Palm Springs

Start with the water. Séc-he, the hot mineral spring in what is now downtown, is where the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians place their beginnings, and it is still theirs. In 1876 President Grant set aside that square mile, Section 14, as reservation land; the following year President Hayes extended the reservation across the even-numbered sections of three townships. The odd-numbered sections had already gone to the Southern Pacific Railroad as a construction subsidy. The result is a checkerboard: fifty-one alternating square miles of tribal and non-tribal land, laid over a city that grew up on top of it.

Section 14 sits in the middle of downtown. Because Palm Springs excluded non-white residents nearly everywhere else, Black and Mexican American families leased there and built homes. Through the 1950s and 1960s the city cleared them out, bulldozing and burning houses; a California attorney general's report later called it a city-engineered holocaust. The city apologized in 2021, and in November 2024 approved a settlement with the survivors and their descendants, paying 5.9 million dollars in direct compensation in October 2025 alongside 20 million in housing programs.

The rest of what draws people here is real too: the largest concentration of mid-century modern architecture in the country, a February festival built around it, the Indian Canyons and Tahquitz Canyon on tribal land, and a tramway that lifts you from the desert floor to eight thousand feet of pine forest in about ten minutes.