The Western movie set that became a town
Pioneertown, a smudge of a place in the high desert near Palm Springs, is among California’s more unusual counterpoints to city living.
It began in 1946 as a live-in movie set, built by a group of Hollywood legends including Roy Rogers and Gene Autry to replicate a 19th-century Western town — complete with a bank, a chapel and a saloon.
Dozens of films and television shows were shot there.
More than 70 years later, it has been transformed into a real town with roughly 350 residents drawn in part by the area’s otherworldly terrain of boulders, sand and Joshua trees.
Many work in creative fields, and hail from cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco.
For Yves Kamoiner, a jewelry designer who relocated from Manhattan, Pioneertown represented a fresh start.
“When I arrived to the desert, I mean it’s really you and nothing,” he said. “There’s something about the desert that gives you permission to play and to find yourself again.”
Pioneertown has a post office and a motel. The social epicenter is a honky-tonk barbecue place called Pappy and Harriet’s that attracts big talent to its performance stage. Paul McCartney and Robert Plant have played there.
Whatever draws people to Pioneertown, the cheaper living can’t be ignored. On the market right now is a 150-square-foot house for $120,000.
It’s tiny, acknowledged the selling agent, Madelaine LaVoie. But the property covers 2.5 acres.
And in Pioneertown, she added, it’s really not about how big your house is.
“People like to live outside in the desert,” LaVoie said. “They want to have the hammock outside.”
This article is from the California Sun, a newsletter that delivers California’s most compelling news to your inbox each morning — for free. Sign up here.
