The Midcentury Spa-Tels of Desert Hot Springs
Trudi Sandmeier 0:00
Today on Save As…
Willa Seidenberg 0:01
I always loved it, A: because the spa water is amazing. And, B: the minute I get to the desert I relax.
Trudi Sandmeier 0:17
Welcome to Save As: NextGen Heritage Conservation, an award winning podcast that glimpses the future of the field with graduate students at the University of Southern California. I’m Trudy Sandmeier.
Cindy Olnick 0:28
And I’m Cindy Olnick. So, Trudi.
Trudi Sandmeier 0:32
Yes, Cindy.
Cindy Olnick 0:33
We have a very superduper special episode today because we are turning the tables and turning the mic on our very own producer, Willa Seidenberg who graduated from the heritage conservation program recently and did a thesis. So you know, the rule — you do a thesis, you get on Save As.
Trudi Sandmeier 0:55
That’s right. This is a home team adventure here. The Save As Dream Team conversation amongst ourselves celebrating this amazing accomplishment by our colleague and friend. So this is a special one for us.
Cindy Olnick 1:09
Very special. Well, they’re all special. But yes, this one is special in a special way.
Trudi Sandmeier 1:13
That’s right.
Cindy Olnick 1:14
So, Willa and I drove out to Desert Hot Springs, which is in Riverside County, it’s about a little more than 10 miles north of Palm Springs. And we went out there in January for the grand opening and dedication of the historic rock house as the new permanent home of the Desert Hot Springs Historical Society. And it was built in the 40s as the Pil-O-Rox . And I mean, it was spelled p-i-l hyphen o hyphen, r-o-x. So Pil-O-Rox. And it is a fantastic place and a whole other story in itself. But today we are talking about Willa’s thesis, which was the spa-tels or spa motels of Desert Hot Springs. So we drove around and looked at some places and talk to some people. And yeah, it was super fun.
Trudi Sandmeier 2:11
So for those of you who need a little excitement in your day, one really important thing to listen for is the name of one of the spa hotels, which is Ma-Ha-Yah. And if you stay tuned to the very end of the episode, we’ll tell you what it means.
Cindy Olnick 2:28
Fun fact.
Trudi Sandmeier 2:29
All right, so let’s get to it. Let’s join in on the road trip with Cindy and Willa to Desert Hot Springs.
Cindy Olnick 2:39
So Willa, welcome to the other side of the mic.
Willa Seidenberg 2:43
It’s a very strange thing after editing the words of so many interviews to now be the person being interviewed about her thesis.
Cindy Olnick 2:52
I know. All right, so tell me about why Desert Hot Springs for your thesis?
Willa Seidenberg 3:00
I’ve been coming here to go to the spas and stay in the motels for 30 years. It’s a place that my husband and I discovered shortly after we moved to LA and I always loved it, A: because the spa water is amazing. And, B: the minute I get to the desert I relax. And Desert Hot Springs in particular because it was always kind of an eclectic, quirky town. So in the course of my research in Desert Hot Springs, I got to know one couple who used to own the Kismet Lodge, Jeff and Judy Bowman. And they gave me really good perspective on what they like about the town and its character.
Jeff Bowman 3:52
I like to say, we’re a funky little desert town that hasn’t been all LA-ified like Palm Springs.
Judy Bowman 3:58
People don’t come to Desert Hot Springs for a typical corporate, spiffed-up regulated environment. This is not quite the Wild West, but when we came here, it was much more like people could do what they wanted to do leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone.
Willa Seidenberg 4:13
The other thing I always appreciated was that it was really a town for middle-class vacationers to come out and enjoy spa life. It was kind of a spa town for the masses.
Cindy Olnick 4:29
Right. So tell me about the very unique topography of this area.
Willa Seidenberg 4:33
The town has a natural cold aquifer and hot aquifer. And as you go up the hill, the water gets warmer. And it has this unique collection of minerals. They call themselves Spa City, but as I discovered, there are a lot of places that call themselves….
Cindy Olnick 4:55
A lot of Spa Cities.
Willa Seidenberg 4:55
Yeah. Desert Hot Springs, though, the water is really good. And there’s just water everywhere.
Cindy Olnick 5:04
Right, right. So how did Desert Hot Springs become Spa City?
