Arcades and shopfronts face the sidewalk at La Plaza, originally Palm Springs Plaza and also known as La Plaza de California, an on-street, open-air shopping centre at the heart of downtown Palm Springs. It sits between South Palm Canyon Drive, the main southbound artery through downtown, and Indian Canyon Drive, the northbound one, along a divided road called La Plaza, with storefronts on both of those streets and on the Tahquitz Canyon and Arenas backsides. The historic Plaza Theatre is its anchor.
It opened in 1936 as one of the first planned shopping centres in Southern California, which is a larger claim than it first appears: this is a pre-mall model, where the parking is on the street and the shopfronts face people on foot. Julia Carnell, an Ohio businesswoman who had helped rebuild downtown Dayton, financed it, and the architect Harry Williams laid it out in a Spanish Colonial Revival idiom that the desert climate happens to suit. His son, E. Stewart Williams, would spend the next four decades arguing the opposite case a few blocks away in steel and glass.
Little about these shopfronts has moved since Harry Williams laid them out.