Beverly Hills History: From Bean Fields to Rodeo Drive

November 8, 2026

Beverly Hills started as a semi-arid oasis, became a Mexican land grant, then a lima bean farm and a failed oil prospect. In 1906 it was renamed and subdivided into a planned residential town. It was incorporated on January 14, 1914, and within a few decades movie stars had made it the most famous small city in America. Here is the story in order, with the landmarks that still tell it.

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TL;DR

The name comes from Beverly, Massachusetts, not from the hills. Founder Burton Green borrowed it, hoping to attract President Taft.
Before the city, the land was a Tongva oasis, a Mexican rancho and then lima bean fields. Only six houses stood there by 1911.
The Beverly Hills Hotel opened in 1912, two years before incorporation, and pulled buyers to the new lots.
In 1923, residents including Mary Pickford and Will Rogers helped defeat annexation to Los Angeles, 507 to 337.
You can still read this history on the street: the hotel, Greystone, Rodeo Drive and the Trousdale Estates.

Before the city: water in a dry basin
Sheep, beans and a disappointing oil hunt
Why it is called Beverly Hills
1906 to 1914: a planned town takes shape
1914: a city of 88 residents
The movie stars arrive: Pickfair and the 1920s
Rodeo Drive and the postwar boom
A timeline at a glance
A walking route through the history
Perspective
See it with a guide
FAQ
Sources

Before the city: water in a dry basin

Long before anyone sold a lot, the Tongva (Gabrielino) people knew this ground as a special place. The City of Beverly Hills says they considered the area sacred and called it the Gathering of the Waters, or El Rodeo de las Aguas in Spanish. Water was the point: in a dry Southern California basin, this spot had it.

That explains why Rodeo Drive carries a Spanish name today. It also explains why the area was prosperous before Hollywood arrived. The city’s own history page puts it plainly: Beverly Hills was a sought-after location long before the movie industry discovered it.

The Spanish and Mexican eras added the first formal land title. In 1838, the governor of Mexican-controlled California deeded 4,500 acres to Maria Rita Valdez Villa, who ran a cattle and horse ranch and built an adobe home near what is now Sunset Boulevard and Alpine Drive. If you stand at that corner today, you are looking at one of the oldest ranch sites in the city.

Sheep, beans and a disappointing oil hunt

After the rancho era, the land struggled to pay its way. The Beverly Hills Historical Society notes that sheepherders, cattle ranchers and oilmen all tried, and that real estate is what finally defined the town. It describes the land as a treeless desert until the twentieth century.

The oil attempt is the part many visitors have never heard. In 1900, Burton E. Green and a group of investors formed the Amalgamated Oil Company, bought the Hammel and Denker ranch and began drilling. They did not find enough oil to exploit commercially. So the investors pivoted from oil wells to house lots.

The Los Angeles Times described what the land looked like at that point: lima bean fields covering 4,539 acres. By 1911, only six houses on one-acre lots had been built there, and they sold for between $300 and $1,000. It is hard to picture when you are walking past a boutique window on Rodeo.

Why it is called Beverly Hills

The name has nothing to do with the scenery. According to the Los Angeles Times, Green named the community after Beverly, Massachusetts, a quiet Atlantic coast town north of Boston. He had read that President William Howard Taft planned a vacation in the East Coast Beverly, and he borrowed the name for his new community of parks and tree-lined streets in the hope of luring the president there.

The Massachusetts town itself took its name from Beverley in Yorkshire, which Etymonline traces to an Old English phrase meaning “beaver lodge”. So the glamour capital of California is, linguistically, a beaver’s home. The same source dates “Beverly Hills” as a name to 1911.

1906 to 1914: a planned town takes shape

In 1906, the investors reorganized as the Rodeo Land and Water Company, renamed the property “Beverly Hills,” subdivided it and began selling lots. What they did next separated Beverly Hills from a typical land grab.

In 1907, landscape architect Wilbur D. Cook was hired to design the street plan. According to the Historical Society, he laid out curving streets, larger lots on the north side and smaller lots on the south, with a triangular commercial district in between. Every street was to be tree-lined, with land set aside for parks, four elementary schools and a high school.

