Palm Springs Sprawl : Desert Oasis Suffers Tilt Toward East
Shortly after public relations executive Chicki Kleiner moved from Beverly Hills to the swank Lakes Country Club in Palm Desert last March, a woman she discreetly describes only as a “multimillionaire socialite” ensconced her in a Rolls-Royce for a tour of the desert.
Along with the tour came some important do’s and don’ts.
The first stop was at an intersection well east of the Palm Springs city limits, Kleiner said.
“ ‘The first thing you must learn,’ she told me, ‘is never go west of Bob Hope Drive. Everything there is old hat,’ ” Kleiner recalled.
For 30 years, Palm Springs was a glittering oasis without parallel for Southern California’s hip and wealthy and the ultimate destination for tourists seeking glamorous shops, fancy restaurants, clean air and sunshine.
Now, big spenders, tourists and developers are sidestepping this 50-year-old resort community, gravitating instead toward the towns that have blossomed east of here in the Coachella Valley over the last 10 years.
The new competition contributed to the city’s first municipal budget shortfall of $1.5 million in 1985. City officials were forced to dip into reserves to balance the books.
Nearly two-thirds of the visitors who rented cars at Palm Springs Airport in 1983 and 1984, according to a recent study, did not stay here.
Instead, they drove to new condominiums, country clubs, golf courses and restaurants in Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage, Indian Wells, Cathedral City, La Quinta and once-sleepy Indio, which Riverside County planners believe may surpass Palm Springs as the largest city in the valley by the year 2000.
Desert Transformation
Squeezed out of Palm Springs by a lack of affordable land and sizable lots, home builders are turning the desert east of here into vast tracts of tiled roofs and neatly trimmed golf courses teeming with retirees and winter residents.
“I wouldn’t buy in Palm Springs,” said retired Canadian oil company executive William Kennedy as he looked over expensive model homes in La Quinta. “It is old to begin with, and ‘touristy’--too hurly-burly.”
Palm Springs is scrambling to reverse the trend and find a new niche in the changing economic balance of the valley without destroying most of its cherished “village” atmosphere.
It is getting into the convention business, giving its deteriorating downtown a face lift and even courting K Mart and Sears, hoping that they will open stores in the city and broaden its economic base. Sandblasting crews can be seen blowing bubble gum and soda pop stains off the sidewalks of the commercial district as hotels freshen their image with new facades. It has even relaxed, albeit slightly, a longstanding ban on certain advertising signs and building height.
“Palm Springs had sat upon its laurels and had the luxury of turning down developers’ schemes,” said Tom Lynch, director of economic development and housing. But now, Lynch said, the city has deemed it necessary to become “more aggressive.”
An official with the Palm Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau put it another way: “The competition gave this city a much-needed kick in the butt.”
After years of deliberately restricting growth to preserve its low-slung, tiled-stucco ambiance, city officials are slowly starting to lift the area’s severe limitations on advertising banners and so-called “mid-rise” development to attract new customers.
Largest Resort Community
To be sure, Palm Springs, with 5,000 hotel rooms, 7,435 swimming pools, 300 public and private tennis courts and 10,000 palm trees, remains the largest resort community in the valley.
During the busy tourist season, November through May, the population soars from 39,000 to 75,000 and its sidewalk cafes, nightclubs, restaurants and secluded hotels are crammed with visitors whose “fashion statement” may range from pink Bermuda shorts to tiny bikinis.
It is at this time that the mid-priced cars and Jeeps belonging to local residents earning an average $17,500 a year jostle for space with the hordes of sleek sports cars and Rolls-Royces owned by visitors earning an average $47,000 a year.
“I like the hotels, they’re good for business, but I also love the traffic,” said Palm Springs men’s clothing shop owner Jerry Maloof, staring out at the scantily clad masses strolling by his store one sunny day in January. “It’s the bumper-to-bumper traffic that makes this place what it is.”
The hubbub is also the very thing that is driving people away.
‘Mobs Control Main Drag’
“The mobs control the main drag in Palm Springs,” said real estate broker C. Jordan Thorn as he nursed a vodka and soda at Melvyn’s, the popular Palm Springs watering hole and dinner house.
“It’s a shabby community compared to what’s happening down valley,” said Thorn, who moved to Palm Desert eight years ago.
“The Palm Springs name will fade slowly but surely,” he added. “It’s a fading star.”
Indeed, the city’s grip on the upper crust of society has been loosened by neighboring towns also battling for the tourist dollar.
Only three of the valley’s 60 golf courses are in Palm Springs, for example.