Willa Seidenberg 5:11
People passed through here for years, but the terrain was just too inhospitable. Now, the Cahuilla people, the Indigenous tribe that was based in the whole Palm Springs area of the Coachella Valley, there’s evidence that they would come through Desert Hot Springs for the hot springs. And they would have ceremonies, but they didn’t settle here, as they did in places like Palm Springs. So, people just didn’t know how to survive here. But, after the Civil War, the government had a program to encourage homesteaders to settle in the West. You could buy a certain number of acres and you could develop your property. So, Yerxa Cabet is considered the father of Desert Hot Springs.
Cindy Olnick 6:06
Not the founder, but the father.
Willa Seidenberg 6:09
He was one of the first white people to come and “discover” the springs. And he had a very tight association with Native American culture. He was one of the very first homesteaders, one of the first people that found the mineral water wells.
Cindy Olnick 6:30
So this would have been what 1800s, 1900s?
Willa Seidenberg 6:32
No, this would have been early 1900s. He put his homestead up here, and then later started building this adobe that just became this jumble of weird architecture. And it’s now a very prominent site in the town. It’s a museum now.
Cindy Olnick 6:56
Oh alright.
Willa Seidenberg 6:57
So he was like this adventurer and he lived part of the time here, he’d also go off and go live somewhere else. He had this grocery store in Moorpark, L.W. Coffee happened to go in it, they talked. And so Cabot gave him an introduction to somebody who was already out here. L.W. Coffee is considered the founder of Desert Hot Springs.
Cindy Olnick 7:26
And was Coffee more of the, let’s make some money here.
Willa Seidenberg 7:30
Coffee was more the businessman, although not necessarily a great businessman, but he was the one that looked at the town and said, Oh, there’s mineral water everywhere, we have to make a town devoted to health and wellness. So you know, both of these characters really contributed to making the town what it is.
Cindy Olnick 7:51
Oh, yeah, that was around the time there was that health and wellness movement around the country, right? Big, big, big hygiene kick.
Willa Seidenberg 7:57
Yes, and particularly in California, you know, where we have the sun and the water and the mountains
Cindy Olnick 8:03
Come out here to be healed.
Willa Seidenberg 8:05
So, it was really tapping into something that he thought people would want. He started dividing up the town and selling these subdivisions. And he had a lot of legal problems, and a lot of people that worked with him, they fell out. But he did build a bathhouse and opened it in the 40s. Tons of people came and he didn’t have lodging, but people were so anxious to discover the waters that they just came and slept in their cars, or in tents or whatever. And then slowly over time, people started buying up plots and actually building lodging and digging wells and having a little spa. And, a lot of them were very simple vernacular almost boxes around the spas. And, usually a lot of them were like ten units maybe. And the initial development was in the lower part of the town near where Coffee’s bathhouse was on Palm Drive, which is the main drag still.
Cindy Olnick 9:16
We just passed the site of the very first spa-tel which was…
Willa Seidenberg 9:19
L.W. Coffee’s Bath House.
Cindy Olnick 9:23
And it is a huge vacant lot covered in scrub brush. It’s for sale — 2.6 acres, hot mineral water zoned.
Willa Seidenberg 9:32
It’s just a shame that they didn’t preserve it because it was the first one and it is preserved in film history. Robert Altman made a film here, it was in my thesis. In the 50s, they started building up on Miracle Hill where the better concentration of the water was.
Cindy Olnick 10:01
Like they would build like a hot tub.
Willa Seidenberg 10:03
They would drill a well and make yeah, like a hot tub, a spa, and a lot of them had swimming pools. You could go sit in the spa after you swam, relax on chaise lounges. And, it also became a place for snowbirds.
Cindy Olnick 10:22
And this was also when the motels started coming into being.
Willa Seidenberg 10:26
Yes, it did coincide with two other trends. One was motels and the motels evolved from the fact that car ownership started going up after World War II. And then you got the highway system. So it used to be kind of a trek to get from Los Angeles out to Desert Hot Springs.
Suchi Branfman 10:48
My name is Suchi Branfman, and I have spent a lot of time out here over the decades. My grandmother used to come out here in the 20s. And driving from L.A. in a Model T. It took the whole day, there was no freeway and there were not a lot of lights on the roads. So if you left in the evening, you’d have to kind of camp out on the side of the road.
Willa Seidenberg 11:11
When they started building the highways and more people were in cars, they needed to build motels to accommodate car travelers and Desert Hot Springs was perfectly positioned to take advantage of those trends.
Cindy Olnick 11:25
But Desert Hot Springs had spas, so the motels became …
Willa Seidenberg 11:31
Spa-tels!
