourism
and the ongoing influx of gay buyers had a direct effect on the Palm Springs real estate
market. In 1995 local realtor Jack Pray estimated that gay buyers had driven up prices in
the Deepwell and Las Palmas neighborhoods by20 percent to 100 percent over the
previous few years.
42
Five years later a marketing study by The Desert Sun attributed
$75 million to $100 million of the valley’s annual tourism income to gay and lesbian
travelers, and estimated that between 40 percent and 50 percent of homes sold in Palm
Springs were being purchased by gay buyers.
43
Gay or straight, most buyers were
interested in Modern houses; and by virtue of their quality, quantity and relative

39
“Plan to acquire,” B1.
40
Lotter, “Last Chance.”
41
“New lease on life for old gas station,” The Desert Sun, December 8, 2002, B4.
42
Hank Stokes, “The Gay Dollar Comes to the Desert,” Palm Springs Life, October 1995, 52.
43
Nadia Villagran, “National companies court gay dollar,” The Desert Sun, April 13, 2000, A12.
93

affordability, the 2,200-plus tract homes built by the Alexander Company between 1955
and 1965 became the hottest ticket in town in the early 2000s.
44

Figure 5.3: A restored Krisel-designed Alexander in Las Palmas. Photo by author.
The “Alexanders,” as they were collectively called, were built as part-time
vacation homes, with no insulation, tiny kitchens and closets, and front yards of
maintenance-free white rocks. But their open floor plans, dramatic “butterfly” roofs,
walls of glass giving on to vistas of mountain and sky, and wide overhangs providing
shelter from the blistering sun, were the epitome of Desert Modern architecture. The
smallest of the houses originally sold for $19,500, with an extra $2,000 to add a simple
rectangular swimming pool; by 2001 these little Twin Palms fixers were going for at least
$200,000, while larger, restored Las Palmas models were priced at $500,000 and up.
45

Palm Springs Historic Site Foundation President Carl Prout, who had purchased his

44
Judith Salkin, “Mid-century ‘sheds’ earn architectural respect in new millennium,” Desert Post Weekly,
November 1, 2001.
45
Mary Anne Pinkston, “It’s an Alexander,” The Desert Sun, October 28, 2001, F1.
94

Alexander home in 1992 for $260,000 and spent another $150,000 on renovations,
estimated its 2001 value at $800,000 to $900,000.
46

Figure 5.4: A restored Krisel-designed Alexander A-frame in Las Palmas. Photo by author.
The Historic Site Foundation recognized the importance and impact of the
Alexander family and their housing developments with a three-day celebration called
“The Great Alexander Weekend,” held Friday, November 2 through Sunday, November
4, 2001. Chaired by HSF Treasurer William Kopelk, the weekend’s festivities included a
kick-off cocktail party; tours of Alexander neighborhoods and houses; an exhibit of Julius
Shulman photographs; and lectures by Shulman, Alexander architect William Krisel, and
authors Adèle Cygelman, Andrew Danish and Alan Hess.
47
The climax of the weekend
was a Saturday-evening fundraising gala in the Mediterranean Room at the Riviera

46
Salkin, “Mid-century ‘sheds’.”
47
Judith Graffam, “Palm Springs’ mid-century modern architecture,” The Press-Enterprise, October 27,
2001, D3.
95

Resort, hosted by Barbara Sinatra and emceed by local television personality and
journalist Gloria Greer and 1950s actress (and longtime Palm Springs resident) Ruta Lee.
True to the revivalist spirit of the event, the menu faithfully re-created a 1961 dinner held
in that very room in honor of the Alexander family: canned-pear-and-cottage cheese salad
garnished with maraschino cherries; chicken croquettes in béchamel sauce with string
beans and baby carrots; and a dessert of orange-and-lime Jell-O mold filled with fruit
cocktail.
48
Unappetizing as it sounds, the meal was a period-appropriate culinary tribute
to what one Alexander homeowner succinctly described as “simple homes that live large
and well.”
49

Show and Sell
That first year of the 21st century also saw the inaugural Palm Springs
Modernism Show, the most successful first event of its kind in the industry.
50
The show
was the inspiration of Jacques Caussin, a French-born, Detroit-based collector and dealer
of mid-20th century design from the 1930s through the 1960s. Caussin had been
consulting for Dolphin Promotions, producers of antiques shows across the country,
when he first discovered Palm Springs and realized that the timing was perfect for a
similar, Modern-themed show in the desert resort.
51
Caussin and Dolphin partnered to
organize the first Palm Springs Modern Show and Sale in February 2001 at the Palm

