Palm Springs' La Plaza a historic shopping site

In 1936 Southern California's first self-contained shopping center, La Plaza, opened in the heart of Palm Springs.

National Cash Register heiress Julia Carnell, a frequent guest of her friend Nellie Coffman, who ran the world-renowned Desert Inn, believed Palm Springs was going to prosper in a big way. She already owned the Carnell Building at 194 N. Palm Canyon Drive and wanted to build a project to help the infant town mature.

Carnell purchased 3˝ acres owned by pioneer Cornelia White.

To construct her visionary project, she commissioned Harry J. Williams, an architect in Dayton who also had done industrial work for General Motors, Frigidaire, and Delco during the financial surge of the 1920s.

In today's dollars, her million-dollar commission to build La Plaza translates to about $15 million, an enormous investment during the downside of the Great Depression.

Coffman famously remarked that her friend was daft, “building so far south of town in open desert dotted with just a few orchards,” even though La Plaza was but a block removed from Coffman's Desert Inn.

La Plaza's pioneering concept as a one-stop resort become mainstream: Underground parking, full-service bungalows and penthouses, onsite drug store, food market, bakery, stock brokerage, barber/beauty shop, post office, retail, restaurants, entertainment, and auto sales and service (Cadillac, of course!) for the newly mobile American traveler.

To help design what he called “the first comprehensive little shopping center in California, a city within a city,” Harry Williams enlisted his architect-sons, Roger and Stewart; both fell in love with the desert, raising families whose progeny still live and work here.

Integral to the project was La Plaza Theatre, owned and operated by pioneer Earle Strebe.

The theater opened in 1936 with the premiere of Greta Garbo's “Camille,” a film she attended incognito, sitting in the back row.

During the 1940s the Amos 'n' Andy, Jack Benny and Bing Crosby radio shows were broadcast here.

Before 1958, theater policy adhered to segregation, with white folk in the orchestra section and people “of color” seated in the balcony.

At the east end of La Plaza's median strip stands a small building that has survived many iterations. It first served as the Mobil gas station, next as the Greyhound bus station, then a date shop, followed by an A&W Root Beer stand.

Today it is the popular Tyler's, an alfresco diner where locals go for sliders and shakes.

Tyler's personifies the journey of La Plaza through Palm Springs history.

First part of a groundbreaking new architectural concept and a key element in automobile travel and mass transportation, now part of food history and hospitality, the venue, like the city itself, boasts exceptional genes.

Styles and demographics, cuisine and architecture change, but Palm Springs continues to reinvent itself.