Cindy Olnick 11:33
Spa-tels.
Willa Seidenberg 11:33
Spa-tels, which is such a great term.
Cindy Olnick 11:36
So you said the heyday of these spa-tels was sort of 40s through the 60s, maybe?
Willa Seidenberg 11:41
I would say the 50s, 60s and maybe early 70s. So, a lot of the older spa-tels that were in the center of town were made into apartments or torn down. There’s some that are still operating as motels, but most of them have been either converted or demolished. So where we are right now is called Miracle Hill. And it got that name from Cabot because when he discovered water up here, he called it a miracle. And as you can see, it is up on a hill.
Cindy Olnick 12:28
Yeah, and you can see a vast sea of wind turbines, but also these beautiful beautiful mountains
Willa Seidenberg 12:41
Okay, so now you can see that Cabot’s is this quirky adobe.
Cindy Olnick 12:47
Is that what he built for himself?
Willa Seidenberg 12:48
That is what he built?
Cindy Olnick 12:48
It looks like a thousand years old. It’s like three stories tall in some places, and it’s multi-level.
Willa Seidenberg 12:59
It’s kind of this ramshackle building that has weird twists and turns. It’s now a museum and you can go on a tour. It’s kind of the one site to see in Desert Hot Springs.
Cindy Olnick 13:14
Wow. I mean, that looks like a tower like coming out of it a little bit.
Willa Seidenberg 13:17
Exactly. A lot of it is built with found materials from the area.
Cindy Olnick 13:24
Oh, yeah. Somebody earlier was talking about he was recycling before that was a thing exactly.
Willa Seidenberg 13:28
Exactly. This place up here right across the street, this is called Miracle Manor. And this is one of the first spa-tels that was built up here. And it was built by a couple, the Martins. And what’s interesting about this place, Michael Rotondi, an L.A. architect and his wife, April Greiman, a designer, bought this place in the late 90s and fixed it up to be a boutique hotel. I spoke with Michael Rotondi, and he described what Miracle Manor looked like when he first bought it.
Michael Rotondi 14:12
It had all 1960s and 70s furniture. It had polyester sheets and twin beds that you’d roll together and make-do with trying to make it into a bed for a couple. You know then in the middle of the night the beds would be sliding apart and you’d be lying in a hammock in between the beds. It was like that. And there was no windows to the outside, and the windows were filled with air conditioners. The one thing that I didn’t know is that people didn’t particularly like the aesthetic of the desert. They were out there for the climate and the water. That was it.
Willa Seidenberg 14:45
So you can see, it’s very simple construction. It’s not fancy.
Cindy Olnick 14:49
It looks like it’s almost garden level like underground a little bit but you don’t see much of the building.
Willa Seidenberg 14:55
No you don’t. So, I stayed here in 1998, when I was pregnant, and it was kind of our last, you know, before the baby comes, yeah, there were no telephones, no TVs, it was just a very spare room, but they gave you nice fluffy robes, you know. And the pools are straight ahead and you’ve got great views of the San Jacinto Mountains from there.
Cindy Olnick 15:20
Cool.
Willa Seidenberg 15:22
But I do think it’s interesting that this was one of the first up here, and it was one of the first to be revived. It had that through line. The place that we initially went was called Ma-Ha-Yah. And I never knew how to say it. I always was like, Maha yah, yah, yah, yah, I never knew, but I loved the place. When we started going, it was funky, but it was clean. And we didn’t have to feel precious about it, especially when we were coming with a kid. And they had a great swimming pool. And he could just come and be a kid. And then somebody bought it to fix it up and made it into a fancy place. And so we didn’t come anymore. This is it. It’s now called Bella Monte and its substance abuse facility. But it looked nothing like this, nothing like this.
Cindy Olnick 16:27
Okay, so now it’s like a beige stucco, its got red tile on the roof, sort of like Mission in a way, but very generic.
