Half close your eyes, ignore the smell of rotting fish and you could see why this was such a popular place in the 1960s. The pilings to the left are the remains of the boat jetty.
The North Shore Beach and Yacht Club began construction in 1958 at a time when that accidental sea, the Salton Sea, was an up-and-coming destination and not the dead fish-ridden wasteland that much of it has become today.
Back when it looked like the resort would last forever.
Back in the 1950s, there was a multi-million dollar plan for what would become California’s largest marina and the jewel in the crown was the yacht club, designed by architect Albert Frey who was responsible for ‘desert modernism’ and whose influence on Palm Springs remains to this day. Frey delighted in the idea of creating a ship in the middle of a desert by a sea that shouldn’t exist, and his design is evocative of a boat with a curved prow, mast, crow’s nest lounge and porthole windows. It soon became popular, promoted as ‘The Glamour Capital of the Salton Sea’, and Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, the Beach Boys and the Marx Brothers all visited the club.
Bereft of its nautical flags and Albert Frey’s signature yellow fibre glass panels.
One of the developers who built the yacht club was Ray Ryan, who had been responsible for the restoration of the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs and later opened the Bermuda Dunes Country Club. Ryan was a flamboyant character who, it was whispered, had connections to the Mob. Stepping out of the Olympia health club in Evansville, Indiana on 18th October 1977, he got into his new Lincoln Continental Mark V coupe and turned the key. The car exploded. Ryan was killed immediately, the power was knocked out over the south part of Evansville and it took two days to find all the pieces of the Lincoln.
From a LA Time supplement of April 1963. The yacht club is in the middle left, with the pool clearly visible. The jetty was destroyed in 1981, and the motel at the top of the picture in late 2008.
Without Ryan, it’s unlikely that North Shore would have been the destination spot that it became in the 1960s, but even he could do little about the twin forces of a recession and environmental problems, both of which ensured the resort’s downfall. As the development boom went bust in the 1970s, countless lots were simply abandoned, while water pollution saw the number of visitors fall. Flooding compounded the area’s problems and, in 1981, a flood destroyed the North Shore Marina’s jetty. If people couldn’t dock their boats, they wouldn’t visit. Many took their boats away from the Salton Sea entirely as they found the increased salinity clogging expensive marine engines.
By 1984, the yacht club was forced to shut its doors. Eventually it fell prey to vandals who exacerbated the interior damage caused by its use as a film location in 2005 (the front was also painted with the name ‘Aces & Spades’ for the movie The Island and the inside gutted) and to skateboarders who treasured the yacht club’s now-empty swooping pool.
The North Shore Motel close to the yacht club. The motel was torn down a few months after this photo was taken.
But that’s not quite the end of the story. The North Shore Yacht Club looked like this when I first visited in 2008. There was a large motel nearby, albeit also boarded up. When I returned three years later, the motel had been razed to the ground but, to my surprise, the yacht club had been restored to its former glory. It was, apparently, intended for use as a community centre and home to the Salton Sea History Museum. But here’s the rub; the owners of the property terminated the museum’s lease after a handful of years, forcing the museum into (hopefully temporary) closure, while every time I’ve been there, the place has been firmly shut up with no indication of any future community events to be held there.
If a club designed to look like a ship in the desert was incongruous, the site of a restored and repainted disused building at North Shore is even odder still.
The North Shore Beach & Yacht Club in 2008.
The North Shore Beach & Yacht Club in 2014.
The famous pool, now gone.
But on the southern edge of town is a place that’s part art installation, part modern graveyard. The International Car Forest was the work of Chad Sorg and Mark Rippie. Rippie owned the 80 acres of land next to Highway 95 and enlisted Sorg (who fell in love with Goldfield and would move there in 2004) in an ambitious project to set the world record for the most upturned cars in an art work, primarily to beat Carhenge in Alliance, Nebraska. Rippie also owned over 40 cars, trucks and buses. Trust me, this is not particularly unusual in Goldfield.
Work began in 2002 and continued over the next decade, using a back hoe and a lot of hard work to ‘plant’ the vehicles. Some were posed nose into the ground, some balanced on the top of others, some poised over mounds of earth. The idea was that the site would be a blank canvas for artists and would inspire graffiti, rather as the better-known Cadillac Ranch ending up doing.
But, unlike that Texas landmark, the International Car Forest seems, for the most part, to have attracted people with some artistic flair. Most of the cars and buses have been painted with designs rather than having names scrawled badly in spray paint. It’s probably the fact that the International Car Forest is in the middle of nowhere – and once you get to nowhere you have to traverse some pretty potholed roads – that has protected it from becoming a eyesore like Cadillac Ranch.
Unsurprisingly, considering that they were two diametrically opposed personalities, Chad Sorg and Mark Rippie’s partnership did not end well. Sorg is an artist who had a vision for the International Car Forest; Rippie just wanted his name on a Guinness World Record. They fell out irrevocably not long before Rippie went to prison for two years for improperly possessing and attempting to purchase firearms. He had been found not guilty of a 1970 armed robbery in Colorado by reason of insanity, something he neglected to tell a dealer in 2010 when purchasing a gun. In 2013 he was arrested at his home in Goldfield where police found with 15 firearms, including two loaded semi-automatic assault-type rifles with extended 30-round clips and a loaded semi-automatic .40 caliber pistol and over 22,000 rounds of ammunition. The court was told Rippie was well-known to law enforcement and others in the Goldfield and Tonopah areas.
Chad Sorg is still an artist and blogger. He has never been found insane. Mark Rippie is out of jail and living in Goldfield where he describes himself as ‘a fat old man with a shit load of guns and ammos’. And quite a few cars that don’t work…
Last year I was covering the Las Vegas Bike Fest for my magazine when I decided I needed a break from the bling. It was also that I wanted to find essential supplies (water, cigarettes, chocolate – the basic food groups) at a reasonable price and I had spotted a small convenience store outside the show. The trouble was there was a security guard and a large fence between me and said shop.
NEVER QUITE LOST 