Drive east from the Palm Springs Art Museum and within four blocks you are on it. There is no marker. Some of it is hotel and convention center now, some of it is parking, and some of it is still vacant ground with concrete slabs in the weeds where floors used to be. This is Section 14: one square mile in the middle of downtown, and until about sixty years ago it was where a third of the city lived.
The word the city used for what happened to it was abatement.
The checkerboard
The people whose land this is call themselves the ʔívil̃uqaletem, the Cahuilla, and their name for this place was Sec-he, boiling water, for the hot mineral spring that the Spanish renamed Agua Caliente and the Americans eventually renamed Palm Springs. Archaeology puts them in Tahquitz Canyon for at least five thousand years. Cahuilla territory ran from the San Bernardino Mountains south to Borrego Springs and east across the basin that now holds the Salton Sea, sitting in the bed of a much older lake that carries their name.
When the reservation was laid out, it was not laid out as a block. The Southern Pacific had been granted every other square-mile section as a railroad subsidy, so the Agua Caliente reservation came out as a checkerboard: fifty-one alternating sections, tribal and non-tribal, interleaved across the valley. Section 14 is one of those squares, and it happens to sit directly against downtown Palm Springs.
Why people lived there
Palm Springs in the middle of the twentieth century enforced racial covenants, which meant Black and Latino families could not buy in most of the city. Section 14 was tribal trust land, outside that machinery, and federal law at the time capped tribal leases at five years. A five-year lease is close to worthless to a hotel developer. It was perfectly good, though, if what you wanted was somewhere to put a house.
So people did. They leased lots, formally or informally, and built. By 1950 roughly a third of the population of Palm Springs lived in Section 14 — the people who cleaned the hotels and cooked in the kitchens and did the construction, in a neighborhood with churches and businesses and, by every surviving account, the ordinary density of a place where people knew each other.
The part that is usually left out
The tribe owned the land. Most individual Agua Caliente allottees did not control it.
A conservatorship system run through the local courts placed tribal members' estates under appointed guardians and conservators, most of them white, who managed the property and took fees against it. Tribal members were, as a matter of law, treated as incapable of handling their own affairs. The program was not dismantled until 1968. Any account of Section 14 that reads as landlord against tenant has the shape wrong: the people with the least power in the story are on both sides of the lease.
1959, and what came after
In 1959 federal law changed to let the Agua Caliente Band lease its land for up to ninety-nine years. Overnight the square mile against downtown became the most valuable undeveloped real estate in the Coachella Valley, and the city wanted it for the resort business.
What followed is documented in the city's own records. Between 1965 and 1967 the Palm Springs fire department burned 235 structures in Section 14. Roughly a thousand people were evicted. Some got notice and some came home to find the house gone. Nobody was compensated. Photographs from the period show houses burning and a church going down under a bulldozer, filed under the heading of controlled-burn abatement.
In 1968 a report out of the California Attorney General's office described what the city had done as a "city-engineered holocaust." Then, for about fifty years, almost nothing.
Sixty years later
In June 2020 a petition began circulating to remove the statue of Frank Bogert, mayor during the clearance, from the lawn in front of city hall. That fight pulled the older one back into daylight. The council voted for removal in 2021 and issued a formal apology the same year. Bogert's personal role remains disputed — some local historians argue he worked to help the displaced and was scapegoated — but the city's institutional responsibility was never really the contested part.
Survivors filed a complaint in 2022. In November 2024 the council voted unanimously for a settlement: 5.9 million dollars in direct payments shared among roughly 1,200 survivors and descendants, calculated against an estimated 30,000 dollars per home for 197 non-abandoned residences, alongside about 21 million dollars in housing and small-business programs. The city transferred the payment in October 2025. The memorial, the park, and the cultural center are still ahead of it.
Most of the people who collected were in their seventies and eighties. They spent four years going to council meetings to get it.
What to do with this on the drive
Palm Springs is worth a day of anyone's trip — the architecture is worth the trip, and the canyons above town are tribally owned and open to visitors for an admission that goes to the tribe.
But the mid-century Palm Springs that people come to photograph was not built beside Section 14. Some of it was built by clearing it. That is not a reason to skip the town. It is a reason to know, when you are standing on a nice flat block downtown wondering why it is a parking lot, that the answer is not that nothing was ever there.