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This old hulk of a building stood, until 1997 or so, in San Gogornio Pass, the passage between the Los Angeles area and Palm Springs and the other desert cities to the east. Those of you who have been through there probably will recognize it as "the place where the windmills are." Like Altamont Pass, its geographic and topographic relative east of Hayward in northern California, it is a natural wind tunnel: the converging mountain walls of the San Bernardino Mountains to the north (Lake Arrowhead, Big Bear) and the San Jacinto Mountains to the south (Idyllwild and the Palm Springs Tram) funnel the normal onshore ocean winds through a 10,000-foot-deep downward-sloping valley whose floor is only about four wiles wide at its narrowest point. When climatic conditions are right--when it is hot in the desert and that heat causes a natural vacuum which tends to suck the already-strong onshore wind through the pass--the winds regularly blow 40-60mph and sometimes even harder. San Gogornio Pass and Altamont Pass are in fact the two largest commercial wind farms in the world. (It should come as no surprise that San Gogornio Pass was created by the action of the San Andreas earthquake fault, the major rift which splits California in two and which has been responsible for many [but by no means not all!] of our State's worst disasters.)
Casino was right in the throat of the pass, on the south side of Interstate 10 a few miles east of Casino Morongo, a relatively new and very successful casino run by the Morongo Band of Mission Indians. The people at Casino Morongo tell me that it was a card room that was not run by Indians and that it closed many years before their casino opened; it was probably also a bar, restaurant and nightclub, from the evidence of the signs ... and that's about all I can tell you.
(Photos taken February 22, 1993.)
Catalog Number: 356-4a
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Catalog Number: 356-40a
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Catalog Number: 356-42a
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Catalog Number: 357-10a
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Catalog Number: 356-35a
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Catalog Number: 356-26a
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Catalog Number: 357-12a
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Catalog Number: 356-36a
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Catalog Number: 356-9a
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Catalog Number: 356-8a
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Catalog Number: 356-2a
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Catalog Number: 356-39a
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