Fire trucks once rolled out of the doors at 72861 El Paseo, now the Palm Desert Historical Society, a 1949 station raised three years after Cliff Henderson platted this street. The society keeps photographs, maps and documents from the founding years, but the building itself is the most useful exhibit in it: a fire station sitting on the main shopping street tells you how small this place was when El Paseo was laid out, and how recently. Palm Desert incorporated in 1973 with a few thousand residents.
By the 2020 census the population had reached 51,163, and the city had been among the fastest-growing in California since 1980, when it counted 11,801 people. Everything you will pass in the next mile — the galleries, the median, the rotating commissions — was built inside a single lifetime, on ground that was creosote and sand when this fire station opened. Walk east and the storefronts climb away from this one.