Palm Springs California — Retro Vintage History

The desert's mid-century modern capital — a Coachella Valley oasis where Hollywood built a town of butterfly roofs and the world's largest rotating tram climbs two miles into the mountains. Palm Springs sits in a bowl of sun at the foot of Mount San Jacinto, on the floor of the Coachella Valley. The Agua Caliente Cahuilla built their lives around its hot mineral springs and palm-canyon oases for thousands of years; by the 1950s it had become a sun-drenched modernist playground of clean lines and kidney-shaped pools. Three hundred and fifty days of sun, a mountain that leaps straight off the desert floor, and a whole town of desert-modern design — this page tells the story.

The hot mineral springs the Cahuilla called "Se-Khi," and the fan-palm oases of the canyons that still carry their name, made this stretch of desert livable for thousands of years; the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians are its original inhabitants and stewards. In 1884 John Guthrie McCallum became the first permanent non-Native settler, building the adobe that is still the city's oldest standing structure and digging irrigation ditches to green the valley floor. A health-resort era followed — the Desert Inn opened in 1909 — and on the strength of its dry air and warm springs the desert stop grew into a winter resort. Palm Springs incorporated as a city in 1938.

Two hours from the Hollywood studios, Palm Springs became a movie-colony retreat in the 1920s and '30s, and after the war it turned into something the world had never quite seen: the capital of mid-century modern design. Through the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, architects filled the desert with glass-walled houses, folded-plate roofs, and breeze-block screens — the style now called Desert Modernism, and still the densest concentration of preserved mid-century modern architecture in the country. In 1963 the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway opened, climbing the sheer cliffs of Chino Canyon to Mount San Jacinto State Park; rebuilt with rotating cars in 2000, it remains the world's largest rotating tramcar. Each February, Modernism Week — founded in 2006 — brings a global design crowd back to the butterfly roofs.

What's with the butterfly roofs? They're the signature of Desert Modernism — the postwar architecture that made Palm Springs the world capital of mid-century modern. Roofs that dip in the middle like a butterfly's wings, walls of glass that erase the line between inside and desert, breeze blocks and floating planes and kidney-shaped pools: a whole town built for indoor-outdoor living under 350 days of sun. The architects who designed it turned a desert resort into a living museum of mid-century design, which is why the butterfly roof — and the breeze block, and the blue pool — belongs to Palm Springs as much as the palms do.

Palm Springs keeps two kinds of cool. There is the design — the butterfly roofs and glass walls of the mid-century town, celebrated every Modernism Week. And there is the literal kind: the rotating tram that lifts you nearly six thousand feet off the valley floor into the pines of Mount San Jacinto, where it can be forty degrees cooler than the desert below. Between them sits the oasis itself — the Cahuilla hot springs, the fan-palm canyons, and the long mountain wall that makes the whole valley feel like a room.

Our Palm Springs logo carries the California grizzly and star over "California Republic, Est. 1850," the same emblem every Merlin Classics California place wears. The bear and star are California's shorthand — wildness, independence, the open West — printed black-and-white with the worn look of an old state-park sign or a vintage athletic print. What makes this one Palm Springs is the place behind it: the mid-century modern, the rotating tram, the desert oasis. On a tee or a cap it reads less like a souvenir and more like a piece of the California desert — Est. 1850, worn plain.

Today Palm Springs is a thriving desert resort city, proud of its mid-century modern heritage, its tramway and palm-canyon oases, and the Coachella Valley sun that draws a design-loving world back every winter. Its story runs from the Cahuilla hot springs through McCallum's 1884 adobe, the 1938 incorporation, the postwar Desert Modernism boom, and the 1963 tram into the mountains. Our Palm Springs designs gather that identity into wearable form — the desert, the design, the oasis. Palm Springs, California — mid-century modern at the foot of the mountain.

Palm Springs California — Travel Guide

Visiting Palm Springs California Today

Palm Springs sits at the foot of Mount San Jacinto on the floor of the Coachella Valley, an easy two-hour desert escape from Los Angeles or San Diego. It pairs mid-century modern architecture and palm-canyon oases with the rotating aerial tramway, downtown galleries on Palm Canyon Drive, and roughly 350 days of sun a year.

The Design, the Tram & the Oasis

For visitors searching for things to do in Palm Springs, California:

• Ride the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway up Chino Canyon to the cooler pine forests of Mount San Jacinto State Park.
• Hike the Indian Canyons, the Cahuilla fan-palm oases with stream-fed trails.
• Tour the mid-century modern neighborhoods — and time a visit for Modernism Week in February.
• Stroll Palm Canyon Drive downtown for galleries, design shops, and classic facades.
• Wander Moorten Botanical Garden and the Palm Springs Art Museum.
• Detour west to the roadside Cabazon Dinosaurs (in Cabazon, about 20 minutes away) or out to Joshua Tree National Park.

Why People Visit Palm Springs California

People come to Palm Springs for the sun, the mid-century modern design, and the rare pairing of desert and mountain — palm oases on the valley floor, snow-dusted pines a tram ride above. It is bright, stylish, and walkable: the desert's design capital at the foot of Mount San Jacinto.

For deeper reading on the Palm Springs, California history described here — the Agua Caliente Cahuilla hot-springs oasis, John Guthrie McCallum's 1884 settlement and adobe, the 1909 Desert Inn health-resort era, the 1938 incorporation, the postwar Desert Modernism boom, the 1963 Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, and the founding of Modernism Week in 2006 — it may be useful to consult (1) the Palm Springs Historical Society, (2) the Palm Springs Public Library's local-history room, (3) the California State Archives and the California Historical Society, (4) the Palm Springs City Clerk's records office, and (5) the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum for Cahuilla heritage. For travel and visitor information, it may be useful to contact (1) Visit Greater Palm Springs, (2) the California Office of Tourism, (3) the Palm Springs Parks and Recreation department, (4) Mount San Jacinto State Park and the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, and (5) Palm Springs International Airport visitor information.