The Desert Club of La Quinta: A Forgotten Club That Shaped the Cove

Last Updated: 5.12.26 | Time To Read: 10 minutes | Author: Mark Miller | Category: Days To Remember

Long before La Quinta became a city, before Old Town had its polished restaurant patios, before golf communities stretched across the valley floor, there was a club in the Cove that promised a different kind of desert life.

It was called The Desert Club.

Today, the building is gone. No dining room. No poolside chatter. No clubhouse glowing at night against the Santa Rosa Mountains. But the story still lives in La Quinta’s street names, old photographs, real-estate tracts, Fritz Burns Park, and the memory of a time when the desert was being sold not just as land, but as a lifestyle.

The City of La Quinta places the Desert Club among the essential threads of local history, alongside the ancient Salton Sea, the Cahuilla people, the Bradshaw Trail, La Quinta Hotel, celebrities, and PGA West. That is telling. The Desert Club was not a footnote. It was part of the origin story of modern La Quinta. The city itself did not incorporate until May 1, 1982, and it took its name from La Quinta Resort, which had been established decades earlier in 1926.

To understand the Desert Club, you have to imagine La Quinta before La Quinta was “La Quinta.” The Cove was not yet the dense neighborhood we know today. It was a raw desert subdivision tucked into the mountains, marketed to people who wanted winter sun, mountain views, social prestige, and a small piece of the California desert dream.

The Desert Club was built to make that dream feel real.

The Desert Club’s story begins with developer E.S. “Harry” Kiener, who saw what La Quinta Hotel had already proven: people with money, leisure time, and a taste for escape would come to the desert if the experience felt special enough.

According to the City of La Quinta’s Historic Resource Survey and Context Statement, Kiener envisioned a winter-home community in Marshall’s Cove — what we now call La Quinta Cove — that could rival the resort appeal of Palm Springs. His plan was not simply to sell lots. He wanted a residential subdivision, a commercial district, and a private resort club attached to the whole thing.

That is the key to the Desert Club.

It was not merely a restaurant.
It was not merely a private pool.
It was not merely a clubhouse.

It was the emotional center of a land-sales strategy.

The concept was modeled after exclusive Southern California coastal communities where “home life” and “club life” were bundled together. In La Quinta, the offer was simple and powerful: buy a lot in the Cove, and you were not just buying dirt. You were buying access, identity, recreation, and belonging. The City survey states that each person who bought a Cove lot was given membership in the Desert Club for $10 per year.

That detail matters. In today’s terms, the Desert Club functioned like an amenity package attached to a master-planned lifestyle community. Long before the modern country-club developments of the Coachella Valley, La Quinta already had a version of the pitch: buy here, belong here, play here.

The Desert Club was deeply connected to the early development of La Quinta Cove.

The La Quinta Historical Society describes the Cove’s historic casitas as 63 small Spanish Colonial homes, built between 1935 and 1941, with white adobe-like exteriors, low red-tile roofs, wooden lintels, and modest proportions. These were not giant estates. They were seasonal desert retreats — charming, compact, and photogenic.

The Desert Club gave those homes a social anchor.

You can picture the sales logic: a buyer from Los Angeles or another coastal city arrives in the desert, sees the mountains wrapping around the Cove, tours a white stucco casita with a red-tile roof, then learns that ownership comes with access to a private club with a swimming pool, tennis, dining, lounging, and a built-in social scene.

That is a much stronger pitch than “here is a lot in the desert.”

A local Cove history page summarizes the relationship plainly: Kiener purchased thousands of acres in 1932, subdivided part of the land into vacation-home lots, and the Desert Club was completed in 1937 to serve as the social hub for those casitas. It also notes that all of the original casitas still exist, while the Desert Club did not survive.

In other words, the homes were the hardware.

The Desert Club was the software.
It made the neighborhood feel like a community before the community was fully built.

Architecturally, the Desert Club was a surprise.

The Cove casitas leaned Spanish Colonial Revival. The Desert Club went modern.