Palm Desert, which has half the population of Palm Springs, listed new building starts in 1985 valued at $180 million. By comparison, Palm Springs listed new building starts that year valued at $104 million.
A new $1-billion recreation/residential development at La Quinta offering 5,000 homes and four championship golf courses is turning that formerly remote hamlet into a premiere destination resort almost overnight.
‘Yesteryear’s Darling’
Compared to these communities, “We started looking a little seedy, threadbare,” acknowledged John Mangione, Palm Springs director of community development. “We had become yesteryear’s darling.”
Now, signs abound that the city is starting to move in new directions.
“When I started here in 1982, I wanted to put up banners to advertise exhibits and was turned down,” recalled Morton Golden, director of the Palm Springs Desert Museum. For the Armand Hammer exhibit of masterpiece paintings, which opened Jan. 16, he said, “they said it was all right. I think attitudes are changing.”
A six-story luxury hotel, Maxim’s, an affiliate of the famous Paris restaurant, opened last month on Palm Canyon Drive in an area known for its rows of one-, two- and three-story shops. City officials said the hotel and adjacent new Desert Fashion Mall, which together make up the largest redevelopment project here in 40 years, were designed to bring big spenders back to town and make it more attractive to prospective developers.
“Had it (the hotel and shopping center) not been built, we could have gone the way of Yuma, El Centro or Pasadena,” said Julie Baumer, Palm Springs public relations director.
Construction of the hotel effectively ended a tradition of “low-rise” buildings that didn’t obstruct the view of the mountains behind the commercial district, said Ken Feenstra, director of redevelopment.
The city even accepted an unusual design that would probably not have been considered years earlier. One Indio resident likened it to two giant cash registers sitting side by side.
“We were so desperate for major development downtown that we were not in a position to argue with developers over design,” Feenstra said.
Mayor Frank Bogert bristles at criticism of the city’s revitalization efforts.
A former publicity agent for Palm Springs, Bogert helped shape the city’s reputation as a posh playground for the rich. From 1934 to 1942, he wrote “articles about the millionaires and the glamour people here” with the idea that, “if you cater publicly to the classes, the masses will come.”
More than one city in the area is using that same strategy today as development races east along California 111. In fact, the name “Palm Springs” has come to connote a larger metropolitan area of many cities than the single municipality that bears its name.
Golf Classic Elsewhere
The annual PGA golf tournament, often referred to as the “Bob Hope Desert Classic at Palm Springs,” is actually played on golf courses at nearby Bermuda Dunes, Indian Wells and La Quinta.
When U.S. presidents make their pilgrimage to the sprawling enclave of multimillionaire Walter H. Annenberg, reports may say it is in “Palm Springs,” but the estate is actually in neighboring Rancho Mirage, home for a growing list of celebrities that includes former President Gerald R. Ford, Lucille Ball, Ginger Rogers, Frank Sinatra and former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, among others.
“We still have celebrities,” said Jerry Moore, manager of a Palm Springs sightseeing business. “Oh, Trini Lopez is still here.”
So are Bob Hope, Kirk Douglas and Sonny Bono, who owns a Palm Springs restaurant and recently asked at City Hall about how to run for the City Council, according to Baumer, the city’s public relations director.
Joining celebrities in the exodus down valley are what developers cherish as the “real beautiful people” of the desert--second-home buyers and retirees.
Of course, people like retired oil company executive William Kennedy, and his wife, Angela, of Calgary, Canada, still tell friends they vacation in “Palm Springs.”
“You say La Quinta and who the hell knows where that is?” Kennedy said.
Luxury Car Bait
“Knowledgeable people go to Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage and La Quinta,” agreed Doug Richards, a salesman at Chaparral Country Club in Palm Desert, which offers a free “$50,000 Mercedes-Benz” with the purchase of a home on the development’s golf course. “Sinatra, (former Secretary of State Henry A.) Kissinger--these guys don’t go traipsing down to Palm Springs anymore.”
There is a growing sense throughout the valley that the really “in” places to be are east of Palm Springs.
“This is a place where, when you see diamonds, it’s the real thing,” said Palm Desert resident Kleiner. “This is not fun jewelry, this is serious stuff.”
With the reputation of their city under attack, local officials accuse the surrounding communities of being jealous of Palm Springs’ accomplishments in years past.
“Maybe in 100 years, if Palm Desert does enough publicity, they will be as famous as we are,” said Mayor Bogert in response to a Palm Desert official’s assertion that his city has become “honky-tonk.”