48
Palm Springs Historic Site Foundation, The Great Alexander Gala [program], 2001.
49
Palm Springs Historic Site Foundation, When Mod Went Mass: A Celebration of Alexander Homes
[brochure], 2001, 10.
50
Moruzzi, “A Chronology,” 3.
51
Janice Kleinschmidt, “What Defines a Modern Man, Jacques Caussin?,” Palm Springs Life, February
2012, http://www.palmspringslife.com/Palm-Springs-Life/February-2012?CAMEO-What-Defines-a-
Modern-Man-Jacques-Caussin/ (accessed September 11, 2012).
96

Springs Convention Center, with dozens of dealers from across the country selling
furniture, house wares and fine art dating from the early 1900s to the 1970s.
52
The show
was an instant success, which Caussin later credited in large part to the enthusiastic
support of the city’s gay community.
53
Caussin moved to Palm Springs in 2002, and the
following year purchased a William Krisel-designed house in Twin Palms.
54

In 2006 the continued popularity and success of the Modernism Show and of the
Museum’s annual Modern design symposium, also held each February at the height of
the city’s tourist season, morphed into what would become the country’s biggest
celebration of mid-20th century design, Palm Springs Modernism Week. Organized by a
steering committee that included representatives from the Palm Springs Preservation
Foundation (formerly the Historic Site Foundation), the Palm Springs Modern
Committee, the Palm Springs Historical Society and the Museum’s Architecture and
Design Council
55
and chaired by Jacques Caussin, the ten-day Modernism Week was
bookended with the Modernism Show and the design symposium on succeeding
weekends, with a week of related Modern-themed events between that included
architectural tours, lectures, films, vintage auto and fashion shows, and cocktail parties in
exclusive private homes.
56

Modernism Week was an immediate success, bringing tens of thousands of
visitors - and millions of dollars - to Palm Springs, instantly rivaling the White Party and

52
Dolphin Productions, “Palm Springs Modernism Show & Sale a Celebration of 20th Century Design”
[press release], January 12, 2012.
53
Jacques Caussin, telephone interview with author, June 9, 2011.
54
Kleinschmidt, “What Defines.”
55
Palm Springs Modernism Week, “About Us,” Palm Springs Modernism Week,
http://modernismweek.com/?page_id=78 (accessed September 12, 2012).
56
Dolphin Productions, “Palm Springs.”
97

the Film Festival as one of the city’s most popular and profitable annual events.
57
Profits
from Modernism Week now fund grants to various non-profit organizations including PS
ModCom, the Palm Springs Preservation Foundation, the Architecture and Design
Council, the Palm Springs Historical Society and the California Preservation Foundation,
as well as scholarships for Coachella Valley architecture and design students.
58
But far
more than just a boon for the tourist industry and local organizations, Modernism Week
is a manifestation of the extent to which Palm Springs has grown to embrace and identify
with its mid-20th century Modern heritage as a lifestyle for the 21st century, the
culmination of its three-decades-long process of rediscovery and rebirth.

57
A. Altman, “The art of business, the business of art: Economic benefits of arts and culture events felt
across the Coachella Valley,” The Public Record 33, no. 6 (February 10, 2009), 1,
http://www.proquest.com (accessed September 12, 2012).
58
Palm Springs Modernism Week, “Attendance for the 2012 Palm Springs Modernism Week is Up 40%
Over 2011” [press release], March 5, 2012.
98

Conclusion

Now, in the spring of 2013, Palm Springs continues to flourish as “the capital of
midcentury mod style.”
1
Modernism Week 2012 set a new attendance record with over
35,000 participants - 86 percent of them from outside the Coachella Valley - an increase
of 40 percent over the previous year’s event, and injected nearly $11 million into the
local economy.
2
The 11-day event, the seventh annual celebration of Palm Springs
Modernism, included the city’s 12th Annual Modernism Show & Sale and more than 80
other events, including home tours, lectures, “mod” cocktail parties, and the first public
tours of Sunnylands, the newly-restored, A. Quincy Jones-designed 1966 estate of Walter
and Lenore Annenberg in nearby Rancho Mirage.
3

