In 1986, a spring break riot changed Palm Springs. Here is the video.

From the archive: This story was first published by The Desert Sun in March 2018. It contains graphic details, images and video.

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. – It was March 29, 1986, and Ken Kurtz had never seen a party quite like this one.

Two months prior, he had moved from northern Wisconsin to Palm Springs, receiving a state-of-the-art Super 8 camcorder as a going-away present. Then spring break came to his new home, bringing thousands of half-dressed college kids to drink, flirt and dance in the California sunshine.

Kurtz grabbed the camcorder and headed downtown, filming footage of bikini babes that he could use to taunt his buddies still buried in the Wisconsin snow. But as he waded deeper into the party, the scene took an ugly turn. A few rowdy dudes were running into traffic to splash girls with ice water, then a drunken crowd followed them into the street. Traffic slowed to a halt. People shouted. Women started screaming.

So Kurtz climbed on the roof of the Palm Springs Hotel, a single-story inn on the corner of Palm Canyon Drive and Chino Drive, searching for a better view. From above, it was clear what had gone wrong. In a matter of minutes, the spring break party had become an out-of-control mob, blocking traffic, rocking cars, climbing onto a limousine, dumping water into convertibles and grabbing at women in pickup beds, tearing off their clothes.

“They were swarming like ants on a cinnamon bun,” Kurtz said. “But still, I didn’t know what was going to happen, so I just kept filming.”

From his vantage point on the roof, Kurtz recorded the epicenter of what would come to be known as the 1986 Spring Break Riot – the worst riot in Palm Springs in the past five decades. Before the day was over, hundreds of spring breakers would be arrested, tear gas would waft through downtown and at least one woman would be sexually assaulted by a mob in the middle of the street.

Kurtz’s footage, recently rediscovered after 30 years in a box in his garage, captures a pivotal moment for Palm Springs, which turned public opinion against spring break and spurred the city to cast off its reputation as a nationally renowned party destination. In the years after the riot, city leaders and police would intentionally sabotage spring break with irksome laws intended to chase away college-age tourists. The riot would also contribute to a long-term decision to reroute Highway 111 away from Palm Canyon Drive, giving Palm Springs more control over its most important road and making possible the downtown district as it exists today. This is the story of how all that happened.

Before the 1986 riot, Palm Springs had been a spring break destination for decades, like a Daytona Beach or Cancun for college kids on the West Coast. The city offered few options for entertainment, but that didn’t matter. Spring-breakers came to the desert to see and be seen, so they spent most of their time cruising down Palm Canyon Drive in convertibles or wandering the sidewalks in bathing suits and bikinis. And with no beach, squirt bottles and water balloons became a spring break tradition.

The event was widely viewed as an economic boost for the city, but as the crowds peaked in the early ‘80s, some had begun to question if the surge of college-age tourists – notorious for packing into hotel rooms by the dozen and only buying fast food and cheap beer – was really worth the hassle.

And if the city had begun to doubt if spring break was good for Palm Springs, the police were convinced it was not. Arrests increased each year and nearly all of the city police had to work overtime just to keep up. Spring break had nearly spiraled out of control in 1982, when a mob threw rocks and bottles at police at the Travelodge hotel. Two years later, cops cleared hundreds of spring-breakers from the pool at the Westward Ho resort, which reported that almost none of the crowd were actually guests at the hotel.

By the mid-'80s, rank-and-file officers were certain that spring break was approaching a breaking point, said Gary Jeandron, a former Palm Springs police chief who is now a candidate for state Assembly. At the time of the riot, Jeandron was a sergeant.

“We would tell our administration that it was only a matter of time,” Jeandron said. “We didn’t want to be crying wolf …  but this wasn’t wolf. This was going to happen.

“In 1986, it came true.”

Anatomy of a riot

Tod Goldberg, 15, was grounded, but that was not going to stop him from going to spring break. He slipped out of a patio door at his mom’s house and snagged a ride into downtown Palm Springs, where the crowd was already drunk and partying.

Goldberg had been doing this for years – sneaking beers and trying to blend in with the older kids – so he could tell that this particular spring break felt different. It was somehow more aggressive, more obnoxious and more volatile. Macho men were stirring up fights. Gone was the harmless tradition of spraying squirt bottles, and instead a few drunk guys were dumping entire coolers of water into fancy convertibles.