Willa Seidenberg 16:39
So, this place and another one that’s down the street called Hope Springs, to me, were two of the most interesting properties. When I was doing the thesis research, I got connected with a former owner of Hope Springs, Christopher Tandon. And Christopher had owned it with a group of, I think, five investors. And he had studied architecture, and he was convinced that an architect had designed Hope Springs because he said there were just too many architectural elements in it for it not to. And he said the only other one that I felt like had the same architectural elements was Ma-Ha-Yah. He had done a lot of research, he had gone to the library and looked through microfilm, he had talked to previous owners of Hope Springs. And he finally concluded no, no architect, it was just a contractor. And so I started trying to really track this down. And I kept doing all these different kinds of search terms. I found this one lead, which was a listing of archives of an architect named John Outcault, and his archives were at UC Santa Barbara. And they had the names of the different boxes of his drawings, and there were some that said Desert Hot Springs. And the contractor that built both places, Charles Eliot, I thought maybe he knew John Outcault, maybe just got some ideas from him or something. So I also got connected with John Outcault’s daughter MJ. Her parents had divorced, and so she didn’t really know a lot about her dad’s architecture business. But we decided to go up and look at his archives together. And I found the drawings to both Ma-Ha-Yah and Hope Springs. And so if confirmed that he had actually designed those two properties. It was like this eureka moment.
Cindy Olnick 18:44
Friends, this is the kind of scholarship and knowledge production that happens at the USC Heritage Conservation program.
Willa Seidenberg 18:52
Absolutely. And you know, that’s the thing is that writing a thesis, you go down these rabbit holes, right. Nobody had heard of him, really, because he was very centered in the desert. And as it turned out, he didn’t do a lot of designing here, because most places here were not designed by architects, except for the Lautner compound, which is the most famous one, but he designed or rehabbed hundreds of properties in the Coachella Valley. He was based in Palm Desert. And he went to USC, and he was part of that whole 50s architecture crowd. Yeah. So he’s worth looking at, right? Because he did all this stuff. And nobody knows about him.
Cindy Olnick 19:35
And there was a reason that you were drawn, pardon the pun, to these two properties, right?
Willa Seidenberg 19:42
Because they did have that kind of midcentury architectural elements, right? So let’s go Hope Springs.
Cindy Olnick 19:49
Chills.
Willa Seidenberg 19:49
Yeah. This place was originally called La Bella Sari.
Cindy Olnick 20:02
So this is definitely architectural. This is like A frame.
Willa Seidenberg 20:06
Yeah, exactly. So you can see why he had thought that there had been an architect.
Cindy Olnick 20:11
Now, this is what you think of when you think MidMod. Midcentury Palm Springs, terrazzo floor, walls of glass. Yeah. And it’s got this sunken seating area, but its all terrazzo. It’s super, super cool. So, there’s also a Jewish heritage in the area, right?
Willa Seidenberg 20:34
This was another rabbit hole that I went down in my thesis research. The Jews in the desert. Well, what I discovered was that there were a lot of Jews that were spa-tel owners, and I was trying to figure out how did they come there? Why did they come there? And it’s hard to know exactly. But I think for one thing, Palm Springs had covenants that didn’t expressly prohibit sales to Jews, but it was known that you don’t sell to Jews. And people will say, Well, what about all these Hollywood people? Well, they were building places in like, Rancho Mirage, right?
Cindy Olnick 20:34
Jack Benny.
Willa Seidenberg 20:34
Jack Benny — he couldn’t get into a club because he was Jewish. So my theory is that a lot of Jews probably felt locked out of Palm Springs, not welcomed to open stores and businesses there. So a lot of the people who bought these motels or built them, were sort of professionals, who were maybe in their 50s and retired. And they just ran these businesses, not just Jews, but other people, they ran these businesses as mom-and-pop spa-tels, right. And I went through a lot of microfilm of the Desert Sentinel, which no longer publishes, but the Jews really were a part of the town. There was a sizable Jewish community, sizable enough that they recruited a rabbi who had been a traveling rabbi for the Palm Springs area, to come to Desert Hot Springs and help them build a temple, which they did. And so there had to be enough Jews to support building a temple. This is post World War II, a lot of Jews moving to Southern California, particularly Los Angeles, after the war. And the other sort of interesting connection is that I was researching Ma-Ha-Yah and Hope Springs which had the same architect, the same contractor. Ma-Ha-Yah was built first, and the couple that built it was Rose and Nat Bertram. It turned out Rose Bertram was a Jewish immigrant from Romania. She had worked for many years for City of Hope, as a fundraiser. And what I did not know is that City of Hope started as the Jewish Consumptive League.
Cindy Olnick 23:14
Wow.
