In search of San Anselmo

It was so balmy Saturday I decided to go for a walk around the grounds of La Quinta, where I’m staying. The air was saturated with the scent of orange blossoms from the hundreds of citrus trees around the beautiful courtyards as I wandered around looking for the San Anselmo casita. There were a few grapefruits, the size of softballs, floating in one of the pools, and every once in awhile as I was walking around I’d hear a thud and watch an orange or lemon roll away from the tree where it had fallen. So much ripe fruit everywhere you looked; like being in the Garden of Eden.

When Walter H. Morgan opened La Quinta hotel around Christmas in 1926, it consisted of a small office, dining room, and six casitas (called cottages back then), all in a style now known as Spanish Revival. The design, by a then unknown Pasadena architect named Gordon Kaufmann, incorporated what would become known as Kaufmann’s signature details: thick stucco walls, tile roofs, loggias, arches, private patios enclosed by walls.

Originally the hotel was designed around three courtyards, which are still present and now full of the mature citrus trees I was so admiring. Around the courtyards, Kaufman designed six casitas, named alphabetically for saints: San Anselmo, San Benito, San Carlos, San Dimas, San Jacinto, and San Lucas.

That was the hotel—a dining room and lobby, administrative offices, and six small cottages. No pool (the resort now has 41 pools, but the first wasn’t built until 1937) and certainly no golf courses.

According to a 1951 book I have on the history of Palm Springs, “the little community of La Quinta…was, strangely enough, a product of the First World War. In a front line trench, thick with mud, two young officers huddled against the rain and bitter cold and made a pact, resolving that if they lived through the war, they would return to the United States and seek the driest, warmest, most enjoyable climate they could find and settle down.”

One of these two young men was Walter H. Morgan, the youngest son of John S. Morgan, the wealthy owner of the Morgan Oyster Company. In 1921, Walter Morgan did in fact go looking for someplace dry and warm and ended up buying 1,400 acres of land named “Happy Hollow” by the Cahuilla people, writing in a business plan that he figured it was the best place to build a little hotel because of the site’s “abundance of water reasonably close to the surface for irrigation, minimum wind, warm winter climate, and high percentage of clear blue sky.”

How’s that for a business plan?