Mojave Modern

By Bill Barol/Palm Springs

I've always found the two-hour drive from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, Calif., to be deeply dislocating, in the best sense of the word. Route 111, the main approach to town, veers suddenly off from Interstate 10 to cut a jazzy angle across the desert, unplugging you at last from the freeway grid. Past the turnoff, the six-mile drive into town, with its surreal juxtaposition of ancient mountains and shiny new energy-producing windmills, seems to further separate you from the everyday. And then the big, welcoming surprise: the sharply angled roof of the Tramway Gas Station looming over a low wall at the entrance to the desert resort, like a jet poised for takeoff. Tramway Gas, designed by Albert Frey and Robson C. Chambers in 1965, is iconically modern. Balancing restraint and exuberance, it promises an infinitely perfectible future. And it opens the door not just to Palm Springs but to one of the richest collections of Modernist architecture anywhere.

It seems odd at first, all this low-slung elegance in the middle of a desert. In fact, it was almost inevitable, as Tony Merchell, an amateur architectural historian who has been deeply involved in the town's historic-preservation movement, told me. Wealthy Eastern and Midwestern business people followed movie stars to Palm Springs in the 1940s and '50s, at just the moment when Modernism was taking hold in California.

The combination of wealth and a dominant regional style (plus, says Merchell, "a certain amount of keeping up with the Joneses") led to a flurry of Modernist-home construction that lasted into the '60s, and a parallel boom in Modernist public buildings and tract houses. The style fell out of favor in the '70s, and Palm Springs suffered a two-decade recession, from which it has only recently emerged. In 1997 a developer's threat to demolish Tramway Gas sparked a preservation movement and in turn a rush to snap up and restore the area's stock of '50s and '60s homes. Today, although the preservation community is far from having the upper hand, there is at least a fresh focus on the town's wealth of mid-century architecture.

There's much more of it than can be seen in a weekend. I like to go midweek, off-season, and spend at least three days. "A Map of Palm Springs Modern," published by the Palm Springs Modern Committee (available at its website and at the visitors' center, 2781 North Palm Canyon Drive), is an indispensable aid to navigation. A word of warning: some of the very best buildings featured on the map are private homes, such as E. Stewart Williams' 1953 Edris House; Frey and Raymond Loewy's 1946 Loewy House; and Richard Neutra's meticulously restored 1946 Kaufmann House, famously photographed by Julius Shulman in what critic Alan Hess calls "one of the defining images of mid-20th century Modernism." These homes are accessible only during occasional house tours. (For more information, visit the websites of the Modern Committee and the Palm Springs Desert Museum; see box.) The map at least gives visitors a chance to view the houses from the street. It also gives locations for important but less lavish homes like Donald Wexler's Steel Houses. Cheap, strong and resistant to the elements, steel looked like the next big thing in modular-home construction when these demonstration houses were put up at the intersection of Simms and Molino in 1961. But the idea never caught on, and today the homes are in private hands. The nearby Racquet Club Road Estates area, also marked on the map, is worth a cruise for its huge stock of circa-1960 tract homes built for the George Alexander Co. (The houses, newly desirable on the local market, are known generically as Alexanders.)

Head for downtown, along Palm Canyon Drive south of Tachevah, for the biggest concentration of noteworthy commercial buildings. Some, like the office Frey shared with John Porter Clark, and the Kocher-Samson Building, produced early in Frey's career, have been unsympathetically treated and are barely recognizable. Others, like A. Quincy Jones and Paul R. Williams' Town & Country project, a mixed-use development from 1950, are in good repair but suffer from hard use. (Some of the once choice storefronts along the landscaped courtyard today are used for storage; the centerpiece Town & Country restaurant, now Zeldaz dance club, is intact but done over in a brutal '70s style.) The best viewing lies farther south, in a string of three banks designed by Williams, Williams and Williams. Two of them, Coachella Valley Savings Bank No. 2 (1956) and Santa Fe Federal Savings (1957), are vacant. The former is being offered for sale at just under $1.4 million and includes "an all-original GE all-electric kitchen"; the latter, one of architect E. Stewart Williams' favorites, is a glassy International-style beauty that seems to float lightly above a "moat" of black stones. A third Williams bank, Coachella No. 3 (now operating as Washington Mutual), takes the idea a step further, almost literally floating above a broad pool as cooling fountains play across the front.

When it's time to call it a day, skip the overbearingly themed Ballantine's Movie Colony on Indian Canyon Drive and head to the neighboring town of Desert Hot Springs for a night at Hope Springs. Formerly a residential hotel, Hope Springs is a low-key and welcoming 10-room inn done over in an austere '50s style. Soak your tired feet in its flow-through system of three spring-fed mineral pools, and say hello to Hector, a wirehaired terrier rescued by manager Nancy Morgan from the surrounding desert. (The lobby fire pit, done over as a tile fountain, is Hector's unofficial water bowl.) Better yet, stay in town--at L'Horizon, where Marilyn Monroe always took Room 3C, or at Herbert Burns' 1957 Orbit In, which has been meticulously restored and impeccably decorated with furnishings by mid-century icons Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen and George Nelson. It's hard to imagine another hotel whose devotion to style is so intense. The guest lounge is named after a local architect (the ubiquitous Frey), sports vintage photographs of his work (by Shulman) and invites visitors to simply look out the window for the best view in town of one of his greatest works--Frey House No. 2 (1963), which perches on the rocky mountainside directly over the hotel's pool deck. Manager Bruce Abney and assistant manager Patrick Richardson work tirelessly to make guests feel at home, and if you catch Abney at the right moment, as I did on my last visit, he will recount the whole history of the Burgess House, Frey No. 2's flashier neighbor, right down through its recent sale. An added bonus: the hotel is within walking distance of my new favorite restaurant in Palm Springs, the casually inventive Johannes, where--somewhat paradoxically, considering its location in the desert--my wife and I had the best sea bass of our lives.

All in all, Orbit In is pretty close to Modernist heaven. As you sip your complimentary Orbitini, listen to Mambo with Tjader on the poolside stereo and watch the sun slip behind the mountains, it's easy to forget that much of Palm Springs' architectural heritage is still at risk. Despite victories like the saving of Frey's Fire House No. 1, new threats arise every day. Tramway Gas--the building that started the preservation movement in Palm Springs and most recently housed a gallery--abruptly closed its doors last month and has been sold. Although it has the protection of historic-site status, the result of the 1997 flap, "we're worried about what will become of it," says Peter Moruzzi, chairman of the Modern Committee. "It's hard to know what's going to happen."

California never has had much use for the past. Every time that reality gets too oppressive, I know exactly what to do: I get behind the wheel and drive east, to an oasis of architecture that now and always looks to the future.

Bill Barol, a writer living in Los Angeles, has visited Palm Springs several times a year for the past decade