About Me
Prehistoric Beverly Hills
Beverly Hills was wealthy and famous long before it was discovered by the movie industry. At the beginning, our fabled El Dorado was blessed with a commodity more precious in Southern California than jewels: water.
The source of this fertility comprises three dramatic canyons: Franklin, Coldwater and Benedict. Moisture from the Southern California sky gathers on the hills and wends its way down to form streams flowing to the nexus of Beverly Drive and Sunset Boulevard. Native American inhabitants, the Tongva or Gabrielinos, considered it a sacred site, naming it the Gathering of the Waters or, in Spanish, El Rodeo de las Aguas.
To further stimulate development, the Beverly Hills Hotel was constructed in 1912 at the site of the Gathering of the Waters. It was served by a Dinky railroad, as wondrous in its day as the monorail at Disneyland appeared in the 1950s. The hotel became the center of community life, serving as theater, meeting place and church.
The Glamour Era
Attracted to an elegant lifestyle made possible by the hotel, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford led the wave of movie stars here when they built their mansion, Pickfair, in 1919.
Life during the Roaring 20s accelerated with the construction of a huge, banked wooden racetrack, dominating most of the southern section of the City. The Speedway drove Beverly Hills further toward the center of America's popular imagination via radio broadcasts of races that were on the same scale as today's Indy 500. The speedway also was sometimes used as a base for another national craze: aviation.Beverly Hills continued to grow. Promotional materials from the period touted the young metropolis as "center of the next million." Fortunately, human-scale public improvements helped soften the effects of growth. In the 1930s, Santa Monica Park was renamed Beverly Gardens and was extended to span the length of the City. The famous Electric Fountain was installed. A finely modeled sculpture atop the fountain shows a Tongva in prayer, homage to Beverly Hills? heritage as a wellspring of fertility and abundance.
A Modern City
In the post World War II years, Beverly Hills continued to develop as one of the most glamorous places in the world to live, eat, play and, especially, shop. The Golden Triangle, with Rodeo Drive at its center, was built and marketed to the rest of the world as the shopping destination of a lifetime. Many other glamorous hotels opened, notably the Beverly Wilshire, attracting visitors from all over the world. The City's iconic image was enhanced with the spread of television shows and movies set in Beverly Hills, among them The Jack Benny Show in the 1950s, The Beverly Hillbillies in the 1960s and, more recently, Beverly Hills Cop in the 1980s and Beverly Hills 90210 in the 1990s.
