San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
SEARCHING FOR THE REMNANTS OF PRE-MODERN PALM SPRINGS.
In the beginning, there were palms. And springs. But not a whole lot more.
When Nellie Coffman, the woman who turned Palm Springs into a world-famous destination, came to the Coachella Valley in October 1909, the community was a small Cahuilla Indian village with a handful of white settlers. Some farmed and others came to this spot at the foot of the San Jacinto Mountains for the mild winter climate and cures at primitive spa hotels.
So as Coffman, part of a hotelier family in Santa Monica, traveled by train before climbing into a buckboard wagon for the final miles through the deep sands to her new home, she had reached a country that belonged more to Old West than the West Coast. The nowlegendary manhunt for Willie Boy, a Chemehuevi Indian charged with murder, played out in the nearby canyons and mountains. There were unfounded rumors of an Indian uprising and even a possible assassination attempt on President William Howard Taft, then traveling through inland Southern California.
It hardly seemed like a promising location for a resort town. But after Coffman and her husband, Harry, opened a sanatorium hotel, she recognized Palm Springs’ tourism potential, then built the Desert Inn, a graceful Spanish-style enclave that set the tone for the community over the decades. The inn became a destination for Hollywood stars who, after discovering Palm Springs while on location, began escaping to the desert. As Palm Springs has become more and more identified with midcentury modern architecture, its early history has been overwhelmed by all things ring-a-ding-ding. While I still love cruising through town with “I Say a Little Prayer” on the car stereo, I’ve also grown weary of an increase in knockoff, midcentury mundane designs. So on this trip, I’m in search of a different Palm Springs. Before it was mod. Thousands of wind turbines whirl in the San Gorgonio Pass before I hop off Interstate 10 and follow Highway 111 along the San Jacintos. The highway goes past ATVs surging up sand dunes and a gas station with a Flying V roofline designed by modernist master Albert Frey that now houses the Palm Springs Visitors Center.
In town, I pass the onetime site of the Desert Inn (torn down in 1966 to make way for a shopping mall that has also been demolished) and the nine-hole O’Donnell Golf Club, the oldest course in the golf-mad valley. In the distance, deep shadows mark the opening to Tahquitz Canyon, a prominent cleft in the mountain wall.
The Cahuilla Indians have lived in the Palm Springs area for as long as 3,000 years, and today’s Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians owns thousands of parcels in a checkerboard pattern around town, as well as the oasis-like Indian Palm Canyons and Tahquitz Canyon.
The canyon is named for a powerful, if not especially benevolent, shaman, who according to legend was exiled here. He then turned himself into a green fireball and began preying upon the souls of the unwary who ventured into the canyon. Tahquitz’s story is among the lore you’ll hear on guided hikes that explore the canyon and lead to a seasonal 60-foot waterfall. Despite the canyon’s notorious reputation (some Cahuilla still avoid it), the waterfall doubled as an earthly paradise when it played Shangri-La in scenes from the 1937 film version of “Lost Horizon.”
Tribal ranger Robert Hepburn leads the hike. Compact and fit from years of long treks into the San Jacintos, he’s as old-school as his stout leather hiking boots and simple canteen — no hydration system for him. Dubbed “Mountain Bob,” the former Marine wrote “Plants of the Cahuilla Indians,” and on the 2-mile round trip he points out some of the 200 species the tribe depended on for food, medicine and materials for their baskets.
Despite recent rains, the canyon remains parched. Only a scattering of blooming desert fuchsia sprinkles color among the tans and grays. Enclosed by steep, boulderstrewn slopes beautifully lit by the soft autumn light, Tahquitz Canyon, though only a short walk from the manicured precincts of Palm Springs, feels a world apart.
Hepburn stops to identify remnants of the Cahuillas’ past, including pictographs on a boulder face that slants above us, and pauses to savor the desert wind swirling through the canyon. “There’s that wonderful, cool breeze again,” he says with satisfaction. “And just look at how blue the sky is today.”
