Two of the oldest buildings in town share one narrow lot here at the Village Green Heritage Center, a park on South Palm Canyon Drive maintained by the Palm Springs Historical Society. The site holds the Cornelia White House, the McCallum Adobe, Ruddy's General Store, a green space, a fountain, and the bronze sculpture Standing Woman by Felipe Castaneda; the Palm Springs Walk of Stars runs through the park as well. The Cornelia White House is a wooden structure of 1893 and one of the oldest surviving buildings in town — it was built partly from railroad ties, which tells you plainly what materials were to hand.
The McCallum Adobe dates to 1884 and was the home of John Guthrie McCallum, the first permanent white settler here, who came seeking a dry climate for a son with tuberculosis and set about diverting water from the Whitewater River to farm. Ruddy's is a reconstructed general store fitted out as it would have looked in the 1930s. Together these buildings cover the fifty years between a Cahuilla oasis and a Hollywood resort, on a lot narrow enough to cross in a minute.
The plaques run in date order, and fifty years go by in a minute.