“Even at 15 years old, I could tell it had taken a bit of a darker turn,” said Goldberg, now 47, a novelist who has lived most of his life in Palm Springs. “That was the first time it felt as if there was something combustible in the air.”

It is this splashing into convertibles that is widely believed to have been responsible for sparking the 1986 spring break riot, according to every source interviewed by The Desert Sun for this story. A few young men started running to Palm Canyon Drive to dump water on the passing cars, then the splashing drew more spring-breakers into the streets, forming a mob that cluttered the roadway so cars could no longer pass through the crowd.

All of this can be seen in the video shot by Kurtz, the guy with a camcorder filming from the roof of the Palm Springs Hotel, which is now the site of the Chicken Ranch restaurant.

“I could see how fast it happened – from being fun to being something that was wicked – it all happened in a matter of minutes,” said Kurtz, now a 65-year-old Palm Desert resident. “It was going to go a lot further if somebody didn’t put a stop to it.”

In the footage, the mob can be seen surrounding several cars and a city bus, then violently rocking the vehicles back and forth. At one point, a white limousine gets stuck in the crowd, then a man jumps on the hood, pulls down his pants and wags his genitals at the driver while other rioters dump cups of water through the limo’s sunroof. A tall passenger jumps out of limo, chest puffed as if he is wants to fight, but then his limo speeds off, leaving him to chase it down the street.

The riot then reaches its darkest point. A mob of men surround a woman in the back of a pickup truck and jump into the truck bed to tear at her clothing. She can be heard screaming and clutching a torn shirt to her chest as the truck lurches forward, trying to escape through a gap in the crowd.

A moment later, the attack is repeated on another woman in another pickup. Her clothing is also torn off, and men grab at her ankles, forcing her onto her back and then reaching between her legs.

“It was like a tsunami, and there was nobody policing them,” said Gina Salinas, of Los Angeles, who came to Palm Springs for spring break every year as a young woman. 

In 1986, Salinas and three girlfriends were in a black Volkswagen convertible that got stuck in the riot on Palm Canyon Drive. They were trapped in the car, inching closer to the heart of the mob, where men were swarming any vehicle with women inside.

“They were ripping the bikini tops off of girls and swinging them around like trophies,” Salinas said in a recent interview with The Desert Sun.

“And I looked around at the women in the other cars, and you could see in their faces that they were terrified. This wasn’t fun anymore.”

To defend themselves, Salinas and her girlfriends closed the roof of the convertible, raising a thin barrier just before the mob engulfed the Volkswagen. The convertible driver hit the gas, trying to escape, but some of the men had lifted the back end of the car off the ground, so the tires spun worthlessly. Other men wedged their fingers beneath the convertible roof, trying to pry the car open to get to the girls inside, but Salinas and her friends fought back, jabbing at their fingertips with a pencil. 

After a short standoff, the men gave up and the mob moved on to the next car.

Police then arrived to try to stop the attacks, but were quickly overwhelmed.

Bill Williams, one of the few Palm Springs police officers at the spring break scene before the riot broke out, was alone as he got to the Alejo intersection, where the mob was at its worst.

Like many local police, Williams had feared this day would come.

“I drove up as close as I could, and as soon as I stepped out of my car, I got hit in the head with a beer bottle and got knocked out,” he said. “It was so fast, I never even got the car door closed.”

Williams woke up a minute later, still surrounded by the mob. Realizing he could do nothing on his own, he retreated into his car and drove himself to the emergency room, where he was assessed by doctors and quickly released.

Williams then drove back to downtown, joining about 40 police officers who had gathered in a church parking lot along Chino Drive, around the corner from the mob.  A cop with a megaphone announced that the spring break party had been declared a riot and warned that anyone who did not leave the area in three minutes would be arrested.

Police then split into two teams and moved down both sides of Palm Canyon Drive, creeping forward in tight formation, protecting each other, with a front row of officers holding a perimeter and cops in the back handcuffing rioters and making arrests. The cops moved like this for nearly a mile, making arrest after arrest while forcing the riot south on Palm Canyon Drive.