Thanks in large part to the revived interest in its Modern architecture, Palm
Springs is once again a popular tourist destination, and more of the city’s down-at-the-
heel hotels have been rehabilitated in recent years to meet the growing demand for visitor
accommodations. Unlike earlier, more modest offerings like the still-popular Orbit In,
these new arrivals have largely eschewed period authenticity in favor of an edgier, hyper-
stylized look to attract a younger, hipper clientele. The huge Riviera Hotel, built in 1959,
was frequented in its heyday by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Elvis
Presley, and was the setting of the 1963 teen flick Palm Springs Weekend;
4
it reopened in

1
“Desert Hideaways: Soak, sun, relax,” Sunset (February 2013), 21.
2
“Attendance for the 2012 Palm Springs Modernism Week Is Up 40% Over 2011,” Palm Springs
Modernism Week press release (Palm Springs, CA, March 5, 2012).
3
“Palm Springs Modernism Show & Sale A Celebration of 20th Century Design,” Dolphin Promotions press
release (January 12, 2012).
4
Peter Moruzzi, Palm Springs Holiday (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 2009), 92.
99

2008 after a $70 million makeover as a lavish embodiment of “retro cool swank.”
5
The
following year the quirky, dog-friendly Ace Hotel & Swim Club opened in a transformed
1960s Howard Johnson’s,
6
catering to a clientele of twenty-something wannabe hipsters.
And in February 2012, just in time for that year’s Modernism Week, the candy-colored,
desert-themed Saguaro Hotel opened in what had been a drab 1977 Holiday Inn.
7

The flip side of Palm Springs’ renewed popularity is, of course, increased
pressure for redevelopment, with the City Council caught in a precarious balancing act
between developers and preservationists. On the one hand, the City is a major sponsor of
Modernism Week and an obvious beneficiary of the tens of millions of dollars generated
annually by cultural tourism focused on Modern architecture. On the other hand, the City
Council, like its counterparts in most cities, has a hard time refusing an infusion of
developer dollars, even at the expense of some of the city’s most significant architectural
specimens. Since 2004 the City Council has been locked in a battle with the Palm
Springs Modern Committee (PS ModCom) and the Palm Springs Preservation
Foundation (PSPF) over the fate of the Town and Country Center. The 1948 mixed-use
development, designed by A. Quincy Jones and Paul R. Williams, is slated for demolition
as part of the proposed redevelopment of the adjacent Desert Fashion Plaza, the moribund
mall that occupies the site of the legendary, long-lost Desert Inn. In 2009, ignoring the
recommendations of its own Planning staff and the Historic Site Preservation Board

5
Riviera Palm Springs, “Riviera History,” Riviera Palm Springs, http://www.psriviera.com/riviera-resort-
history.aspx (accessed February 23, 2013).
6
Beverly Beyette, “Hotel Review: In the desert, a surprising oasis,” Los Angeles Times, March 29, 2009, L6,
http://www.proquest.com (accessed February 23, 2013).
7
Craig Nakano, “Desert Modern,” Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2012, E7, http://www.proquest.com
(accessed February 23, 2013).
100

(HSPB), the City Council voted unanimously to deny the Town and Country Center a
Class 1 historic designation. “Architecture is driving the city’s renaissance,” said senior
planner Ken Lyon. “Now is the perfect time to work with building owners to gauge their
interest in restoring their buildings and to educated them as to how architecture is the
reason why people come here.”
8

Figure C.1: Town & Country Center, 1947, A. Quincy Jones and Paul R. Williams, architects. Photo by author.
Despite such setbacks, there has been progress. New development is trending
toward a clean, contemporary style in homage to the city’s Modern heritage, instead of
the faux-Mediterranean pastiche in favor since the 1970s; and preservationists can boast
of a number of successes since the battle over the Tramway Gas Station in the late 1990s.
The most recent of these is the adaptive reuse of the Santa Fe Federal Savings and Loan
building, a steel and glass pavilion designed in 1960 by E. Stewart Williams, into the

8
Mike Singer, “Architectural Vigilance Pays Off for Palm Springs Preservationists,” Practicing Architecture,
American Institute of Architects, www.aia.org/practicing/AIAB082591 (accessed July 25, 2012).
101

