I wish I had been writing this column in 1994, when Disney cut the ribbon at Celebration, a fully-planned, Florida “town” that looks and feels like the mythical place Walt himself had pined for most of his life.
Belief was so strong that Disney’s “Imagineers” could conjure up a real lifestyle by cherry-picking the best of architecture and urban planning from 1840 to 1940 (the same could be said of Seaside, Fla., which came first), there was a waiting list to buy in.
I wonder if, at the age I was then, 26, I would have celebrated Celebration. Probably, since I’ve always had a weak spot for nostalgia.
If I’ve learned anything in the past two decades, however, it’s that you can’t create authenticity from scratch. Just like a good deli needs a few layers of schmaltz on the food prep area as well as on the tables, a real neighbourhood needs layers of history; that way, you can understand the motivations of the people that came before, and learn to accept the good and the bad. When serious crime finally came to Celebration in 2010 in the form of a murder and suicide, it was off script: “How do you fit these events into the Disney dream?” wrote Ed Pilkington in The Guardian.
That’s why I love what’s happening in Palm Springs, Calif., where real neighbourhoods from the mid-20th century are being lovingly restored one house at a time. Starting about 20 years ago, a handful of Los Angeles-based lovers of mid-century modernism rediscovered the sleepy retirement town and started to snatch up the modest-but-modernist vacation homes built by the Alexander Construction Co. and others. In so doing, they learned of the area’s storied past as a desert playground for Hollywood’s studio system actors of the 1930s and 40s (they had to be within a 90-minute drive for reshoots) and well into the Rat Pack fifties and sixties and, ultimately, how this led to ordinary folk wanting to play there too.
By the late 1990s, entrepreneurs were buying up tired, old low-rise hotels that had once hosted celebrities and sprucing them up to attract architourists (this one spent his 2003 honeymoon at the Orbit In). In 2005, a small festival was built around a mid-century modern furniture show at the Palm Springs Convention Center; today, Modernism Week has grown into a joyous celebration of architecture, preservation, furniture design, fashion and cocktail culture that, in 2014, attracted more than 45,000 people.
“We want everybody to be a preservationist,” says Ron Marshall, former president and current board member of the Palm Springs Preservation Foundation. “One of the reasons I got involved in preservation was because I would take a walk around my little neighbourhood [of Sunmor Estates] and talk to people, and I was amazed that they were just as crazy as I was when it came to historic preservation; they saw the economic benefits, they understood, they’d been overseas in cities where stuff had been preserved.”
And much of Palm Springs’ rebirth-via-preservation can be attributed to the gay community, which, by necessity, has had to hone sharper activism and advocacy skills. “Actually, when you look at the boards, straight members are the exception,” Mr. Marshall observes. “On our [neighbourhood] board, there were times when we’ve only had one or two straight people … and that’s true throughout the city, it doesn’t matter whether it’s an HOA [home owners association], [gay members] are usually forward-thinking and we need to tap into their energy and their sensibility.”
And, thankfully, it’s not all serious stuff that that energy gets poured into; as evidenced by the three major Modernism Week home tours I attended last month, this new spirit of preservation spills into rescuing significant pieces of mid-century modern furniture, as well. And, once a year, doors open, Sinatra hits the hi-fi, and period-appropriate cocktails are poured for the goggle-eyed tourists.
For instance, at the Royal Hawaiian Estates, a complex of 40 Polynesian-themed, Donald Wexler/Ric Harrison-designed condo units on five lush acres (built 1961–62), I had the pleasure of touring six homes filled not only with period-appropriate furniture, but also with Easter Island totems and primitive Witco furniture from the short-lived Tiki bar phenomena of the postwar years. One unit, owned by hip illustrator “Shag” (Josh Agle), had a reproduction fieldstone wall mimicking those on the office buildings downtown on Palm Canyon Drive. As a side note, the Royal Hawaiian became the city’s first Historic Residential District in 2010.
In the neighbouring city of Palm Desert at “the Sandpiper,” architect William Krisel’s mega-complex of 306 condo-homes arranged around 18 swimming pools, at least half of the homes on tour were decked out in Mad Men style. Built between 1958 and 1969 and arranged in “Circles,” I cheerfully noted that Circles 11 and 12 (built 1965) had successfully become first in the complex to become a Historic District in May 2013.
The last official tour I took (there were unofficial ones as well), featured single-family homes by architect Hugh M. Kaptur. To my eye, Mr. Kaptur captured the same “Flintstones meets the Jetsons” vibe of the famous Googie coffee shops of L.A., with futuristic, zoomy butterfly roofs married to heavy fieldstone bases. Here, too, more than half of the 11 homes open for inspection were celebrating the era with vintage décor.
But here’s the thing: None of this was planned; there was no script. Mid-century modernism’s rebirth in Palm Springs happened organically, authentically, by like-minded people who decided there was something worth keeping besides the sunshine and the rugged San Jacinto Mountains.
And that’s cause for celebration.