Several years ago in many Beverly Hills retail stores you could purchase "Beverly Hills Real Estate" for $10.00 in the form of a small glass jar filled with dirt (allegedly from the rich earth of Beverly Hills). The store owner told me they sold a lot of the "real estate." In reality, Beverly Hills homes can start at $3 million and go on up from there (Southern California's Mega-Estates). Ever since that last trip years ago I have thought of Beverly Hills as a frivolous place, a closed system where people fit into a caste, those who own the real estate, and those who buy the jars of dirt. This assignment gave me a chance to go back and reassess my first impressions of that city. In the process, it altered several of my initial perceptions of Beverly Hills.
I decided to do some research on Beverly Hills before going there so that I would have a better idea of the history and makeup of the city. According to the Beverly Hills Fact Sheet, the city of Beverly Hills, which occupies 5.69 square miles, is located about halfway between the Los Angeles Civic Center and the Pacific Ocean, and is completely surrounded by the city of Los Angeles. It was first discovered by Gaspar de Portola in 1769 and later developed by the Rodeo Land and Water Company in 1907. Beverly Hills was officially incorporated on January 29, 1914 and the population at that time was 550. The current population is 33,000, with 19,700 registered voters and 5,000 school age and the average per capita income after taxes is $121, 396 a year. In addition, approximately 100,000 people work in Beverly Hills, including 889 city employees. Some of the main commercial businesses included banking, specialty and boutique shopping, beauty salons and spas, talent agencies, fragrance companies, and the hospitality industry (Beverly Hills, 2003). On November 15, 2003, with this information in hand I set out to discover what I could about Beverly Hills that would complete t...