That triangle is the origin of the Golden Triangle, the shopping district bounded by Wilshire Boulevard, Santa Monica Boulevard and Crescent Drive. The curving residential streets north of Sunset are why driving through the city feels so different from the LA grid.

The hotel that came first

The Beverly Hills Hotel opened on May 12, 1912, two years before the city existed. The Los Angeles Business Journal notes it stood alone amid open fields and lima bean farms and that it predates the city, which incorporated two years later. Its general manager says the hotel was where the city started and grew up around.

TIME reported in 1962 that it was built for $500,000 and overlooked a bridle path named Sunset Boulevard. Visitors who came for the hotel were inclined to buy land, and by 1914 the population qualified the town for incorporation, per Wikipedia’s account.

The look you picture today came later. In the 1940s, architect Paul R. Williams painted the hotel pink, added the Crescent wing, the Cabana Café and the Fountain Coffee Room, reimagined the Polo Lounge, brought in the banana-leaf wallpaper and designed the script signage, according to the Business Journal.

Photographer’s tip: shoot the hotel’s pink facade and palm-lined entry in the soft light of late afternoon. Wide at 24 mm gets the full porte-cochère and the sign in one frame.

1914: a city of 88 residents

Beverly Hills was incorporated on January 14, 1914. The scale is striking: the Historical Society says the city had only 88 residents in 1914. A little more than a century later, Rodeo Drive alone attracted 7.4 million tourists.

Today the city sits within a 5.7 square mile radius and has about 35,000 residents, while welcoming millions of visitors a year. It is small enough to cover in a single morning, which is part of its charm.

The movie stars arrive: Pickfair and the 1920s

Hollywood royalty gave Beverly Hills its second identity. In 1919, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford bought land on Summit Drive and built a mansion, finished in 1921 and nicknamed Pickfair by the press. The glamour around the couple, and the other stars who built mansions in the city, drove its growing appeal.

The decade also produced two landmarks you can still see. In 1928, the Beverly Wilshire Apartment Hotel opened on Wilshire Boulevard between El Camino and Rodeo drives, on part of the old Beverly Hills Speedway. That same year, oilman Edward L. Doheny finished Greystone Mansion, a 55-room house meant as a wedding present for his son. Greystone is a favorite for photographers, with its grounds and architecture, and it has long served as a film backdrop.

The 1923 vote that kept the city independent

The most dramatic chapter is the annexation fight. In 1923, a proposal to annex Beverly Hills to Los Angeles was defeated 507 to 337. The city’s official history says residents including Will Rogers, who later became the city’s first mayor, and Mary Pickford mobilized local voters against the plan.

LAist names the group the “Beverly Hills Eight”: Pickford, Fairbanks, Rogers, Harold Lloyd, Conrad Nagel, Fred Niblo, Tom Mix and Rudolph Valentino. They used their celebrity to fight the anti-annexation cause.

Historian Nancie Clare calls it Beverly Hills’ close brush with oblivion. In her view, what they did became a model for generations of celebrities to intervene in political causes, as the Jewish Journal reported in its review of her book. The reason Beverly Hills has its own city hall, police and fire departments, and its own school district, is a vote of 844 people.

Rodeo Drive and the postwar boom

Beverly Hills grew quickly after World War II. The Historical Society says that in the late 1940s the city began to develop rapidly with Rodeo Drive as its focus, and the commercial district became known as the Golden Triangle as more internationally renowned retailers opened there.

Then came the hillside estates. In 1954, Paul Trousdale bought the Doheny Ranch and subdivided it into 532 lots, all subject to strict rules set by an Architectural Committee. Early houses were designed by architects such as Wallace Neff, Paul R. Williams, A. Quincy Jones and Frank Lloyd Wright. If you drive the Trousdale Estates today, you are seeing mid-century modern design as the neighborhood’s founders intended.

In 1989, Two Rodeo and its pedestrian path, Via Rodeo, opened. The Historical Society says it quickly became a shopping and tourist magnet as well as a popular photo and film backdrop. The cobbled curve with the hills framed behind it is one of the most photographed corners in the city.

