I brought a friend visiting from Canada on one of my nighttime bus rides down Wilshire Boulevard. Halfway through the trip, he looked out all the windows in search of any feature that might identify the area around us. Finding none, he turned to me and simply asked. When I told him that we’d reached Beverly Hills, he reacted with incredulity: what could this dark, silent row of office buildings possibly have to do with that internationally recognized pair of words, less a place name than an incantation of opulence? I tried my best to explain that, despite Wilshire’s status as the closest thing to the “main street” of western Los Angeles, it doesn’t necessarily play the same role for all the neighborhoods, districts, and municipalities through which it passes.
So if Wilshire doesn’t expose the heart of Beverly Hills, he asked, then what street does? I could only offer an assumption: Rodeo Drive. Among impassioned shoppers everywhere, its name surely sparks as much of reaction as that of Beverly Hills itself. Its four blocks between Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevard run through the middle of the “golden triangle,” a commercial zone that, though small, has successfully exported its image of itself far and wide. More than a few Angelenos who originally came from other countries have told me that, when they envisioned Los Angeles from afar, they’d imagined miles of glossy façades fronted by palm trees; a landscape of vertiginously high-end brands and forbiddingly expensive boutiques; parking jammed with Rolls Royces, Maseratis, and Hummers; numerous plastic surgery clinics; cafés and spas populated by those clinics’ even more numerous clients waited on by the soap-opera stars of tomorrow.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
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