Sights—Tramway Oasis Gas Station; Palm Springs Aerial Tramway; Palm Canyon; Tahquitz Canyon.
Museums—Palm Springs Art Museum; Palm Springs Air Museum.
Memorable Meals—Citron; Johannes; Matchbox; Fisherman's Market & Grill; Le Vallauris; Wally's Desert Turtle; Cafe Italiana.
Late Night—The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies; Blue Guitar; Agua Caliente Casino; CopyKatz Showroom; Buddy Greco's; The McCallum Theater.
Walks—Palm Desert Civic Center Sculpture Park; the trails at Moorten Botanical Garden.
Especially for Kids—Children's Discovery Museum of the Desert; Knott's Soak City; Boomer's; The Living Desert.
Palm Springs lies at the north end of the Coachella Valley, 100 mi/161 km east of Los Angeles. The valley extends for approximately 45 mi/72 km along a northwest-southeast axis between the San Jacinto Mountains and Santa Rosa Mountains on the west and the Little San Bernardino Mountains on the east. Palm Springs sits at the base of Mount San Jacinto (10,834 ft/3,359 m), towering over the city on its north side.
The mountain (snow-capped in winter) is incised by deep canyons where native fan palms are fed by natural springs. The San Andreas fault runs along the base of the Little San Bernardino Mountains, which merge north with the San Jacinto Mountains. Access to the valley is via the San Gorgonio Pass. Palm Springs is at 450 ft/140 m elevation, but the valley slopes gradually east to the Salton Sea, 227 ft/70 m below sea level. Interstate 10 runs through the center of the valley, connecting Los Angeles with Phoenix, Arizona.
The term "Palm Springs" is often used to encompass the eight desert resort communities—Desert Hot Springs, Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage, Indian Wells, La Quinta and Indio—that occupy the Coachella Valley. With the exception of Desert Hot Springs, which lies on the east side of the valley, the cities are located between Interstate 10 and Highway 111, the valley's commercial thoroughfare, which snakes along the foot of the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains. The cities are laid out in a checkerboard grid of north-south and east-west boulevards.
Within Palm Springs, Highway 111 becomes Palm Canyon Drive. This 2-mi-/3-km-long main drag is lined with the principal shops, restaurants, hotels and bars. Immediately west of Palm Canyon, the upscale residential districts (north to south) of Las Palmas, the Tennis Club District and Little Tuscany comprise a warren of little-trafficked streets lined with upscale homes of the rich and famous.
The Palm Springs region was first settled about 2,000 years ago by Native American communities who made good use of the natural springs at the base of the San Jacinto Mountains. When prospectors arrived in the mid-19th-century, they found a highly evolved society—the Agua Caliente (Hot Water) Band of Cahuilla Indians. In 1876, the U.S. government deeded 32,000 acres/12,950 hectares in trust to the Cahuillas, and an equal amount to the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, which put a track through in 1877. Soon enough, visitors began arriving for the curative powers of the natural springs. In 1884, settler "Judge" John Guthrie McCallum built the first permanent homestead and general store. By 1915, the first hotel was built.
In the 1920s, the arrival of stars and starlets launched Palm Springs from a sleepy desert outpost into a hedonistic retreat. Movie directors used the area as a backdrop for their movies, such as The Sheik (1921) and The Foreign Legion (1928). Ranch hotels opened, drawing regular habitues such as Walt Disney. Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Errol Flynn and Clark Gable were among the regular fixtures alongside Hollywood moguls. Ensuing decades saw the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, Crosby and Hope, and even Elvis.
By the 1950s and '60s, Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack had made Palm Springs the definition of cool. Almost every Hollywood star of the era put down roots in Palm Springs. They were accompanied by world-famous architects—among them Albert Frey, John Lautner, Richard Neutra and E. Stewart Williams—who blessed the city with thousands of buildings in an informal and trendy vernacular "desert-Modernist" style. Meanwhile, the post-war arrival of air-conditioning gave the desert city a magnificent boost.
The heyday lasted into the 1970s, by which time the money had moved down-valley to newer cities graced by ritzy golf-oriented country clubs. Palm Springs began a two-decade-long decline and fell into a state of decay. The town developed a seedy image, worsened by its sudden popularity as the West Coast spring-break party town. In 1988, song-writer Sonny Bono was elected mayor and managed to tone down spring-break fever. He also established the Palm Springs Film Festival. Meanwhile, the Agua Caliente tribe opened its first casino.
Fortunately, the city's stock of Modernist homes helped turn things around. By the mid-1990s, gay fashionistas began arriving to renovate run-down homes, many of which metamorphosed into stylish boutique hotels furnished with retro Eames, Noguchi and Saarinen kitsch. Palm Springs has since staged an impressive comeback. New hotels continue to open. Palm Springs is now acclaimed for fine dining. And Hollywood stars are again flocking to sip their martinis poolside at fashionable resorts that denote the 1960s all over again.
Elvis and Priscilla planned a secret wedding at Elvis' leased home at 1350 Ladera Circle, but word got out. To escape the paparazzi, they hopped the back fence, where Frank Sinatra's limo was waiting to whisk them to the airport and an escape to Las Vegas on Sinatra's private jet.
Temperatures regularly reach 120 F/49 C in summer, but you can hop the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, which deposits you at 8,516 ft/2,640 m, where it's usually 30 degrees F/17 degrees C cooler.
When The Lodge at Rancho Mirage was built, no fences were permitted so as not to interfere with migratory pathways of endangered bighorn sheep. An exception was granted after the sheep took to using the hotel's swimming pool.
In 1943, Errol Flynn opened a nudist colony in Palm Springs but kept his name off the books for tax reasons. The site is still a nudist resort.
Frank Sinatra's modernist three-bedroom home—Twin Palms—sold in 1997 for the unbelievable price of US$187,000. It was resold in 2005 for US$2.9 million.