The City’s Historic Resource Survey identifies the Desert Club as the work of S. Charles Lee, an architect best known for his Los Angeles theater designs. Lee had also worked with Kiener on the Peter Pan Woodland Club in Big Bear. The Desert Club’s main building was completed in a Streamline Moderne style with nautical elements: curved unornamented corners, round porthole windows, smooth stucco siding, horizontal grooves, and an asymmetrical façade.

That is a remarkable design choice for 1930s La Quinta.

S. Charles Lee was not a minor figure. The Los Angeles Conservancy describes him as one of the most celebrated and prolific theater architects in Los Angeles, a designer whose career launched in the motion-picture capital of the world.

That background helps explain the Desert Club’s theatrical quality. It was not trying to disappear into the desert. It was trying to create a scene.

Local accounts often describe the building as resembling a riverboat or “ship” in the desert. That image fits the Streamline Moderne vocabulary perfectly: rounded corners, horizontal lines, porthole-like windows, and a sense of movement. Imagine a glamorous white vessel parked against the mountains, surrounded not by water but by sand, palms, patios, and winter sunshine.

Even construction carried a strange desert story. During excavation for the Desert Club swimming pool, workers reportedly exposed the tops of an orchard buried underground by silt from earlier flooding. The discovery required more excavation, adding time and expense to the project.

That image is almost poetic: to build La Quinta’s new social playground, workers first had to dig through an older buried landscape.

The Desert Club membership system was more than casual access. A 1952 California appellate case, Nyman v. The Desert Club, gives us a rare look at how the club was marketed and governed.

The case describes the Desert Club as having clubrooms, a swimming pool, garden lounging facilities, tennis courts, and other amenities. It also states that certain buyers purchased lots based on promotional materials that included membership in the Desert Club as part of the sales pitch. One brochure famously called it the “rendezvous where winter never comes.”

The same case describes several membership classes: life members, pioneer members, and invitational members. Annual dues were listed as $10 per year, and the club rules allowed termination of membership under certain circumstances. The lawsuit arose because members claimed they were being denied rights to use the club, while the club argued that membership was contractual and subject to its bylaws.

That legal fight is fascinating because it shows that membership was not just a dinner reservation or a casual perk. Members argued that they had a deeper interest — even a property-like right — in the club’s assets and facilities. The appellate court did not decide the entire underlying dispute, but it upheld a temporary injunction preserving members’ access while the case continued.

For a blog reader, the point is simple: the Desert Club was serious business. It was tied to land ownership, buyer expectations, club privileges, and legal rights.

This was La Quinta’s early experiment in selling lifestyle as real estate.

The Desert Club was designed to be the place where the Cove came alive.

After World War II, promotion around the club intensified. The City’s Historic Resource Survey notes that a 1947 marketing brochure advertised a long list of proposed amenities: swimming pool, tennis and badminton courts, archery range, riding stables and ring, modern sunbathing equipment, grand lounge, dining room, coffee shop, billiard and card rooms, landscaped patios, and terraces.

That is a full resort program, not a modest neighborhood clubhouse.

Other local descriptions add badminton, ping pong, croquet, horseback riding, a cocktail bar, and a gracious dining room. Desert Health, writing about the modern DSRT CLUB restaurant’s homage to the original, quotes 1937 promotional language describing the club as a place where outdoor sports “never end” and calls it the social hub and playground for La Quinta property owners and guests.

This is where the Desert Club becomes entertaining to imagine.

Morning: swim in the pool.
Afternoon: tennis, badminton, archery, or horseback riding.
Sunset: cocktails on the terrace.
Evening: dinner in the dining room.
Late night: cards, billiards, gossip, maybe a little Hollywood mythology.

For the Cove’s early seasonal residents, the club gave the desert a rhythm. It turned empty lots and small casitas into a social world.

The Desert Club’s legend is also tied to celebrities.

This part of the story should be written carefully, because local-history lore often mixes documented sightings, newspaper mentions, museum memories, and romantic embellishment. But multiple modern local accounts agree that the Desert Club became associated with Hollywood visitors from nearby La Quinta Hotel.

