The Castle Built by Skid Row Hands
Near Zzyzx, California
When Curtis Howe Springer arrived at Soda Springs in nineteen forty-four, there was almost nothing here but the springs, the salt flats, and a scatter of old ruins. His first encampment was little more than twenty tents. To turn tents into a resort, Springer did something remarkable and, by many accounts, self-serving.
He drove into the Skid Row district of Los Angeles and recruited homeless and down-on-their-luck men, offering them food, shelter, and desert air in exchange for their labor. They mixed and poured the concrete that became Zzyzx. Over the years, that work produced a sprawling complex.
The centerpiece was a sixty-room hotel that Springer styled as a castle, with a grand facade facing the desert. Around it he laid out a health spa fed by pools he heated with a boiler, then marketed as natural hot mineral springs. He added a church, guest cottages, a dining hall, and a curving entrance drive he grandly named the Boulevard of Dreams.
At its height the resort drew crowds of paying visitors. Critics later noted that Springer had promised his desert an oasis and delivered one built largely on the free labor of the poor and the trust of the faithful.
