The Cathedral City Line: Who Built Palm Springs

The resort city you are approaching was built, in considerable part, by people who were not allowed to live in it. That fact is documented. It is almost entirely absent from the story Palm Springs tells about itself.

In nineteen twenty-four, a man named Lawrence Crossley arrived in Palm Springs and went to work as a handyman and chauffeur for hotel owner Pearl Stevens, helping build and maintain the city's first golf course. He became one of the most consequential Black civic figures in the region's history, eventually one of the first Black landowners in Palm Springs.

What there was not, for the men doing that work, was a legal place to live within the city they were building. Palm Springs in those decades was a sundown town, a place where Black residents were expected to be absent after dark. The informal boundary was a drainage ditch that marked the edge of Palm Springs and the beginning of Cathedral City. The workers lived on the Cathedral City side.

Decades later, in nineteen fifty-six, Crossley built affordable housing in Cathedral City for Black families displaced by new land agreements, establishing a community that became known as the Crossley area. He turned the exclusion into a foundation, built something durable on the other side of the line, and created a community that outlasted the legal structures that had confined it there.

The resort's public history does not celebrate this. The Crossley story is in the archives, in the KCET documentation, in the California History scholarship that examines who actually did the labor the resort economy required. It is a history that the resort's economy depended on and that the resort's identity chose not to remember.