One of the formations was led by Jeandron, the sergeant who would later go on to be police chief.

“If we hadn’t had the foresight of this, and hadn’t had the training for this, I don’t know how we would have handled it. We would have been one mob versus another,” he said. “But a small number of well-organized officers can overwhelm an out-of-control disorganized mob. And that’s what happened.”

Faced with cops in riot gear, most of the spring breakers left quickly, Jeandron said. By the time the police reached the Baristo Road intersection – where the downtown parking garage stands today – the riot had been whittled down to about 100 of the most belligerent men. They formed a line across the roadway as if they planned to stand and fight. One rioter started doing one-armed push-ups in the street, taunting the cops.

Police discussed if they should throw tear gas, or if they could throw a smoke grenade and pretend it was tear gas, hoping to trick the crowd into dispersing. One of the rioters overheard the cops, Jeandron said, then warned the mob that cops were only going to throw harmless smoke.

They threw tear gas instead.

“They were expecting it to be smoke, and they stood still until that tear gas canister went off,” Jeandron said, chuckling. “And then they turned and ran. The fight is over. The riot is over.”

In the days after the riot, police received some criticism for mistakenly arresting bystanders and using tear gas, some of which had wafted into the nearby Las Casuelas Terraza restaurant, causing customers to gag over their dinners. But city officials and public opinion mostly praised the cops for protecting the city from what was widely considered to be the true culprit – spring break itself.

The death of springs break

Two days had passed since the spring break riot, and Mayor Frank Bogert wasn’t mincing words. As city workers were hauling away a small mountain of beer cans and broken glass, Bogert said there simply wasn’t “anything good” about spring break anymore.

“Legally, there is nothing we can do to stop the kids from coming into town,” Bogert said. “But next year they will be met with four times the number of police.”

This was the beginning of the end for spring break, which for decades had been a central Palm Springs identity, but now was no longer welcome. After years of half-hearted support for the event, city officials began openly discussing their desire to get rid of spring break altogether.

Bogert wasn’t bluffing about adding cops either. The following year, Palm Springs police seceded part of downtown to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, which does not normally patrol in the city, so it could swarm downtown with a small army of uniformed police.

Cops also began to target spring breakers with petty citations, hoping the fines would make them think twice about partying in the city. Within the 10-day span of spring break 1987, police in Palm Springs issued more than 4,500 tickets.

“We didn’t make it fun anymore,” said Jeandron. “It got to the point where, if you stepped off the curb to try to flag down a car, we’d write you a ticket for being a pedestrian in the roadway.

“If you were downtown, you were likely to get a ticket for something.”

Ticketing like this proceeded for the next two years, hampering the party but not outright ending it. That’s when the spring-breakers met their worst enemy – Sonny Bono, the celebrity mayor of Palm Springs.

After his election in 1988, the popstar-turned-politician did not hide his disdain for spring break, which he called a “nightmare” for the city.

Under Bono’s leadership, the city produced a national commercial promoting the “wholesome side” of Palm Springs, intended to show tourists that the city was more than just drunken hooligans. Bono also planned competing events, including a spring harvest festival and an inter-mural sports tournament that the mayor described as “the healthy, all-American, apple pie kind of thing to do.”

Neither event was popular enough to compete with spring break, so Bono went on the offensive. In 1990, he made statewide headlines by patrolling downtown on a Harley, then pulling over a spring-breaker who he felt was driving too fast.

The college kid got a warning. Bono got statewide press for his war on spring break.

“If I could wave a wand and make it go away, I would,” Bono told The Los Angeles Times that same year. “I wish I could send them up into the hills somewhere.”

Instead of a wand, Bono used the law. Palm Springs impaneled a citizen task force designed to tone down spring break, then the City Council adopted a slew of new ordinances specifically intended to undercut the event.

Thong bikinis were banned. Throwing water balloons and shooting squirt guns was banned. Poolside drinking was forbidden after 11 p.m. The city passed an ordinance that barred motorcycles from driving down Palm Canyon Drive, but then repealed it in response to protests. The city even approved a special $15 fee that was added to all police citations, but only during the 10 days of spring break.

