Old Las Palmas

The neighborhood organization puts it simply: Old Las Palmas was a citrus grove until the mid 1920s, when Prescott Stevens bought the land and subdivided it. It was first developed by Alvah Hicks, a New York builder, and his son Harold.

The streets curve on purpose. The organization says the layout was inspired by the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect behind Central Park.

One of the oldest documented houses is the one Alvah Hicks built in 1926 at 701 North Patencio Road as a spec house. His family sold it in 1929, and the city named it a historic resource in 2024.

In 1932 John and Estella Snyder built a winter house on West Merito Place, in the old Merito Vista tract. The house was set off center on its lot to leave room for a big garden, and the actor Rod Taylor later lived there. Five years after that, Brewster & Benedict designed Casa Adaire on Hermosa Place in the Spanish Colonial Revival style.

Then the modernists arrived. Donald Wexler and Richard Harrison designed a house for Kirk Douglas here in 1954, and ten years later Wexler designed Dinah Shore's house on Hermosa Place. Shore's house is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Old Las Palmas Neighborhood Organization was chartered in 2005. It holds neighborhood meetings twice a year that are open to all homeowners, plus social events and home tours.

Downtown Palm Springs is a walk away, and many of the older estates are being restored and updated.