North Shore Beach and Yacht Club: What It Is Now

There is a building on the northeast shore of the Salton Sea that looks like a ship run aground in the desert. Curved prow, a second-storey bridge, portholes, pipe railings, a mast. Albert Frey designed it, it opened at the tail end of the 1950s, and for about twenty years it was the social centre of a resort that people genuinely believed was going to be the next Palm Springs.

It is still there. The water is not.

Quick Links

• Visiting it now
• The building
• What happened
• What else is out there

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Visiting It Now

Set your expectations before you drive out, because this is the part most write-ups get wrong.

It is a community center. Riverside County owns it and the Desert Recreation District runs it, and what happens inside is after-school programs, fitness, classes and room rentals for the people who live in North Shore. It is not a museum, it is not a bar, and there is no visitor center, no tour and no docent.

The Salton Sea History Museum was in here for about a year after the restoration and moved out in 2011. A lot of travel writing has not caught up with that.

North Shore Beach and Yacht Club

99-155 Sea View Drive, North Shore, CA 92254 · (760) 393-0602

Hours: weekdays only, and split across the day — mornings, then closed for a midday break, then afternoons into the evening. Closed Saturday and Sunday. The exact afternoon reopening varies depending on which of the district’s own listings you read, so treat the published hours as a rough shape.

Cost: No admission fee is published. Rooms, tables and chairs are available to rent; rates are not online.

Time needed: fifteen minutes. This is a stop on the way to somewhere else, not a destination.

The practical note, and it is the important one: the exterior is what you came for and you can see it any time, from the outside, for nothing. Whether a visitor who just wants to look at the Frey interior can walk in is not something anyone publishes an answer to. If seeing inside matters to you, phone ahead. Turning up at noon on a Saturday expecting a look around is how people end up disappointed.

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The Building

Frey was doing the nautical thing on purpose. The National Register plaque on the building describes the sand-coloured concrete block, the corrugated metal, the yellow fibreglass panels, the porthole windows and the central mast, and the whole composition reads as a ship because it was meant to be seen from a marina full of boats.

It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in September 2015.

The opening date is genuinely muddled. The federal plaque on the building says 1958. Other sources say 1959, and one says construction did not begin until 1960 with an opening in 1962. The plaque is the best authority available, so: the late 1950s, and 1958 if you want the number that is bolted to the wall.

The restoration is the reason it is still standing. County funding came through in 2009 and the building reopened in 2010, with John Rivera as project architect.

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What Happened

The short version: a lake that was not supposed to exist became a resort, and then stopped being one.

The Salton Sea filled by accident in 1905 when the Colorado River broke through an irrigation works. By the 1950s developers were selling it as an inland Riviera — water skiing, speedboat races, celebrities down from Palm Springs. The yacht club was the centrepiece, and its marina was among the largest in Southern California.

Then the sea started doing what a lake with no outlet does. Salinity climbed. Flooding in the early 1980s destroyed the jetty. The club closed in 1984 and sat empty for twenty-five years.

The part that is hardest to picture standing there now is that this building had boats tied up outside it. The shoreline has retreated so far that the state’s own dredging project for this site exists specifically to reconnect the outlet channel to the water.

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What Else Is Out There

There is no working marina and no usable boat ramp here. A dredging project to rehabilitate the ramp and reopen the channel has been in the works for years, and no source says it is finished. Do not bring a boat.

Next door there is a community park and a playground. That is the extent of it.

A few miles south, Salton Sea State Recreation Area is the only developed public access on the sea — restrooms, showers, water, a visitor center open daily 9 to 4, $7 per vehicle. Note that Varner Harbor there is also closed to vessel access because of the falling water level, though you can hand-carry a kayak across the beach.

North Shore itself is quiet. It had around 3,400 residents at the last count and has been described, fairly, as all but abandoned as a tourist destination. Come for the building and keep driving.

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Bottom line: Fifteen minutes, weekdays, from the outside, on the way down the east shore of the Salton Sea. It is the best surviving piece of the resort era and it is worth the stop, as long as you are not expecting it to be a museum. Keep going south and you get to Bombay Beach, Slab City and Salvation Mountain.