On a lonely stretch of desert road smack dab between Phoenix and Los Angeles sits a tiny town (population 216!) consisting of a handful of storefronts straddling a solitary block just steps from Interstate 10. Cars still regularly pull off the freeway and into the gas station there, though the pumps haven’t been filled with petrol in years. A sign in the café window reads, “We apologize for being closed temporarily for building maintenance,” though one look through the chalky windows and it’s clear the “temporary” shuttering is anything but.
Desert Center, as it is known, has been compared to both the charming Route 66 hamlet of Radiator Springs from “Cars” and the treacherous Nevada town from “The Hills Have Eyes,” but the truth of the place lies somewhere in between.
The remote site was the brainchild of preacher Stephen Ragsdale, who fortuitously broke down in the area while traveling from his hometown of Palo Verde Valley to Los Angeles in 1915. Upon being rescued and towed to a mechanic by a local landowner, an idea was born. Figuring the region needed a decent rest stop, Ragsdale purchased the good samaritan’s acreage and, along with his wife Lydia, proceeded to build a gas station, auto repair shop and restaurant along the dusty main drag which became known as Ragsdale Rd.
Desert Center was officially founded in 1921 and just as Stephen, who took to calling himself “Desert Steve,” had envisioned, it evolved into a popular pit stop for travelers making their way between California and Arizona. The entire Ragsdale clan had a hand in the operation. As historian Steve Lech told The Press-Enterprise, “He [Stephen] would run the tow truck and pump gas. His wife would run the cafe and do the cooking. He had two sons and a daughter and they would do auto repairs and work at the center.”
Incredibly, the town remained in the Ragsdales’ hands up until just last month when its 1,034.78 acres were sold for $6.25 million to Balwinder S. Wraich, a transport company owner based in Riverside. The selling price might seem scant for an entire town, but by the time of the transaction, the place had become a virtual shell of its original self.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake Hardships started to befall Desert Center in the 1960s when U.S. Route 60, which formerly bisected the town, was transformed into Interstate 10 and rerouted about 100 yards, thereby bypassing the once central storefronts. The modernization of the automobile around the same time rendered a roadside detour along the well-traversed path irrelevant anyway. As Steve’s granddaughter Suzanne Ragsdale told the Desert Sun, “People would just fly right by. Trucks didn’t need to stop. There were faster cars at that point that could make it for 100 miles without boiling over.”
The 1982 closure of the Kaiser steel mine in nearby Eagle Mountain and the subsequent relocation of its many employees dealt another hefty blow to Desert Center’s patronage and bottom line. But the Ragsdales managed to somehow plug along, catering to the small population of locals and those passersby who did make a stop in town to stock up on fuel and a quick meal.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake That all changed in 1999 when Desert Steve’s son Stanley, who had run the town since his father’s death almost 30 years prior, passed away, leaving the site’s future in the hands of his six children, a proposition that soon proved interminably muddled. The Desert Sun explained, “A probate process began in 2000 to determine if Stanley had a valid will and how his estate would be administered. The court-supervised process has spanned the last 20 years.” As his heirs’ lengthy haggling over what to do with their birthright dragged on, Desert Center plunged into disrepair. More and more people moved away and one by one the few businesses dotting the main street closed up shop, turning the place into a virtual ghost town. For the better part of a decade, the quaint business district sat frozen in time behind glass-windowed storefronts, the lonely post office the sole enterprise remaining in operation on secluded Ragsdale Rd.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake It didn’t take long for urban explorers to come calling, the bizarre wasteland of broken freeway signs, hollowed-out cars and discarded industrial equipment becoming a popular pilgrimage for lovers of all things strange and abandoned.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake Pictures of the town started popping up on blogs and all over social media, adventure seekers and influencers alike finding the desolate landscape beautiful in its decay, just begging to be photographed.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake Then in November 2019, all of the town’s patinaed ephemera was sold off via auction, leaving behind a shell of vacant storefronts.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake Even the cast-off remnants of industrial life that once littered the surrounding land were offered for sale, earning the Ragsdales a tidy profit. According to the Never Quite Lost website, scrapped signage went for as much as $3,300, while a 1930 motorcycle garnered $42,000 and the red and green pickup pictured above secured a cool $1,400.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake Desert Center itself hit the auction block that same year, eventually selling to Wraich last month. Per the Desert Sun, current plans are to restore the town to its former roadside glory. While most of the original structures will have to be torn down, Balwinder is hopeful a smattering of businesses, including a few fast-food spots, a motel and a gas station, will once again line Ragsdale Rd. at some point soon. In the meantime, audiences can still visit the place virtually via both the big and small screen.
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Image Credit: CBS -
Image Credit: Lindsay Blake Desert Center most famously portrayed the fictional Pope County, Texas municipality where Stringfellow Hawke (Jan-Michael Vincent) and Dominic Santini (Ernest Borgnine) searched for a missing friend in the season two episode of “Airwolf” titled “Sweet Britches,” which aired in 1984. Upon flying into the area at the beginning of the episode, Dom says, “According to the computer, the town has less than 200 people, only four major structures – two seem to be gas stations, one’s gotta be the county jail and the other’s probably a bar.” The descriptor wasn’t far off from the real Desert Center, though Desert Steve was a devout teetotaller and never allowed a bar to be built in town. So the production team redressed the market to appear as a watering hole named The Rack for the shoot.
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Image Credit: CBS At the end of the episode, String and Dom perform a daring helicopter rescue of a highway patrol officer in the middle of Ragsdale Rd. which culminates in a shoot-out with local police.
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Image Credit: IFC Films Detectives Anderson (Clayne Crawford) and Curtis (Chris Mulkey) also spy on a suspect at Desert Center’s former gas station in the 2006 drama “Unknown.”