Palm Springs sits in the Coachella Valley, framed by the abrupt fault-scarp escarpment of the San Jacinto Mountains to the west and the lower Santa Rosa Mountains to the south. The climate that attracted McCallum — dry heat, clean air, more than 300 sunny days annually — also defines the city's character and limits. Temperatures can exceed 117 degrees Fahrenheit; the record was set on October 1, 2024. What the desert gives in warmth and sunshine it demands in vigilance: the same sun that turns the valley golden in photographs can kill the unprepared in hours. It is this extremity that shapes the social life of the city as much as any real estate development or celebrity migration — the logic of the pool, the patio, the deep shade of a mid-century modernist overhang.

The land history of Palm Springs is complicated in ways that its postcard image does not capture. The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians owns significant portions of the city's land in an alternating checkerboard pattern of sections — a legacy of federal land grants. For decades this arrangement created jurisdictional tensions, and in the 1960s those tensions had a devastating human cost. The city of Palm Springs, acting with federal government coordination, facilitated the eviction of predominantly Black and Latino residents from Section 14, a portion of Agua Caliente land near downtown. Homes were burned; people were displaced. The city formally apologized for these events in 2021 and reached a $5.91 million settlement with affected families. The apology came sixty years too late for many, but it represented an official acknowledgment of an injustice that had long been documented in the historical record.

Palm Springs is one of the world's most concentrated collections of mid-century modernist residential architecture. The reason is partly timing — the city boomed in the postwar decades when modernism was the default language of ambitious California building — and partly climate, which encouraged the open-plan, indoor-outdoor designs that modernism favored. Architects including Albert Frey, Richard Neutra, John Lautner, E. Stewart Williams, and William Cody all did significant work here, and the resulting streetscapes have been carefully preserved and cataloged. Modernism Week, held every February, draws tens of thousands of architecture enthusiasts to the city for tours, lectures, and the annual celebration of buildings that were once considered radical and are now recognized as irreplaceable.

Palm Springs has been reinventing its identity for over a century. The city that attracted Cahuilla traders became a health resort for tuberculosis patients, then a Hollywood retreat, then a retirement destination, then a center of LGBTQ culture, then an architecture pilgrimage site, and all of these identities coexist in the present day. In January 2018, Palm Springs made national news when it became the first city in the United States with an entirely LGBTQ-comprised city government — mayor, city council, and city clerk all identifying as LGBTQ. The city's population of 44,575 (as of the 2020 census) is small by metropolitan standards, but its cultural influence per capita has always been outsized, as it has been since the days when Frank Sinatra could be seen at the grocery store.