Bombay Beach

Bombay Beach sits 223 feet below sea level on the east shore of the Salton Sea, which makes it the lowest community in the United States. In the 1950s and 1960s it was a genuine resort, fifteen hundred people and a marina, with celebrities coming out from Los Angeles for the fishing and the water skiing. Then the lake turned. Salinity climbed, the fish died in windrows, the smell arrived, and the people left. By the 1990s the population was a couple hundred and the shoreline was lined with flooded, salt-eaten trailers.

What happened next is unlikely. Artists began arriving in the 2010s, and since 2016 the town has hosted the Bombay Beach Biennale, a self-described renegade festival that installs work in and among the ruins each spring. Much of it stays. There is a drive-in theater with vintage cars parked before a screen that faces open desert, an opera house, a swing set standing out on the cracked playa, and a run of sculpture along the berm that keeps the water out.

The census counted 231 residents in 2020. The American Legion post and a small market are most of the infrastructure, and the nearest hospital is nearly forty miles off. Come in winter, walk slowly, buy something local, and photograph the ruins with some restraint about the people who still live in them.