Beyond the parking lot rises The Shops at Palm Desert, known over the years as Palm Desert Town Center, Westfield Shoppingtown Palm Desert, and Westfield Palm Desert. The mall serves the Coachella Valley and holds Macy's, JCPenney, Dick's Sporting Goods and Barnes & Noble alongside a hundred and twenty-two inline stores and a food court; the Tristone Palm Desert 10 Cinemas closed in February 2023, and the space has been shopped to other theatre chains since. Keep this building in mind as the control case for the next mile.
It is the enclosed, air-conditioned, inward-facing model of desert retail, and it opened while El Paseo was still finding its footing a few hundred yards south. Four decades on, the open-air street with sculpture down the middle of it is the one people fly in for. That is less a verdict on malls than a verdict on climate: shade, continuous storefronts, and a median worth walking beside turn out to beat a sealed box, even at a hundred and fifteen degrees.
The open-air street a few hundred yards south won.