Water and bronze mark the corner at Plaza Mercado, where a statue of the musician and former Congressman Sonny Bono — the Sonny Bono Memorial Fountain — looks out over Palm Springs. The sculptor was Emmanuel Snitkovsky. Bono's Palm Springs career is the clearest case of this town's relationship with Hollywood running in reverse.
He arrived as a restaurateur, grew frustrated with the permit process, ran for mayor in 1988 and won, and then used the office to restage the town as a destination rather than a retirement community. His most durable act was founding the Palm Springs International Film Festival in 1989, which now fills these blocks every January and does more for the winter economy than any single hotel. He left for Congress in 1994 and died in a skiing accident in 1998.
The statue went up soon afterwards, positioned so that he appears to be watching the crowd on Palm Canyon Drive — which is, in fairness, what he spent a decade doing. His eyes point down Palm Canyon Drive.