Where a shuttered shopping mall once sealed off this block, Downtown Park now opens it back up to Palm Springs. The Desert Fashion Plaza opened here in 1982, turned its back on Palm Canyon Drive, and slowly emptied until the city was left with a shuttered box in the middle of downtown. Demolition began in 2013, and what replaced it was not another mall but a park, a hotel, and a street grid stitched back into the blocks around it.
That decision matters more than it sounds. A desert town that walks is a town with shade, and this park's job is to supply it: lawn, water, trees, and somewhere to sit between the museum uphill and the shops downhill. The reversal is the story of downtown Palm Springs in miniature — a place that spent the 1980s and 1990s trying to be somewhere else, then decided its own architecture and its own climate were the attraction.
Let the shade pick your route from here to the next stop.