How El Paseo Became the Desert’s Shopping Boulevard

El Paseo looks like a place that grew around shopping. Its history runs the other way: the boulevard was part of an idea for a town before it became a destination full of shops. A street, a resort, home sites and a promise of desert living came first. The retail identity took shape over decades.³

That slower story is more interesting than a single grand-opening date. It connects today’s El Paseo with the early development of Palm Desert, then follows the galleries, public art, shopping centers and events that made a drive become a place to linger.

The road came before the reputation

The valley was already a Cahuilla homeland long before resort developers arrived. The postwar Palm Desert project belongs within that longer history. It also needs to be distinguished from Palm Village, the earlier settlement north of Highway 111; the two names are sometimes blurred in brief retellings.⁶

Cliff Henderson and his development partners imagined a community south of the highway, with the Santa Rosa Mountains supplying an extraordinary setting. The Historical Society identifies the Henderson family, landscape designer Tommy Tomson and investors among the people behind that effort. Palm Desert’s founding story is larger than any one boulevard.¹

The Society’s archival account describes an early commercial center in surplus wartime buildings in 1946. By 1947, a larger tract office stood on El Paseo, with palms and flowers beginning to give the road an identity. Those were the practical tools of selling a future place: somewhere prospective residents could arrive, look around and imagine belonging.²

El Paseo Catalogue’s retrospective recalls Henderson laying out the boulevard well before its retail life matured. The useful distinction is between creating a street and establishing a shopping district. A date for the first does not tell us when the second became successful.³

A resort dream still needed a working town

Nearby Shadow Mountain Club made the development attractive as a leisure destination. The Desert Magazine building, opened in 1948, added publishing, a bookstore, a gem shop and an art gallery to the community. Culture and commerce were connected early, even before El Paseo acquired its later concentration of galleries.⁵

The 1951 fire station on El Paseo offers a different kind of landmark. On land donated by Henderson, the small building housed equipment and living facilities for the people protecting the community. Its later use as the Historical Society’s museum makes it a particularly good place to begin reading the street: public service sits inside the story of a district now identified with luxury.⁴

There is also a part of the founding vision that a history should not smooth away. The Historical Society’s research documents racial restrictions in the Palm Desert Corporation’s original development rules. The marketed ideal of desert living was not offered on equal terms. Recognizing that exclusion gives a fuller account of the community in which El Paseo took shape.²

Palm Desert incorporated in November 1973. The city’s planning history describes commercial activity expanding toward El Paseo during the 1960s and 1970s. Its shopping reputation emerged within that changing town, rather than arriving fully formed with Henderson’s original plan.⁶

Read El Paseo through seven historical stops

Select a marker to connect a place with its chapter in the story. The diagram simplifies the street into west, central and eastern areas. It is a schematic reading map, not a surveyed map, walking route or record of historic building footprints. Dates identify the events described in each card.

Galleries gave the street a reason to browse

A gallery changes the pace of a shopping street. You can enter without needing a replacement for something you own. A sculpture in a window, an unexpected color or an artist’s work can turn a purposeful errand into an unplanned stop. That kind of browsing became part of El Paseo’s appeal.

One durable example is CODA Gallery, founded in 1987 by Connie and David Katz. The gallery’s own history connects its character to the founders’ collecting and philanthropy. It is one example of the people and businesses that built the district’s art identity; it should not be mistaken for the first gallery ever to operate on El Paseo.⁷

The year before, in 1986, Palm Desert adopted its public-art ordinance. That citywide policy helped make art part of the built environment. El Paseo’s median became a particularly visible exhibition space, carrying art beyond gallery doors and into the everyday act of moving along the street.⁸

The city’s biennial El Paseo sculpture exhibition presents 18 works. The 2025–2026 edition is a current chapter in a changing program, not a permanent lineup. The sculpture in an older photograph may have been replaced; an installation’s presence in a picture does not establish that it remains there today.^12,13

That is one reason to look at the Faye Sarkowsky Sculpture Garden as a related stop nearby. It extends an art-focused visit beyond the retail boulevard, while keeping the distinction between different collections and settings clear.

View full photograph ↗

The Gardens changed the scale

El Paseo is a district, not the name of a single shopping center. Within it, The Gardens on El Paseo marked a substantial new phase. A property-owner announcement filed with the SEC dates The Gardens to 1998 and El Paseo Village to 2010. It describes the two properties facing one another across the street and functioning together as an open-air specialty-shopping destination.⁹

Those dates are useful because they prevent a common shortcut: treating the arrival of a large, recognizable center as the beginning of the whole boulevard. By 1998, El Paseo already had decades of history. The Gardens added a new concentration of retail and gathering space to an existing street.

The architectural experience matters as much as the store list. Courtyards, upper levels, shade and places to sit make a shopping center a sequence of spaces. Restaurants create a reason to stay after a purchase—or to visit without making one. Individual tenants change, but these spatial relationships help explain why a district can retain its identity through those changes.

A shopping street became a stage

Fashion Week El Paseo began in 2006. Writing in 2018, creative producer and director Susan Stein explained that the original intention was to showcase the street’s stores to consumers. Her account describes its growth from two shows with fewer than 500 guests into a much larger event.¹⁰

The important connection is local. A runway event turned the district’s existing trade in clothing and personal style into a shared occasion. It gave visitors a reason to plan a trip around El Paseo, and gave businesses a setting in which to present an experience together. The city’s visitor bureau identifies The Gardens as the event location.¹¹

Art walks contribute a similar change of rhythm: shops and galleries become parts of an evening out. For dates and participating businesses, use the current district calendar rather than assuming a past schedule still applies. The El Paseo visitor guide is the practical companion to this history.

The boulevard after shopping hours

Hotel Paseo’s 2018 opening added another way to experience the district: stay nearby and walk out to its shops, galleries and restaurants. The hotel’s own description makes that proximity central to its identity. Its arrival belongs to El Paseo’s later evolution, not its founding.^14,15

Dining also changes how a street is used. A lunch stop, a shaded patio and an evening reservation create different patterns from a short shopping errand. In the photographs below, the restaurant front and the illuminated plaza reveal another part of the boulevard’s life. Both are records of 2021; they should not be read as a promise that every visible tenant or sign is unchanged.

View full photograph ↗

View full photograph ↗

For present-day options, pair this history with the Coachella Valley restaurant guide. Looking at the wider area through the South Palm Desert guide also helps place the boulevard among the neighborhoods around it.

What to notice on your next visit

Start with the things that make El Paseo more than a row of store names. Notice where the mountains enter the view, how a median sculpture changes the street’s appearance, and how a courtyard creates a pause between storefronts. Look for the difference between a building that serves a whole community and one designed primarily to attract a visitor.

El Paseo’s reputation was built in layers: a planned road, a developing town, private businesses, public art and recurring occasions to gather. The street’s history is still visible when you know which layer you are looking at.

Close ×

←

→