The trail continues through tangles of wild grapevines before reaching the waterfall, such as it is. I’ve previously seen this waterfall plunge down the rock in a torrent of foam, but today it barely trickles. A couple arrive and the woman derisively declares, “Oh there it is, the seventh wonder of the world. Or maybe the eighth,” before promptly stumbling off a low footbridge and into the creek bed. More embarrassed than hurt, she says, “So OK, maybe there should have been less sarcasm and more respect.”
Later on, we see the couple performing Instagrambound karate kicks on a flat rock down-canyon. Even so, Tahquitz lets them off easy.
I detour to Desert Hot Springs, Palm Springs’ dusty, less fab Coachella Valley neighbor known originally for its own curing mineral waters and increasingly as a center for cannabis cultivation. I’m here for neither the springs nor the sativa, but to visit Cabot’s Pueblo Museum, a folk art compound listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
It’s tempting to describe Cabot Yerxa, who discovered the town’s hot and cold mineral springs in 1913, as a desert rat. Or, considering Yerxa spent more than two decades building this 35-room Hopiinspired structure from found materials and handcrafted adobe bricks, he might qualify as a classic eccentric. But Yerxa defies easy categorization. How can you type a man whose peripatetic life ranged from the Klondike gold fields to Cuba to the ateliers of Paris, where he retreated to study painting?
Docent Moises Huerta leads the way through the rambling structure, where Yerxa used discarded tin newspaper printing plates (in one section of exposed wall, you can still read a headline about Groucho Marx) for
insulation. Salvaged telephone poles serve as vigas, and, along with Yerxa’s desert paintings, there’s Pueblo pottery he collected during his travels.
But for all his wanderings, Yerxa chose this scruffy desert locale to live and build his master work. “I don’t know exactly what he saw, but something about this area captured his imagination,” says Huerta. “He found his dreams here.”
I check into the Willows Historic Palm Springs Inn, a luxury hotel as refined as Yerxa’s pueblo is roughhewn. On a low prow of the San Jacintos above downtown, the Mediterranean villa was completed in 1925 as a vacation home for Los Angeles banker and philanthropist William Mead and his wife, Nella, after the couple discovered Palm Springs while staying at the Desert Inn. The Willows enjoyed its greatest renown during the years Samuel Untermyer, one of the country’s most prominent attorneys, owned the estate. Among Untermyer’s house guests was his friend Albert Einstein, who stayed here three times in the early 1930s.
In the morning, I wander past cascades of bougainvillea and beneath swaying fan palms to a garden on a rise where Einstein basked in the desert sun. Later I meet with Tracy Conrad, an emergency physician, preservationist and president of the Palm Springs Historical Society. Conrad and her husband, Paul Marut, restored the Willows in the 1990s, and the couple also own the Thomas O’Donnell House, a 1925 Spanish Colonial Revival/ Monterey-style structure on a promontory above the hotel.
Open for tours, the house is considered the last major surviving remnant of the Desert Inn and was designed by architect William Charles Tanner, who also created the hotel. Conrad eases up the long, steep driveway and we enter ornamental iron gates that read Ojo del Desierto (Eye of the Desert) before arriving in the courtyard.
With fret-cut balusters along the curving balcony, a two-story living room beneath a wooden truss ceiling, and vintage Malibu, Gladding McBean, and Batchelder tile, the house preserves a vision of early Palm Springs. There’s even a sofa from the Desert Inn.
We gaze out from 200 feet above the valley, past new and rather uninspiring development along Palm Canyon Drive and to the distant mountains. Conrad loves Palm Springs’ remarkable blend of architecture — Spanish Mediterranean, ranch and midcentury modern. But it’s clear what has hold of her heart.
Looking back at the O’Donnell House, she says, “The way I’ve always put it is that midcentury is great. It’s sexy. But this, this is soulful.”