Today’s guest post comes from memoirist Elaine Smith, who reminisces on the SoCal architecture of her youth.

In 1904, when the Colorado River flooded and created the Salton Sea in the Southern California desert, it was ballyhooed as the “Miracle Salton Riviera” and instantly attracted developers and tourists. By the 1950’s those visitors included movie stars such as the Marx Brothers and Frank Sinatra— which led developers to realize that the area needed a yacht club.

The first one to go in was the North Shore Yacht Club. My family lived across the sea in Salton Sea Beach, and at night we could see lights twinkling on the far shore. Even if we didn’t have a boat and couldn’t make the trip to see it, I was as thrilled as everyone else about a yacht club going in practically next-door. Pictures in the local paper proved it would be the best place for a seven-year-old kid to hang out; it resembled a land-locked battleship. The adults were impressed with its architect, Albert Frey, a former Corbusier disciple and a founder of Desert Modernism. They were also taken with the fact that it drew movie stars from nearby Palm Springs. The Beach Boys kept a boat docked there. So did the Marx Brothers. Jerry Lewis joined Dean Martin for drinks. I got to see their pictures in nearly every edition of The Salton Seafarer.

The closest thing Salton Sea Beach had to a yacht club was Helen’s Beach House, a bar and restaurant built in Tiki Style. It sat up on posts about four feet off the ground, and palm fronds covered its sides and roof. Its owner, Helen Burns, was pretty free with handing out Cokes to little girls sitting on the sidelines, watching teenagers rock out to The Dovells’ Bristol Stomp.

Photo by Jennie Kelly/Salton Sea History Museum

Next came the Salton Bay Yacht Club in Salton City. By then, we’d moved to Desert Shores, but we still drove the 20 miles to be part of the excitement at the yacht club’s opening.

From the highway, it looked like a merry-go-round hovering at the water’s edge. It was round, with a folded plate roof, and a palm tree lined entrance leading to huge double doors. Inside, I was as impressed with the enormous wooden beams as were the adults. They also went on about Richard Dorman, an award-winning mid- century architect who designed the club.

The last yacht club to be built at the Salton Sea was in Desert Shores. We lived only three blocks from it and so walked down for the grand opening. I was terribly disappointed. After the whimsy of the boat-shaped North Shore Yacht Club and the merry-go-round Salton Bay Yacht Club, and after the exoticism of Helen’s Beach House, the simple mid-century modern building reminded me of the cafeteria at school, if it’d had a low ceiling and an expanse of windows covering a whole wall. But the one impressive thing it did have was a pool. And even better, we joined this yacht club.

This was over 50 years ago; a lot has happened since. Rising salinity in the Salton Sea has created problems that include massive fish and bird die off and algae bloom that turns the water brown and gives it a vile odor. It’s no wonder that the thousands of tourists who played in its water have left. The majority of visitors today seem to be photographers of the macabre and people drawn to ghost towns.

The Desert Shores Yacht Club still stands, but it’s a boarded up, unrecognizable shell. Helen’s Beach House burned down and was never rebuilt. Rising water in the Sea undermined the Salton Bay Yacht Club until it was declared a hazard and demolished. The North Shore Yacht Club became a graffiti-covered derelict. But then, through the efforts of a coalition of interested individuals and the Riverside County Supervisors (who approved a grant to provide some of the funds), the yacht club was restored in 2010. Let’s hope that the county finds a viable use for this beautiful relic of a special place from the not-so-distant past.

Elaine Smith was senior staff writer for the journal Discover Adams Avenue. She also co-wrote the script for first place winning film short “Plastic Bags” at Kids First! Film Festival, and is acting as story advisor and editor for the Magic Drawer Workshop’s “Happy’s Greenhouse” ebooks. She’s currently editing her memoir, Salton Sea Diary, the first chapter of which won a Conference Choice Award at UCSD’s Annual Writers’ Conference in 2012.