Edwards Harris Center for Architecture and Design. Threatened with redevelopment in
2006, the 13,000-square-foot building was purchased by the Palm Springs Museum in
2011 and is currently being rehabilitated by Marmol Radziner Architects to house
architecture, design, and photography exhibitions as well as the Museum’s archives of
architectural drawings and models by Williams, Albert Frey, and Donald Wexler. “ I
believe the combined efforts of PSPF, PS ModCom, HSPB, and the Architecture and
Design Council have broadened the base of interest in preservation,” says Sidney
Williams, “and raised the consciousness of local officials to protect our architecture not
only for the heritage and aesthetics of the community, but for cultural tourism.”
9

Figure C.2: Santa Fe Federal Savings and Loan, 1960, E. Stewart Williams, architect. Photo by author.
Palm Springs also continues to prosper as one of the country’s premier
destinations for gay tourists and residents. More than 30,000 gay men flocked to the city
for White Party 2012, a record high in the event’s 24-year history. The three-day dance

9
Sidney Williams, e-mail to author, June 11, 2012.
102

festival generated millions of dollars in revenue for local businesses, including more than
$1 million in occupancy taxes for the city, and is recognized by the Palm Springs Bureau
of Tourism as one of the city’s highest revenue-generating annual events.
10
The city
actively courts gay tourists; a 2010-11 Gay & Lesbian Tourism Report by Community
Marketing, Inc. ranked Palm Springs among the top three U.S. cities promoting itself as
gay-friendly, behind only the much-larger cities of Las Vegas and San Francisco.
11
And
with more and more gay visitors becoming part- or full-time residents, Palm Springs is
now estimated to have one of the highest proportions of gay residents per capita among
all U.S. cities.
12

This influx of gay tourists and residents has contributed to dramatic social and
cultural shifts in formerly conservative Palm Springs. While several gay bars cluster
along a one-block stretch of Arenas Road downtown, there is no “lavender line”; with the
obvious exception of the clothing-optional resorts on Warm Sands Drive, most local
establishments cater equally to gay and straight customers who mingle throughout the
city, patronizing the same businesses and pursuing the same activities. The sight of hand-
in-hand same-sex couples walking along Palm Canyon Drive is as unremarkable as the
sight of senior citizens in Hawaiian shirts and shorts. The changing demographics have
also politically transformed the city and - together with an increased Hispanic population
and redrawn district boundaries - the entire Coachella Valley. Three of Palm Springs’

10
“White Party 2012 in Review,” Advocate.com, April 10, 2012, http://www.advocate.com/arts-
entertainment/people/2012/04/10/white-party-2012 (accessed January 27, 2013).
11
Mariecar Mendoza, “How gay or straight is Palm Springs?,” The Desert Sun, September 13, 2011,
http://www.williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/how-gay-or-straight-is-palm-springs/ (accessed
December 31, 2012).
12
Mendoza, “How gay or straight is Palm Springs?”
103

five City Council members, including Mayor Steve Pougnet, are openly gay;
13
and in the
2012 Congressional elections, longtime incumbent Republican Representative Mary
Bono Mack, the widow of former Palm Springs Mayor and Congressman Sony Bono,
lost her seat to Democrat Raul Ruiz, a Harvard-educated emergency room doctor and the
son of migrant workers.
14

This thesis has demonstrated that gay men and Modern architecture are the twin
cornerstones upon which this dramatic economic, cultural, and political rebirth of Palm
Springs has been constructed. Gay men discovered Palm Springs in the 1970s and 1980s,
during the city’s decades of decline, and transformed the blighted Warm Sands
neighborhood into an attractive, safe, and popular enclave of gay-oriented hotels. The
1989 founding of the wildly successful White Party, modeled on the lesbian-oriented
festivals surrounding the Dinah Shore Golf Tournament, made Palm Springs one of the
premier gay vacation destinations in the country, and introduced to a generation of
talented, affluent gay men the city’s extraordinary cache of mid-20th century Modern
architecture at the exact moment that Modernism was being re-evaluated. In the early
1990s gay men started the vogue for purchasing and restoring Modern houses in Palm
Springs, and in the late 1990s they were among the leaders in organizing efforts to
preserve the city’s Modern architecture, gaining widespread publicity and helping turn
Palm Springs into a focus of cultural tourism. “Modernism is a key factor in the
economy of this city,” says Jacques Caussin, adding, “I don’t know of any other city