Willa Seidenberg 23:15
A lot of Jews had polio, and TB, other diseases. So Rose came out here because she was suffering from arthritis, and they became pretty active in the community. She took her fundraising from City of Hope to Angel View. And, and it was also interesting that the contractor, Charles Eliot, was also an immigrant from Romania. And he and his wife Zelda had been in L.A. and so I think they must have known each other. And Charles Eliot built a lot of places in Desert Hot Springs, he and his wife. And it was the Bertrams, who met two women, Jewish women also who built Hope Springs, which they called La Bella Sari. And John Outcault also designed that and Charles Eliot built that hotel too, so there was that connection too. So for me, that was really fascinating that at a time when there was a lot of discrimination, a lot of anti-semitism, Jews couldn’t live certain places, they couldn’t work certain places, that they were included. And in fact, I found something in one of the papers that said something about we value inclusivity, including our Jewish friends, right, and there were Baptist churches and Catholic churches and Protestant churches, and they all kind of seemed to coexist here. Whether there was discrimination or not, I don’t know. But it also became a place where Jews from L.A., particularly older Jews, would come out there for the weekend, right? And I talked to Stacy Ingber, who grew up in West Los Angeles, and went to Desert Hot Springs as a kid. She called it the Catskills for Southern California Jews.
Stacy Ingber 25:16
When I would go to Hebrew School on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school, my peers would talk about going to Desert Hot Springs with their grandparents. And so it was the place where Westside Jewish families went for long weekends. The concept of going to Desert Hot Springs and to being with other Jewish families was very important for my family, and especially my grandparents. That was their social network.
Willa Seidenberg 25:44
And a lot of Jews from, say, New York or other places in the East would come out for the winter.
Cindy Olnick 25:49
I’m so glad you you made that connection and had that experience and your research.
Willa Seidenberg 25:54
It was so fun for me to go down that rabbit hole, and I even went to look at the archive of the rabbi. And you know, when Desert Hot Springs started, the newspaper was just full of news about the people. And so there’d be these columns where they’d say so and so is traveling in Europe or Rabbi Bloch and his wife are going to England to give some speeches, or so and so’s in town this weekend.
Cindy Olnick 26:23
Local journalism.
Willa Seidenberg 26:24
Local journalism.
Cindy Olnick 26:29
I love how they’re sort of just tucked in among the residential area among the houses. It’s not like this commercial district.
Willa Seidenberg 26:38
The residential part of the town grew up around the spa-tels, right? If you ever see a picture of John Lautner’s Desert Hot Springs Motel, when he built it, there’s nothing around it. But now its in the neighborhood surrounded by homes. At a certain point, people stopped coming to the spas, and it really started going into decline. And a lot of these motel spas started either becoming derelict or kind of limping along, but they were sort of old and tired. And the economy really crashed here, and a lot of crime and drugs started coming in. And so then Desert Hot Springs started becoming known as a dangerous place.
Cindy Olnick 26:38
Desperate Hot Springs.
Willa Seidenberg 26:46
Desperate Hot Springs, and it still is trying to shake off the reputation of being dangerous and crime-ridden. And, to the city’s credit, it had one of the highest crime rates in the Coachella Valley, and now it has one of the lowest crime rates. They really worked hard to bring up the town. There’s been so much adaptive reuse in some of these; some of them became apartments, some of them became recovery centers, and then some of them were just abandoned and torn down.
Cindy Olnick 28:13
Well, it seems like a great place for recovery center because of the healing waters and residential sort of design.
Willa Seidenberg 28:20
Yeah, and in fact, there’s a very prominent facility in Desert Hot Springs called Angel View, and it was initially set up as a recovery center for polio patients. And there is documentation that mineral water can be helpful. I’m sure the claims get a little bit too much. If nothing else, is that it feels good, right.
Cindy Olnick 28:45
Right. So what is Desert Hot Springs like today?
Willa Seidenberg 28:48
One of the things that aided the town is when medical marijuana started in the state, they decided to allow medical marijuana production facilities. And then when marijuana was legalized, they were kind of in a great position to take advantage of that. And so about a third of their budget comes from marijuana. And some of the spas are actually incorporating that into their resort business. They call it Cannatourism, and then they get money from the transit occupancy tax as well. There’s a lot of people who retire here. And then there’s a large immigrant population here. It’s still a very poor community.
Cindy Olnick 29:37
There’s about what 30,000 people?
