Making the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway Mountain Station

For comic effect, E. Stewart Williams liked to play up the architect’s miserable lot, as when he welcomed colleagues to the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway’s commanding  35,000-square-foot Mountain Station soon after its 1963 completion: “I suggest you make the most of the evening,” he told the crowd. “At 8,500 feet above sea level, this may be the closest to heaven an architect will ever get.”

But then, he grew serious, emphasizing the “skill and sacrifice” required to create the mountaintop marvel.

A newspaper account published in 1961, as the plans came together, placed first impulse for the tramway in 1935. Carl Barkow, editor and publisher of The Desert Sun, and Francis Crocker, manager of California Electric Power Co. in Palm Springs, sought relief from the heat by driving uphill to Banning. Along the way, Barkow said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had something that could lift us to the top of  that mountain?”

In a speech archived at the Palm Springs Art Museum’s Architecture and Design Center, a building of his design, Williams noted that Crocker and O. Earl Coffman, second-generation proprietor of the Desert Inn, committed to making the project a reality. Despite Gov. Culbert Olson vetoing enabling legislation three times, incoming Gov. Earl Warren signed off on the Mount San Jacinto Winter Park Authority in 1945. The park authority would administer tramway construction. It commissioned technical studies to locate sites for the supporting towers, while other studies looked at costs.

The architecture firm of Clark & Frey was commissioned for Valley Station, and the Williams Partnership — as Stew Williams called his firm — got Mountain Station.

“There were no fees,” he said. “You just gambled on its success.” The architects stood to earn 10 percent of terminal construction costs. But there would be no payday anytime soon. One particular design problem presented a barrier more formidable than the stupendous rise out of  Chino Canyon.

“In those days, no one could spin a cable more than 7,500 feet long.” Williams said. “The first plans called for a dogleg, up the northwest slope, to a halfway station. The upper half of the dogleg terminated at
the same location it does today.”

Alas, this complicated tramway would cost $13 million. Williams said there was “no way the authority could sell $13 million worth of bonds in a postwar economy to build a tramway from the little town of  Palm Springs to the top of a nearby mountain just so a few local people could get cool in the summer.”

The project perished until Earl Coffman’s European summer of 1959. He happened to learn that the Swiss manufacturer Von Roll Seilbahnen had perfected new cabling technique for a single 13,500-foot length. There was no longer need for the dogleg line and midway station. Returning home, Coffman got a bid for steel supporting towers. Von Roll would make the gondolas, track shoes, and counterweights; U.S. Steel would spin the cables in Pennsylvania. The estimated cost dropped to $8.5 million. Relying  on optimism about repayment via $1.25 tram tickets, Bear Stearns arranged an issue of revenue bonds. Clark & Frey went to work on Valley Station (2,643 feet above sea level). But in the Williams office, when they looked up the canyon, Stew couldn’t help feeling a bit chafed.

“The upper station came under the jurisdiction of the State Park Commission and had to meet their standards [i.e. personal opinions] as to what a park structure should look like.” He envisioned a “double timber arch between the north and south outcroppings of rock.” From this support, the restaurant and observation floors would hang by cables. “It was a great idea but sounded too ‘far out’ to the parks people and too expensive to the authority.”

They settled on a plan devoting the lower level to tram car landings and concessions; the upper level was for dining and observation. In all, floor space was needed for 3,000 people during stormy weather or power outage.

Without a roadway beyond the first support tower, it was up to helicopters to ferry materials for landing platforms, towers, and the upper terminal. Chief  pilot Don Landells told a reporter, “It wasn’t distance or type of load which was our main problem, but the continuous vertical rise to the thin air densities.”

For superior performance, each of the three Bell Model 47 G-3B choppers in use had a six-cylinder Lycoming engine with forced induction. Rate of climb: 860 feet per minute. In total, the choppers would carry 11.3 million pounds of tramway apparatus, a few hundred pounds at a time. It amounted to 23,000 missions over 26 months.

Things went fine until Dec. 10, 1962, when 20 feet above the base pad, two choppers blindsided each other. Joe Dyer’s dropped straight down — miraculously, he was uninjured. Landells lost his tail rotor and smashed the mountainside for a headknocker that broke ribs and his right leg — nothing that seven weeks in Desert Hospital couldn’t resolve.

Stew and his brother, Roger, joined surveyors on horseback from Idyllwild to pinpoint locations for terminal footings. When the time came to assemble the building, the crew utilized precut laminate beams, sheets of  glass, asbestos siding, interior wood finishes, and lots of  bagged concrete mix. Williams himself visited “at least a day a week on the site, and sometimes a night in the base camp in Long Valley.”

The project wrapped up on time, and the first public ascent on the claimed “world’s largest passenger-carrying aerial tramway” was set for Sept. 12, 1963. With gondola capacity of 80 people, the party consisted of  30 VIPs and 50 benefactors at $1,000 each, rising together some 5,873 feet to Mountain Station.

In his subsequent address to esteemed architectural colleagues, Williams remembered the copter jocks, saying, “It was a great experience to fly in the helicopters and to get to know these tough, skillful men without whom the tram would never have been built.”