El Mirador was more than a hotel; it was a statement about what Palm Springs could become. Opened at a cost of one million dollars in 1927, it drew the era's most recognizable faces to the desert for rest, tennis, and the dry heat that doctors then prescribed for respiratory ailments. Its pink tower became the visual shorthand for the town itself — a recognizable silhouette against the San Jacinto Mountains that appeared in photographs, postcards, and society columns. Through the Depression, the hotel managed to maintain its clientele even as luxury establishments elsewhere shuttered. When the United States entered World War II, El Mirador's combination of isolation, warm climate, and existing facilities made it suddenly valuable for a very different purpose.

In July 1942, the Army purchased El Mirador and rebuilt it from the ground up as a military general hospital. The finished facility held 1,600 beds — a scale that required extensive new construction beyond the original hotel buildings. The Army named it Torney General Hospital after George H. Torney, who had served as the 21st Surgeon General of the United States Army from 1909 until his death in 1913 at age sixty-three. Torney had spent his career reforming military medicine following the disaster of the Spanish-American War, when disease killed far more soldiers than enemy fire. Naming the hospital for him connected the facility to a tradition of medical professionalism that the Army was working to project. Among those who worked at Torney were 250 men of the Italian Service Units — Italian prisoners of war who had been reclassified as non-enemy workers and assigned to non-combat duties across the United States.

The Coachella Valley's climate, which had made Palm Springs a retreat for the wealthy, turned out to serve medical purposes as well. The dry desert air, far from industrial pollution and urban congestion, offered recovering soldiers conditions that supported physical rehabilitation. Torney General handled a range of wartime injuries and illnesses, operating throughout the war years as one of the Army's network of general hospitals established across the country to handle the volume of casualties that the conflict produced. The Palm Springs location meant that some patients received their care in a landscape that had, just a few years before, been reserved for movie stars and industrialists — a strange inversion that the war made ordinary.

After the war, the site did not revert to resort use. Instead it became Desert Regional Medical Center, which now operates as a 385-bed facility and Level I trauma center serving the Coachella Valley. Level I designation means it provides the highest standard of trauma care — twenty-four-hour specialist coverage, research programs, and the capacity to handle the most severe injuries and illnesses. The building that once sheltered Einstein and the Marx Brothers, transformed into a military hospital that cared for thousands of wounded soldiers, has become the medical anchor of a region with more than half a million permanent residents. Each reinvention has served the moment's needs, though none of the later uses would have been legible to the guests who danced at El Mirador's opening-night celebration on December 31, 1927.