Munchkinville: A Palm Springs Urban Legend – Did the Wizard of Oz Dwarfs Settle in the Desert?

Munchkinville, Munchkin Land, Midgetville, Midget Town: they are all names of a mythical place that I had heard of since I was in high school in the 1970s. It was always spoken in the second person. Someone’s brother, uncle, older friend, someone else had always been there. Never the person she was telling. The story survives to this day. A niece of mine, who graduated from Palm Springs High School in 2000, had also heard the rumors; as she had a cousin who is even younger. Munchkinville was and is an Urban Legend of the city of Palm Springs.

I was in high school the first time I went looking for him. According to legend, after the Wizard of Oz was made in the 1930s, some of the midget actors took their winnings and bought land in the Araby area of ​​Palm Springs. They played a key role in the construction of their houses, wanting the doors, windows, countertops, and rooflines to be built especially for the little people. Much of the houses were made of natural rock and were built at the end of a long cul-de-sac out of sight of the rest of the world. They wanted to create a place for themselves in the celebrity paradise of Palm Springs.

The main road into the Arabian area in the 1970s was a narrow, curvy dirt road called the Rim Road, barely wide enough for a single car. If two passed each other, one had to brace himself against the mountain that carved out the inner edge of the road, or dangle a tire perilously close to the 50-foot drop off the other side of the road that ran above the desert left. Clear for winter floods. It was late and it was dark. We ventured onto Rim Road and then searched the few cross streets of the small Araby neighborhood. We finally reached the top of the little ridge at the top of the houses and an even skinnier dirt road took us further back along the edge of the mountains and then turned down towards the creek.

We dragged our car forward until someone yelled and pointed at a small group of rough houses, “There it is!” I tried to see through the haze in the car, in my head, and through the glare of the headlights and the darkness outside their misty pools of yellow light. I wasn’t sure what I saw, but it fit the description I had been given. A person inside one of the houses poked his head out a window. My brother yelled, “Oh shit!” and we walk away fast, laughing like idiots.

When I was old enough to have my own driver’s license, I tried to recreate our discovery. But I never saw for sure anything that reminded me of that dark, drunken night. Still, whenever a friend was asked about Munchkinland, he would either claim to have been there or knew someone personally who had. But if they were asked to take me there, they would always exclaim with a busy schedule, “I have to go.”

Fast-forward over 30 years to recently, I found myself in Palm Springs one day with a digital camera in hand and more time than I had scheduled. I decided to drive the same roads I remembered as a teenager and see what I could. Until Arabia Drive I went. Over the years, it had become a normal street and provided easy access to the now prestigious neighborhood of out-of-the-way houses. Pushing my car down the different paths during the day, I determined that there were no crossroads leading to a group of houses beyond the easiest to spot, and none of them appeared to be handcrafted from rock. But on a street called Smoketree I found a fairly new and ominously large iron, brick and mortar gate with little lions perched on top of the pillars and lion heads on the fence that looked anything but cowardly. The location of this gate and the small amount of road I could see beyond it meant that I might travel just along the wash to some house or houses beyond the normal neighborhood.

I drove further through the neighborhood, to the top of Araby Drive and found a small wide spot in the road with signs that said NO PARKING AT ANY TIME. I parked AND stepped up to let my car shield me from the sight of any houses below me while I peed. In front of me was an old water tower, and below it was an iron crossbar that blocked access from Araby Drive to a much older and narrow dirt road, now overgrown with brush and weeds. It descended as it snaked around the base of the mountain, staying just above the water until it came to a small group of houses, made of stone. They were barely noticeable, blending in with the mountain and desert so natural and covered by decades of plant growth. I didn’t walk down. They looked as if they had not been inhabited for years. And besides, my car was illegally parked.

Later that day, I posted my thoughts on Facebook for all my old lifelong friends. There were about 50 comments posted in return. It seems that everyone had a story to tell about Munchkinville. Some believed that they had found it when they were young. Others claimed it was a false rumor. But they all had stories to share.