Palm Springs is a desert city in Riverside County, California, within the Coachella Valley. It is located approximately 37 miles east of San Bernardino, 111 miles (177 km) east of Los Angeles, 136 miles (225 km) northeast of San Diego, and 269 miles (218 km) west of Phoenix, Arizona. The population was 44,552 at the 2010 census.
Golf, swimming, tennis, horseback riding, biking, and hiking in the nearby desert and mountain areas are major forms of recreation in Palm Springs.
Native American settlement
Archaeological research has shown that the Cahuilla people have lived in the area for the past 350–500 years. The Cahuilla name for the area was "Se-Khi" (boiling water). When the Agua Caliente Reservation was established by the United States Government in 1896, the reservation land was composed of alternating sections (640 acres) of land laid out across the desert in a checkerboard pattern. The alternating, non-reservation sections, were granted to the Southern Pacific Railroad as an incentive to bring rail lines through the open desert.
Presently the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians is composed of several smaller bands who live in the modern day Coachella Valley and San Gorgonio Pass areas. The Agua Caliente Reservation occupies 32,000 acres (13,000 ha), of which 6,700 acres (2,700 ha) lie within the city limits, making the Agua Caliente band the city's largest landowner. (Tribal enrollment is currently estimated at between 296 and 365 people.)
Spanish explorers
In the early 19th century, Spanish explorers named the area "Agua Caliente" (hot water). One possible origin of palm in the place name comes from early Spanish explorers who referred to the area as La Palma de la Mano de Dios or "The Palm of God's hand".
Later 19th century
The first white settler in the area was Jack Summers who ran the stagecoach station in 1862.[4]:44, 149 Fourteen years later (1876) the railroad was laid 6 miles to the north isolating the settlement.[4]:17 The current name for the area is "Palm Springs" which likely came into common usage in the mid-1860s when U.S. Government surveyors noted that a local mineral spring was located at the base of "two bunches of palms". By 1884, when San Francisco attorney John Guthrie McCallum settled in Palm Springs, the name was already in wide acceptance.
20th century
The city became a fashionable resort in the 1900s when health tourists arrived with conditions that needed dry heat. The village of Palm Springs was more comfortable in its microclimate as the area was covered in a shadow late afternoon during the summer by the San Jacinto mountains to the west. In the winter the mountains block cold winds from the San Gorgonio pass.
In the 1920s Hollywood movie stars were attracted by the hot dry, sunny weather and seclusion. Architectural modernists flourished with commissions from the stars, using the city to explore architectural innovations, new artistic venues, and an exotic back-to-the-land experiences. Inventive architects designed unique vacation houses, such as steel houses with prefabricated panels and folding roofs, a glass-and-steel house in a boulder-strewn landscape, and a carousel house that turned to avoid the sun's glare.
In 1946 Richard Neutra designed the Edgar and Liliane Kaufmann House. A modernist classic, this mostly glass residence incorporated the latest technological advances in building materials, using natural lighting and floating planes and flowing space for proportion and detail. In recent years an energetic preservation program has protected and enhanced many classic buildings.
Culver (2010) argues that Palm Springs architecture became the model for mass-produced suburban housing, especially in the Southwest. This "Desert Modern" style was a high-end architectural style featuring open-design plans, wall-to-wall carpeting, air-conditioning, swimming pools, and very large windows. As Culver concludes, "While environmentalists might condemn desert modern, the masses would not. Here, it seemed, were houses that fully merged inside and outside, providing spaces for that essential component of Californian—and indeed middle-class American—life: leisure. While not everyone could have a Neutra masterpiece, many families could adopt aspects of Palm Springs modern."
Hollywood values permeated the resort as it combined celebrity, health, new wealth, and sex. As Culver (2010) explains: "The bohemian sexual and marital mores already apparent in Hollywood intersected with the resort atmosphere of Palm Springs, and this new, more open sexuality would gradually appear elsewhere in national tourist culture." To purify the environment city government, stimulated by real estate developers systematically removed and excluded poor people and Indians.
Palm Springs was pictured by the French photographer Robert Doisneau in November 1960 as part of an assignment for Fortune on the construction of golf courses in this particularly dry and hot area of the Colorado desert. Doisneau submitted around 300 slides following his ten-day stay depicting the lifestyle of wealthy retirees and Hollywood stars in the 1960s. At the time, Palm Spring counted just nineteen courses, whereas the city now has "one hundred and twenty-five golf courses, 2,250 holes, or rather continuously thirsty pits, which soak up 1.2 million gallons of water just to survive."
Between 1947 and 1965, the Alexander Construction Company built some 2,200 houses in Palm Springs effectively doubling its housing capacity.
As the 1970s drew to a close, increasing numbers of retirees moved to the Coachella Valley. As a result, Palm Springs began to evolve from a virtual ghost town in the summer to a year-round community. Businesses and hotels that used to close for the months of July and August instead remained open all summer. As commerce grew, so too did the number of families with children.
In the 1980s, Palm Springs had been popular for its annual Spring Break when 100,000+ college students will visit the city and formed crowds and parties, then came the Spring Break riots of 1986 and the Palm Springs Police in riot gear had to put down the rowdy crowd. But in 1990, due to complaints by concerned residents, mayor Sonny Bono and the city council closed the city's Palm Canyon Drive to Spring Breakers and the downtown businesses lost money normally filled by the tourists. Later in the end of the decade, the city worked with downtown businesses to develop the annual Palm Springs VillageFest. The downtown swap meet has became a regular event since 2004.