A 2023 Palm Springs Desert Sun article, republished by Yahoo, says the Desert Club opened in 1937 and became a go-to spot for celebrities visiting La Quinta Hotel. It specifically mentions Kirk Douglas, Greta Garbo, and General George S. Patton, noting that Patton visited often in 1942 while the Third U.S. Army trained nearby. The article also includes a historic photo caption identifying Kirk Douglas and Rita Hayworth at the Desert Club in the 1950s.

A local museum-tour account adds other names to the club’s lore, including Greer Garson, Irene Dunne, Rhonda Fleming, Virginia Mayo, William DuPont Jr., Rita Hayworth, Kirk Douglas, and a rumored Greta Garbo gambling story in the downstairs wine cellar.

That rumored Garbo detail is exactly the kind of anecdote that makes local history irresistible — but it should remain framed as lore unless you find a primary archival source.

Still, the broader point is solid: the Desert Club belonged to the same social atmosphere that made La Quinta Hotel a desert refuge for writers, actors, executives, and winter escapees. The club was part of a glamour corridor: the hotel, the casitas, the Cove, the mountains, and the fantasy of being tucked away from Los Angeles while still connected to its social orbit.

The Desert Club’s glamour had another side: aggressive real-estate promotion.

A 1941 appellate case, Palm Springs-La Quinta Development Co. v. Kieberk Corp., reveals how organized the sales apparatus was. The case describes Harry Kiener’s use of recreational clubs to generate prospects for land sales. It says Kiener organized auxiliary corporations as recreational clubs, inducing people to join with privileges like fishing, hunting, swimming, and golfing, with the object of procuring prospective purchasers of acreage and lots.

That case also describes the La Quinta Tract near Palm Springs, sales to Kiener customers using a detailed card system, installment contracts, and tens of thousands of “lead cards” containing names, residences, financial standing, sales prospects, and contract status.

In modern marketing language, Kiener had a database.

Not a digital CRM, of course — but a highly organized analog prospecting system. He and his companies used club membership, lifestyle access, and customer information to sell land. The Desert Club fits neatly into that larger strategy.

It was beautiful.
It was social.
It was aspirational.
It was also a lead-conversion engine.

That does not cheapen the story. It makes it more interesting. The Desert Club was both romance and sales funnel.

The Desert Club also left its imprint on the land itself.

According to the City’s Historic Resource Survey, after Kiener sold the Desert Club to Edward Glick and Frank Stone, small tracts adjacent to the Cove were gradually opened during the 1940s. Glick and Stone, through the La Quinta Development Company, established five subdivision tracts off the eastern boundary of the Village. These “Desert Club tracts” were largely intended for residential properties near the club and the Village.

But development was not easy.

The same survey notes that water supply and drainage issues made the tract process long and difficult, while demand was scarce before World War II and immediately after it. Like the Cove itself, the Desert Club tracts eventually attracted buyers, but limited development occurred between the 1930s and the 1970s.

That is important for understanding La Quinta’s growth pattern. The Desert Club did not instantly create a booming city. Instead, it helped plant an identity that took decades to mature.

The name persisted.
The tracts persisted.
The dream persisted.

Eventually, La Quinta grew into the kind of residential and resort destination that Kiener had imagined — though not exactly on his timeline, and not entirely through his plan.

Like many desert development stories, the Desert Club story includes ambition, legal fights, and collapse.

The City’s Historic Resource Survey states that Glick and Stone managed the club through much of the 1940s and filed maps for new subdivisions northeast of the Desert Club and east of the Village commercial district. It also states that they fraudulently told prospective lot buyers for the Cove and Desert Club tracts that lots had to be sold or water rights would be lost; they were later indicted, convicted, and placed on probation.

That is a jarring detail, but it fits the larger pattern: land, water, and sales pressure were deeply intertwined in early desert development.