And the deathblow were the barricades. In 1991, the city used more than 200 concrete barricades to close off portions of Palm Canyon Drive and Indian Canyon drives, intentionally creating a downtown traffic jam designed to frustrate spring break cruisers. According to Desert Sun files, the main cruising loop, which once took only 10 minutes, now lasted nearly three hours.

The tourists got the message.

"Palm Springs used to be really cool for spring break, but, man, it is lame this year," said Tory Goben, a 23-year-old college student, in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1991. "That Sonny Bono dude has ruined this place. Next year, I'm going to Daytona Beach."

The change was even more obvious to locals, who watched as Palm Springs evolved around them. Goldberg, the 15-year-old who use to sneak out of his mom’s house to attend spring break, said that once cruising and thongs were gone, the city quickly lost its appeal to college-age tourists.

By the time Goldberg was old enough to party legally, the party was over.

“I remember coming back during college for the week of spring break and finding that the idea of getting drunk and wandering the streets in circles had lost its allure,” he said. “There were a few people trying to hang on to it, but the drunken bacchanal that it had been was long gone, and I think, for good.”

The spring break riot also contributed to a decision to reroute Highway 111, which accomplished the same purpose as Bono’s concrete barricades, but permanently codified the change in California law.

For decades, Highway 111 had overlapped all of Palm Canyon Drive as it passed through the city, which meant the main downtown thoroughfare was a state road that the city could not close without approval from the California Department of Transportation.

Placing barriers on the road required Cal Trans approval. Closing the road for a parade required Cal Trans approval. Even hanging a banner across the street required a state permit.

And all that red tape chafed city leaders, so they pushed to move the highway.

“We are finally taking control of our city streets,” said Tuck Broich, the mayor pro tem, as the city finalized a plan to reroute the highway. “I love it.”

Broich and the rest of the City Council voted for a plan to reroute Highway 111 in 1990, then Cal Trans approved it the following year. The decision gave the city more control over downtown, but it came at a price – taxpayers spent about $1.7 million to synchronize lights on Palm Canyon Drive and prepare Vista Chino for increased traffic.

Since that work was completed, Highway 111 has officially skipped downtown by detouring onto Vista Chino and Gene Autry Trail, and the city gained authority to close Palm Canyon Drive whenever it wanted. Officials took advantage of this new power immediately, launching VillageFest, a weekly street fair that has closed the road nearly every Thursday for the past 27 years.

But a street fair wasn’t enough to protect downtown from what happened next.

At the same time that the city was losing its spring-breakers, many of the city’s larger retailers began moving elsewhere – some shifting to the newly opened El Paseo shopping district in Palm Desert – leaving downtown emptier than it had been in decades. Business dwindled through the ‘90s and early 2000, transforming Palm Canyon Drive – at times one of the most boisterous party scenes in the country – into a sleepy boulevard.

Marvin Roos, who was the Palm Springs planning director at the time of the ’86 riot, said the city’s efforts to shutdown spring break were so effective, it changed the city’s character. In the decades since, he has watched as tourism ebbed and flowed and the city searched for solid footing.

“Eventually kids just stopped coming to Palm Springs for spring break and it took the city a while to find its identity again,” he said. "Thankfully, Palm Springs has spiraled up.”

That resurgence has come only in recent years, as Palm Springs has begun to escape a reputation as a retiree paradise to attract younger tourists, often weekenders from Los Angeles. Popularity has returned, at least in part, thanks to the prominence of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which is held in Indio but closely associated with Palm Springs.

Rob Moon, the current mayor, said he believes the city’s resurging appeal can also be attributed to a new crop of “millennial-oriented” restaurants, shops, hotels and Airbnbs in a centralized, walkable downtown. If spring-breakers once just wanted to aimlessly drive around downtown, now young people want to walk to “good food, good bars, great music and places to go hiking,” Moon said.

Still, the question remains: Were the city’s efforts to drive away young tourists in the ‘80s and ‘90s so effective that spring break will never return?

Moon, one of the city’s biggest cheerleaders, believes it still could. But if spring break came back, the mayor said, there would be no repeat of the riot that changed Palm Springs.

“This is not the same city it was in 1986. We’ve grown. We have the ability to deal with these large crowds,” Moon said. “We have a very, very professional police department. They won’t let things get out of hand now. They won’t. They just won’t.”