Willa Seidenberg 29:39
Yeah, I think it’s about 33,000. In those years that the spa-tels were going out of business, people were moving here and there was building and so the residential population started going up. And in the 90s, some of the spa-tels started being rediscovered, and fixed up and made into nice boutique hotels. And there’s still a core group of those. There’s also some that have sort of gone above and beyond, there’s one that is a large one that’s called a xuer. And the woman who took that one over, has really made it sort of a destination, a lot of people are going there, they sell day passes. They have a restaurant, which most of them don’t. And it’s bigger.
Cindy Olnick 30:35
So you just got back from a whirlwind, amazing trip to Europe, right? Did anything strike you while you were on your trip, or when you got back about what heritage means in a place that has such relatively short, modern history?
Willa Seidenberg 30:54
Well, first of all, I really got an appreciation for the role that water has played, like going through old Roman bath houses. And I got this appreciation for the fact that in Europe, they really value their historic structures. And it doesn’t mean that the cities don’t evolve. So you go to severe if you’re on the historic floor, you know, you get this sense of the winding streets and the squares and the great buildings, you go out a little bit, and then it’s more modern, right, and they build it out, but they protect the core. Yeah, my thesis was an argument for why the city should really protect the remaining spots that are left, because they tell a story about what was happening, not only in the Coachella Valley, but in the United States in the post-war years. And desert, Hot Springs is growing — there are factories being built the marijuana production, I think Amazon is about to build a big warehouse, when you’re a small city that’s struggling with a lot of competing problems, and how are we going to get more revenue into the city, they don’t always see the benefit. I tried to argue in my thesis that it would be a benefit to them, economically, heritage, tourism, heritage tourism, exactly. And then to get tax dollars that you could use to fix places up and that kind of thing. But the city has felt like it’s a low priority, because there’s so many other big problems, and they don’t see how it sort of fits into the greater plan, right.
Cindy Olnick 32:42
May not have immediate, tangible benefits, but it might.
Willa Seidenberg 32:46
And I will say that it is harder now for these smaller places to make it because often it’s an investor, or group of investors coming in and buying the places. And they have to hire staff, and they can’t really scale up because the places are only, you know, eight, ten units. And it’s a lot of work. And so people burn out. So they need help. And my feeling is if they were getting access to tax breaks and incentives, then maybe that would help them?
Cindy Olnick 33:25
Well, I mean, it seems like we might have a little momentum, because you’ve got this hot off the press thesis, with really, you know, great original research and laying out the tools, as well as the Historical Society’s recent research and revitalizing the Pil-O-Rox.
Willa Seidenberg 33:47
There’s a lot of momentum around the whole Coachella Valley for trying to do more preservation work. So I’m hoping that Desert Hot Springs gets swept up in that. And there is some rationale for maybe trying to coalesce these towns because by themselves, they’re small. They don’t maybe have a lot of resources. But if they got together they maybe could do something.And I think it would be a really great way to experiment with how do you build capacity with these places that maybe can’t do it on their own?
Cindy Olnick 34:24
Coalition! Exactly. No, that’s great. All right. Well, thank you, Willa. And I’ll see you back here for our Save As retreat.
Willa Seidenberg 34:32
Thank you, Cindy. This was really fun to be on the other side. Although on this case, I get to be on both sides.
Trudi Sandmeier 34:44
That was a fun road trip. And for those of you who hung in to the end, the reward is that Ma-Ha-Yah means blessing or joy in Yiddish. So there you go.
Cindy Olnick 35:00
Huge congratulations to Willa for this great achievement. And thanks for a great day. She also did all the driving.
Trudi Sandmeier 35:08
Thanks so much for joining us for this episode of Save As for photos and shownotes, visit our website at saveas.place.
Cindy Olnick 35:17
You can also connect with us on the Instagram at Save As: Nextgen. And on Facebook at USC MHC, and LinkedIn as well.
Trudi Sandmeier 35:29
Tune in next time as we chat with our students about a really interesting documentation project they’re working on with local community organization, the Wilfandel Club.
Eliza Jane Franklin 35:39
This is really a hidden gem. So many of these places and spaces that will uplift the Black community. They’re hidden or they’re unacknowledged within our community.
Cindy Olnick 35:51
You know the best way to not miss a new episode? Subscribe!
Trudi Sandmeier 36:03
This episode was produced by Willa Seidenberg. Our original theme music is by Steven Conley. Additional music in this episode is by Desert Hot Springs own APN. You can find more at a peaceful.com/music. Special thanks to Evan McAvenia for all her great work on social media posting.
Cindy Olnick 36:25
Save As is a production of the Heritage Conservation program in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California.