A timeline at a glance

Year	What happened
Before 1838	Tongva people know the area as the Gathering of the Waters
1838	Maria Rita Valdez Villa receives a 4,500-acre land grant
1900	Amalgamated Oil Company buys the ranch and searches for oil
1906	Rodeo Land and Water Company renames and subdivides the land
1907	Wilbur D. Cook designs the curving, tree-lined street plan
1912	The Beverly Hills Hotel opens
1914	The city is incorporated, with 88 residents
1919 to 1921	Pickfair is built
1923	Annexation to Los Angeles is defeated, 507 to 337
1928	Beverly Wilshire opens and Greystone is completed
1954	Trousdale Estates is subdivided
1989	Two Rodeo and Via Rodeo open

A walking route through the history

The best way to make the dates stick is to see the places in sequence. This is a loose route that works for a half day:

Sunset Boulevard and Alpine Drive. Start where the old Valdez adobe stood and picture the cattle ranch.
The Beverly Hills Hotel. Look for the pink walls, the script sign and the palms. This is where the city began.
Greystone Mansion. Admire the 1928 scale of oil money and think about the Doheny story.
Rodeo Drive and Via Rodeo. Walk the Golden Triangle, then end at the curved pedestrian path from 1989.
Wilshire Boulevard. Finish at the Beverly Wilshire, built on the old speedway.

Tip: go on a weekday morning for emptier sidewalks and cleaner photos. Pack a polarizer for glare on the shop windows, and shoot at blue hour for glowing storefronts.

For more on how the area fits into a wider visit, our guide to Beverly Hills tours shows what else fits into a day. If movie history is your angle, read about finding famous movie locations across the city.

Perspective

We think Beverly Hills is the best place in Los Angeles to learn why a tour should tell a story. Almost nothing here explains itself. A pink hotel, a curved shopping lane and a quiet street of mansions look like pure glamour until someone tells you about the lima beans, the failed oil wells and the 1923 vote.
That is how we design our tours: not just to show you sights but to fill in the history and culture behind them. A guide who knows that Burton Green borrowed the name from Massachusetts, or that Will Rogers became the first mayor, turns a drive-by into a memory.
Visitors often tell us they want to go beyond the quick photo stop. Our exclusive stops and storytelling are built for that, whether you come as a family, a couple or a local who has never really looked at the city next door.
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See it with a guide

Reading the story is one thing. Standing at the hotel while a guide explains how it anchored a city is another. Our guided tours are built around storytelling and exclusive stops at places like Beverly Hills, the Walk of Fame and the Hollywood Sign.

If you want to focus on the stars’ neighborhoods, our Celebrity Homes Tour is the place to start. If you would like to set the pace and choose your own stops, our Private Tour is $450. Prefer to cover more ground? Compare the hop-on hop-off tickets and our other options on the main tours page.

Looking for a wider view? Our 4.5-hour Hollywood to Santa Monica tour links the city’s famous neighborhoods in one outing, and our guide to the must-see places in Los Angeles helps you plan the rest of the trip.

FAQ

Why is it called Beverly Hills?

Founder Burton Green named it after Beverly, Massachusetts. He had read that President Taft planned to vacation there, and hoped the name would lure the president to his new community. The name has no connection to the local hills.

When was Beverly Hills founded?

The land was renamed and subdivided in 1906 by the Rodeo Land and Water Company. The city was incorporated on January 14, 1914, when it had 88 residents. The Beverly Hills Hotel had opened two years earlier, in 1912.

What was Beverly Hills before it was a city?

It was first a Tongva site known as the Gathering of the Waters, then part of a Mexican land grant of 4,500 acres in 1838. Later it was ranch land and lima bean fields. Investors drilled for oil but did not find enough to sell commercially.

Why isn’t Beverly Hills part of Los Angeles?

In 1923, voters rejected annexation to Los Angeles by 507 to 337. Residents such as Will Rogers and Mary Pickford rallied support for independence. That is why the city runs its own services today.