Pioneertown

Most film sets get struck when the picture wraps. Pioneertown was built to keep. In 1946 a group of Hollywood investors, among them Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Russell Hayden, and the Sons of the Pioneers who gave the place its name, put up an 1880s frontier street in the high desert above Yucca Valley. The trick was that the facades were real buildings. Behind the saloon front was a working bowling alley; behind others, an ice cream parlor and a motel. Cast and crew could film on Mane Street in the morning and live there the rest of the day.

More than fifty films and television shows shot here in the 1940s and 1950s, including The Cisco Kid, Annie Oakley, and The Gene Autry Show. When the Western died, the town did not. People stayed. Mane Street is a historic district now, and a few hundred residents live in and around it.

The old cantina set had a second life as a burrito joint popular with biker clubs, and in 1982 Harriet and Claude Allen turned it into Pappy and Harriet's Pioneertown Palace. It should be a roadhouse serving barbecue to a hundred people. Instead it books touring acts far too large for the room, and has for decades.

It sits four miles up the hill from Yucca Valley, twenty minutes from the west entrance of Joshua Tree National Park.