Nudist Resort in Palm Springs at a Crossroads
Stephen Payne is serious about nudity. He prefers the term “naturist” and, at the upper-crust resort he own in Palm Springs, bathing suits are banned in the swimming pools and spa.
Payne wears little but a straight face when he calls his Desert Shadows Inn Resort & Villas a “family hotel.”
With business booming, Desert Shadows will embark this week on a $5-million expansion that will include 11 additional condominiums and a nudists-only footbridge over busy Indian Canyon Drive.
In Palm Springs, a fun-loving desert oasis where the minor league baseball team once offered “nude night” and “Drag Queen Night,” nobody is complaining. Even merchants think it’s a swell idea that could bolster a redevelopment campaign north of downtown.
“Anything goes,” said Jacquii Gottlieb, whose husband’s accountancy office is next door to the expansion. “We are totally for it. It’s hot here, anyway. Who needs clothes?”
Not Stephen Payne.
A Minneapolis native with a lengthy background in hotel management, he met his wife, Linda, 25 years ago in Houston. She was already an avowed nudist.
“I thought it was awful,” Payne recalls. “I was dragged kicking and screaming into it. Now I’m almost evangelical about it.”
In 1992, after scouring exotic locales, including Nicaragua and Costa Rica, the Paynes decided to open a high-class nudist resort in Palm Springs.
They began with an 11-room motel and have since purchased most of the block. They’ve added swimming pools, a restaurant and condominiums. The resort now includes 59 condos, 33 hotel rooms, tennis courts, a spa, regular nude water aerobics and periodic nude volleyball tournaments.
With no room to expand farther on the east side of Indian Canyon Drive, the Paynes bought property on the west side. But how to get their nude guests across the street?
That’s where the nudists-only bridge comes in.
“Legally, I think we could do this in Irvine, too,” Payne said. “But a lot of people might react to it differently there than they do here. What sets Palm Springs apart is that it is a lot more accepting of ideas than a lot of other towns.”
The city Planning Commission rejected the bridge--not because it would be used by naked people, but because members felt they might set a bad precedent by allowing Palm Springs’ first elevated walkway.
The City Council apparently didn’t share the planners’ concerns, and this spring it unanimously backed the proposal, which calls for 5-foot-high walls that will shield nudists from street-level gawkers 18 feet below.
Payne is hoping to break ground as early as Monday.
It’s not as if Desert Shadows is merely tolerated in Palm Springs. It’s welcomed with open arms.
Ron Oden, a City Council member, credits Desert Shadows with revitalizing the blighted block north of downtown that was once a haven for prostitution and drug abuse. Oden remembers walking the area with the Paynes before their resort opened in 1992.
“There were broken-down vehicles, mattresses, debris, discarded needles,” Oden says.
“They came in and invested in this community. . . . Each time, it’s bigger and better.
” They have turned this place that was full of illegal activity into one of the highlights of our city,” he said. “It’s spectacular.”
