The El Mirador Hotel opened in 1928 as one of Palm Springs' first major resort hotels, and its presence drew a social set that established the neighborhood's character before the first residential streets were fully developed. Hotels like the El Mirador were the social infrastructure of early Palm Springs celebrity culture: they provided the visible gathering places while the residential neighborhoods immediately adjacent provided the private retreats. The Movie Colony grew up in the blocks near the hotel, its development concentrated in the late 1930s and 1940s when the film industry was at its classical peak and Palm Springs was the established alternative to the Los Angeles social world. The architecture that resulted — mid-century modernist houses on palm-lined streets — reflects the aesthetic preferences of its first owners and their architects.

The list of Movie Colony residents during its peak decades reads like a studio casting list assembled from multiple genres. Jack Benny, whose comedy career spanned vaudeville, radio, film, and television with unusual consistency, kept a Palm Springs presence here. Dinah Shore, the singer and television host whose warm persona made her one of the most beloved entertainers of the postwar era, lived in the neighborhood. Harold Lloyd, whose silent film career had produced some of the most technically demanding comedy in cinema history, retired to Palm Springs. Steve McQueen, whose screen persona of cool self-possession translated into actual privacy in his off-screen life, was among the later residents. David O. Selznick, the producer of *Gone with the Wind*, brought the production world's power structure to the neighborhood alongside its talent.

The Movie Colony contains several Class 1 Historic Sites — buildings recognized for their architectural or historical significance by the city of Palm Springs. The mid-century modernist aesthetic that predominates in the neighborhood reflects both the era of its primary development and the preferences of clients who were accustomed to working with the best available talent. These were people who understood design: who had worked with studio art directors and cinematographers, who lived in homes in Bel Air and Beverly Hills designed by the architects of their era. When they commissioned desert retreats, they brought the same expectations. The result was a concentration of designed architecture that has become part of the city's cultural inheritance.

The Movie Colony today encompasses approximately 170 homes, a number that reflects both the neighborhood's relative compactness and the density of its historical associations. The streets that Cary Grant and Jack Benny walked — physically walked, because Palm Springs is the kind of desert city where walking between neighboring celebrity homes was a normal thing to do — still carry their original names and spatial relationships. The neighborhood sits east of downtown Palm Springs and south of Movie Colony East, its adjacent counterpart, the two districts together forming the geographical core of Palm Springs' mid-century celebrity geography. Both are studied for their architecture, visited for their history, and still inhabited by people who find in them the same combination of discretion and character that drew the original residents.