13
Mendoza, “How gay or straight is Palm Springs?”
14
Pat Morrison, “Rep. Raul Ruiz, an Rx for D.C.,” Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2013,
http://www.articles.latime.com/print/2013/jan/23/opinion/la-oe-0123-morrison-ruiz-20130123
(accessed February 24, 2013).
104

where gays have played a major role in architecture like Palm Springs. Maybe in Miami
Beach with Art Deco.”
15

Caussin’s comparison of Palm Springs to Miami Beach is apt, for gays were
among the leaders of the preservation movement that saved the Art Deco neighborhood
of South Beach when it was threatened with redevelopment in the 1970s; the pastel-hued,
neon-lit historic district is now one of Florida’s top tourist attractions. Gay men have in
fact been credited with leading roles in historic preservation and community
revitalization efforts across the country, from Greenwich Village and SoHo in Manhattan,
to the French Quarter of New Orleans, to San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood.
But very little documentation exists to prove this widely-held perception. Additional
research is needed to definitively document the role of gay men and women in specific
historic preservation and neighborhood revitalization efforts, and in the broader role of
promoting and popularizing historic preservation across the country.
This thesis is but a single case study within that larger context. The story of how
gay men preserved Modern architecture in Palm Springs - and how Modernism, in turn,
transformed the city - is one example of the gay contribution to historic preservation, as
well as a particularly dramatic example of preservation’s broader economic, social, and
cultural benefits. It also demonstrates the benefits of an inclusive, pluralistic society; for
if Palm Springs hadn’t provided a welcoming community for gay men and women in the
1970s and 1980s, it might not be enjoying the remarkable renaissance it is experiencing
today. Palm Springs has always represented a paradise of one sort or another to each

15
Steven Biller, “Replaying the Classics,” art ltd. magazine, January 2012, http://www.artltdmag.com
(accessed January 26, 2013).
105

succeeding wave of its inhabitants: a winter refuge for the Cahuilla; an agricultural
empire for John Guthrie McCallum, and a restorative environment for his dying son; a
sybaritic resort for millionaires and movie stars; a taste of the good life for post-war
America’s rising middle class. It is tempting to call today’s Palm Springs a “gay
paradise,” though of course no such place really exists. But with its incomparable
climate, stunning scenery, fine architecture, and culture of acceptance, Palm Springs
comes closer than most, thanks in large part to the combined influence of gay men and
Modernism.

106

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract The contribution of the gay community - and gay men in particular - to the cause of historic preservation in the United States has long been tacitly accepted, but seldom documented. This thesis fills part of that gap by documenting, as a singular case study, the role played by gay men in rediscovering, rehabilitating, and reviving the faded resort city of Palm Springs, California. ❧ Over the course of the 20th century, Palm Springs developed from a modest spa town into an exclusive winter resort, and, after World War II, into a popular vacation destination for the growing middle class. The city’s popularity, and its period of greatest development, peaked in the two decades after World War II, coinciding with the rise of Modernism in the United States, before declining dramatically in the 1970s, leaving Palm Springs a virtual ghost town that yet boasted the largest and finest concentration of mid-20th century Modern architecture in the country. ❧ This thesis documents how, at its popular and economic nadir, Palm Springs was rediscovered largely by gay men - many in the fields of architecture, design, and publishing - who built a community, rehabilitated neglected Modern houses, led the effort to recognize and preserve the city’s unique architectural heritage and, in so doing, fostered the city’s economic, cultural, and political renaissance.

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Asset Metadata

Creator LoCascio, John Paul (author)

Core Title A different kind of Eden: gay men, modernism, and the rebirth of Palm Springs

School School of Architecture

Degree Master of Historic Preservation

Degree Program Historic Preservation

Publication Date 07/03/2013

Defense Date 07/03/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Gay,modernism,OAI-PMH Harvest,Palm Springs

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Breisch, Kenneth A. (committee chair), Platt, Jay (committee member), Starr, Kevin (committee member)

Creator Email jlocasci@usc.edu,jpl-arch@earthlink.net

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-284740

Unique identifier UC11294027

Identifier etd-LoCascioJo-1739.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-284740 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LoCascioJo-1739.pdf

Dmrecord 284740

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights LoCascio, John Paul

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA