Nellie Coffman and the Desert Inn

Before the movie stars, before the modern houses, one woman turned this desert village into a destination. Her name was Nellie Coffman, and she is remembered as the Mother of Palm Springs. She arrived around nineteen oh eight hoping the dry air would ease a stubborn cough, and the next year she and her physician husband opened a small sanatorium for people with tuberculosis and other lung ailments.

They called it the Desert Inn. Coffman soon saw a bigger future. Worried that sick guests would scare away tourists, she pushed to turn the place into a resort for healthy visitors, a disagreement that helped end her marriage.

She ran it with her two grown sons, and through the nineteen twenties she built it into a world class hotel, borrowing from the oil tycoon Thomas O'Donnell to fund a sprawling Spanish Mediterranean building with over one hundred rooms. For decades the social and civic life of the whole town revolved around the Desert Inn. It stood near the center of what is now downtown, and Palm Springs literally grew up in its shadow.

The hotel itself did not survive. It closed in nineteen sixty-seven and was later torn down and the site redeveloped. But the resort culture Nellie Coffman invented, warm hospitality in a healing desert climate, became the town's entire reason for being.