Palm Springs Board To Weigh In On Swim Center Upgrade Plans Today

The Historic Site Preservation Board meets at 11 a.m. today at City Hall's Large Conference Room to decide whether a decades-old building at the Swim Center should be torn down as part of a larger renovation, or whether it deserves protection as a historic site first.

The Swim Center sits in the southeast corner of Sunrise Park at 405 S. Pavilion Way and includes an Olympic-size pool along with a building housing locker rooms, restrooms, showers, offices, and storage. The city wants to update that building to meet current building codes and expand it to serve the community better. With the current plan, most of the perimeter walls and the existing footprint would stay, but the enclosed office space and the covered roofs over the locker rooms would come down.

Before that can happen, the board has to sign off. City rules require any demolition work on a building this old to go through a historic review first, since the Swim Center opened in 1975 and automatically carries a "Class 4" historic status because of its age. The board can either let the project move forward, or find that the site deserves a higher historic designation, Class 1 or Class 2, which would pause the demolition for up to 120 days while that redesignation gets sorted out.

City staff say the building shouldn't get that upgrade in status. The Swim Center was designed by Kaptur & Lapham, a local firm behind some of the Coachella Valley's most recognized Desert Modernism projects, including Fire Station #4 and Tahquitz Plaza. But staff's report says budget constraints gutted the original vision here. The Swim Center was first planned with two irregularly shaped pools and a bold, Brutalist-style building meant to match the nearby library. Money problems forced the city to swap in a single standard pool and strip out the building's distinctive design elements, "diminishing its visual prominence from the street," according to the staff report. What got built, staff says, is "a simple utilitarian structure" that doesn't reflect the architects' typical caliber of work.

Staff also points to years of deferred maintenance. The report notes the building's slump stone and stucco walls, along with its glu-lam roof beams, are "in various stages of deterioration." Based on that, staff is recommending the board take no action, which would clear the applicant to move ahead with standard building permits.

The renovation itself traces back to 2021, when the community flagged the Swim Center as a priority project to improve quality of life in Palm Springs. City Council approved a task order in November 2025 to begin construction documents based on a design the Parks & Recreation Commission signed off on. The Swim Center was originally built under Proposition R, a bond measure that also funded the Palm Springs Public Library, the Pavilion, and the Leisure Center at a combined cost of $5.91 million.

If the board follows staff's recommendation today, the renovation project can proceed through the city's regular permitting process.