Likened to Children
Director Mangione of the Palm Springs Economic Development Department compared Palm Springs to a father of rebellious children who end up hurting the whole family.
“Palm Springs was here first,” Mangione said. By way of analogy, he added: “It’s like me. I have four children and, as they’ve grown, each in turn has tried to take dad on.”
“And once you’ve dishonored the old man, you’ve dishonored the whole family--you won’t do it again unless you are psychopathic,” added Thomas Hanlon, the director of the Palm Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Hanlon, the highest-paid public official in the city at $95,000 a year, manages an advertising budget of $1.7 million that is used to market Palm Springs’ “product” to what he calls “high-end, low-social-cost, tourism-producing guests.”
Translated, that means “guys who won’t trash your streets,” Hanlon said.
Still, the sometimes disruptive annual Easter pilgrimage of college students and hangers-on that brings negative publicity to Palm Springs is an important source of profits for local owners of small businesses and hotels.
Hanlon worries about a lack of unity among local bureaucrats over the future of Palm Springs.
‘Market Peg’
“What is the market peg?” he asks. “Is Palm Springs a retail center? A relaxation resort? A playground for the rich and beautiful? Or a Coney Island in the desert?”
A $102-million convention center/hotel project is the centerpiece of the city’s stab at reclaiming its eroding prestige, and officials hope it will bring thousands of free-spending conventioneers and their families to town when it opens in mid-1987. The 100,000-square-foot facility is designed to compete with convention centers at other Sun Belt resorts such as Monterey, Scottsdale and San Diego.
But city officials are not waiting for those funds to come rolling in. They have launched a host of programs to trim the city budget.
The city has already raised business license fees and is considering cutting back financing for programs such as the aerobics classes offered by the Palm Springs Department of Leisure, Baumer said.
Beneath the city’s efforts to rebuild and regain a prominent position in the valley, there is growing speculation here that Palm Springs may never be “No. 1” again.
Even Bogert acknowledged that the city has been humbled.
“There is no doubt but that arrogance has hurt the city,” the mayor said. “But I think we’ve corrected it--most of it.”
PORTRAIT OF THE COACHELLA VALLEY
The Coachella Valley now has 60 golf courses which require 60 million gallons of water daily. About 40% returns to the aquifer that supplies the valley with most of its water. Although the water level is dropping about three to four feet a year, estimates are that the aquifer holds enough of the precious liquid to last 200 years.
The Coachella Valley now has 60 golf courses which require 60 million gallons of water daily. About 40% returns to the aquifer that supplies the valley with most of its water. Although the water level is dropping about three to four feet a year, estimates are that the aquifer holds enough of the precious liquid to last 200 years.
The Coachella Valley now has 60 golf courses which require 60 million gallons of water daily. About 40% returns to the aquifer that supplies the valley with most of its water. Although the water level is dropping about three to four feet a year, estimates are that the aquifer holds enough of the precious liquid to last 200 years.
ETHNIC MAKEUP
White Latino Black Other Palm Springs 27,057 2,903 1,418 988 Desert Hot Springs 5,276 514 35 116 Rancho Mirage 5,918 288 15 60 Palm Desert 10,422 1,094 61 224 Indian Wells 1,330 30 10 24 Indio 8,024 12,152 950 485 Coachella 782 8,148 90 109
Source: 1980 U.S. Census
PALM SPRINGS
Incorporated 1938
Population 38,925
Seasonal population 75,000
Mean family income $30,266
Median age 46
DESERT HOT SPRINGS
Incorporated 1963
Population 7,759
Seasonal population 9,400
Mean family income $19,213
Median age 45
CATHEDRAL CITY
Incorporated 1981
Population 16,032
Seasonal population 19,000
Mean family income $23,325
Median age 44.5
RANCHO MIRAGE
Incorporated 1973
Population 7,582
Seasonal population 15,000
Mean family income $48,695
Median age 54
PALM DESERT
Incorporated 1973
Population 15,217
Seasonal population 27,000
Mean family income $33,224
Median age 38.5
INDIAN WELLS
Incorporated 1967
Population 1,880
Seasonal population 3,200
Mean family income $82,579
Median age N/A
LA QUINTA
Incorporated 1982
Population 6,933
Seasonal population 8,500
Mean family income $22,304
Median age 27
INDIO
Incorporated 1930
Population 28,200
Seasonal population 33,200
Mean family income $19,762
Median age 25
COACHELLA
Incorporated 1946
Population 12,550
Seasonal population 15,000
Mean family income $16,527
Median age 22
Source: 1985 city government figures on population, 1980 Census figures on income and age.
