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Article: Down and out in Beverly Hills.
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- March 1, 1986
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1986 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Down and Out in Beverly Hills
Beverly Hills! In the immortal words of George Shelton, regular panelist on the beloved radio program It Pays to Be Ignorant, "I usta woik in that town." Few land tracts have undergone such radical social transformation in so short a time. Within the memory of people still living (if barely), Beverly Hills was a desolate strip of desert to which real-estate developers lured potential investors from Los Angeles with a box lunch and a free trip on a trolley to nowhere. Land went for a dollar a foot of frontage on Wilshire Boulevard, where Neiman-Marcus now rises like a late Babylonian ziggurat. Through the 1950s, Beverly Hills was a ...