The club also struggled during the months before World War II, when Cove development stalled. After the war, promotion resumed, but the Desert Club never became a simple upward success story.

A 1965 fire reportedly gutted the club, and from there the story bends toward decline. The Desert Sun/Yahoo account says the Desert Club fell into disrepair, was transferred to the city, and was allowed to burn in 1989 for firefighting practice; it identifies the former location as the area where Fritz Burns Park now stands.

The City’s Historic Resource Survey gives the end in stark terms: in 1972, builder-developer Fritz Burns purchased the Desert Club with plans to improve the grounds and create an adjacent model-home community, but that vision was never realized. Later owners tried to revitalize the property and failed. The site was given to the City of La Quinta in 1982 to become a city park. By then, the club was in disrepair; the buildings contained elevated asbestos levels, were considered a public safety hazard, and were destroyed in a controlled Riverside County Fire Department training burn. No remains were left on-site.

It is hard not to feel the loss.

The Desert Club began as a vision of leisure, elegance, sport, and community. It ended as a hazardous structure burned for training.

But that ending also explains why the story is powerful. The building disappeared, but the idea did not.

The original Desert Club buildings are gone, but the club’s memory is unusually alive.

The La Quinta Historical Society’s archive page includes images labeled Desert Club, circa 1938, and a newspaper clip of the Desert Club circa 1940, with the Lumberyard building and a historic casita in the background.

The modern DSRT CLUB restaurant in Old Town La Quinta openly draws inspiration from the historic Desert Club. The City’s Play in La Quinta page says the original Desert Club existed from the late 1930s until the late 1980s and became a symbol of swanky desert elegance during the 1940s and 1950s.

The restaurant’s own About page says its founders discovered the story of the old Desert Club while developing a social-club atmosphere inspired by desert nostalgia, then used that history to shape the concept.

That is a fitting afterlife.

The old Desert Club sold an imagined lifestyle to early Cove buyers. The new DSRT CLUB sells a curated memory of that lifestyle to modern La Quinta diners.

Different business. Same magic: the desert as a stage.

The Desert Club matters because it helps explain how La Quinta became La Quinta.

It shows that the city’s identity was never only about golf, or only about resorts, or only about real estate. From the beginning, La Quinta’s appeal was a combination of landscape, architecture, leisure, exclusivity, storytelling, and salesmanship.

The Desert Club sat at the intersection of all of those things.

It was a clubhouse, but also a marketing machine.

It was private, but central to the public story of the Cove.

It was glamorous, but legally messy.
It was modern architecture in a Spanish Colonial neighborhood.

It was a social hub for property owners, but also a symbol of how developers learned to package the desert.

In a way, the Desert Club was a prototype for the Coachella Valley’s future.

Modern desert communities still sell the same essential dream: a home, a view, a club, a pool, dining, friends, recreation, and the feeling that life here is somehow more relaxed, more cinematic, more intentional.

The Desert Club was doing that in La Quinta before La Quinta was even a city.

And that is why the lost building deserves to be remembered.

Not only because celebrities may have dined there.

Not only because the architecture was rare and stylish.

Not only because it ended in fire.

But because the Desert Club captured one of the desert’s most enduring truths:

People do not come here simply to buy property.

They come here to buy a version of life.

Two details deserve careful handling in the final version.

First, the opening date varies slightly by source. Several local accounts say the Desert Club opened in 1937, including Thanksgiving Day 1937. The City’s Historic Resource Survey says S. Charles Lee began construction in 1937 and that the club was opened as an amenity to Vale La Quinta residents by 1940. The safest wording is: “opened around 1937 and was operating by 1940.”

Second, the exact original site wording has some source tension. The City survey excerpt places Lee’s complex at Avenida Bermudas and Avenue 50, while multiple local and modern sources identify the former Desert Club site with what became Fritz Burns Park. For a public blog, I would avoid over-specific parcel language unless you confirm it with the La Quinta Museum or Historical Society. Use: “the former site later became associated with Fritz Burns Park” or “the club’s former location is remembered today at Fritz Burns Park.”