Beverly Hills City Hall The Beverly Hills’ "The Art and
Architecture Trolley Tour" and "The Sites and Scenes Trolley Tour"
will run through Dec. 29.
By Barbara McGuire
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
The television series “Beverly Hills 90210″ added to
the rich, shopping-friendly stereotype of the Southern California
locale. However, the city of Beverly Hills hopes that the open-air
trolley tours it sponsors will prove to visitors and residents
alike that there is more to that zip code than Rodeo Drive.
With so much myth-breaking to be done and so much to share about
the true Beverly Hills, the city feels it necessary to create two
separate trolley tours, the “Art and Architecture Trolley
Tour” and the “Sites and Scenes Trolley Tour.”
These tours will run through Dec. 29, Tuesdays through Saturdays on
the hour beginning at noon.
According to UCLA alumni Robin Chancellor, the director of
communications and marketing for the city of Beverly Hills, an
original trolley tour that has been running since 1988 focused
mainly on the entertainment aspects of the city. In 1996 the city
decided to revitalize the program, adding the “Art and
Architecture Trolley Tour,” and renaming and updating the
original tour to the “Sites and Scenes Trolley
Tour.”
The job of refreshing the Trolley Tours was left to Michele
Merrill, the cultural services manager for the city of Beverly
Hills who helped select the attractions featured on the tours, in
addition to writing the scripts for the tour guide docents.
“I put some art into the “˜Sites and Scenes Trolley
Tour’ because it focused most heavily on the entertainment
aspects and some of the glitzy hotels,” she said in an
interview from her office in the Beverly Hills Library.
Merrill added that the decision to create a second tour that
focused solely on the aesthetic components of the city came about
when Beverly Hills was undergoing a lot of new artistic
alterations. One such addition was that of Sotheby’s, a large
well-known auction house originally from England, as well as the
Gagosian Gallery, a contemporary art gallery that hailed from New
York.
Though the 40-minute-long “Sites and Scenes Trolley
Tour” doesn’t make any stops as it peruses through the
city’s restaurant and shopping district, the longer 50-minute
“Art and Architecture Trolley Tour” does make a few
stops, enabling riders to see the amazing art of the city.
According to Chancellor, 10- to 20-minute stops are made at the
Museum of Television and Radio, which was designed by Richard
Meier, the architect for the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Gagosian
Gallery, as well as at the Creative Artists Agency, which features
a Roy Lichtenstein piece in its lobby.
“Any students that are interested in architecture
construction would probably find interesting the different
significant architectural buildings throughout the city,”
Chancellor said of the attractions featured in the “Art and
Architecture Trolley Tour.”
“For students, however, it just depends on what their area
of interest is because you get a very good exposure to the business
triangle and all the different restaurants and shopping areas with
the “˜Sites and Scenes Trolley Tour,'” she
added.
Though the tours hope to downplay the celebrity-populated image
of Beverly Hills, for those still interested in silver-painted fire
hydrants characteristic of the city, the “Sites and Scenes
Trolley Tour” proves more than adequate. This tour takes
riders up and around the infamous Beverly Hills Hotel, where actor
John Belushi committed suicide and also travels through the
residential districts, pointing out the former homes of household
names such as Candice Bergen (“Murphy Brown”) and Will
Rogers, who was the honorary mayor of Beverly Hills.
The tours are led by certified and trained docents who provide a
narrative as the trolleys make their way through Beverly Hills.
These tour guides are useful in that they are knowledgeable in the
historical aspects of the city, as well as the latest additions.
Merrill, who has selected and trained some of the current docents,
said that though a general script is followed, the ride is far from
boring as the guides improvise to make the journey lively and
fun.
“Docents are kind of interesting because they have to be
like an actor,” she said. “They can’t just be
somebody who sits there and memorizes and reads the script, they
have to add a little bit of drama and color to their
presentation.”
Though Merrill added that some of the best docents have been
people with a background in acting, something in keeping with the
Beverly Hills image that behind every corner there is an aspiring
actor, the tours seem to be making some headway against the
glamorous images of Rodeo Drive that have become a stereotype of
the city.
“It’s a great way for both residents and visitors to
become acquainted with all the different aspects of the
city,” Chancellor said. “We have all different kinds of
art pieces on display throughout the city and the tours are an
opportunity to expose the public to the art and all the different
historical elements of the city.”
TOURS: The “Art and Architecture Trolley
Tour” and the “Sites and Scenes Trolley Tour”
leave from the corner of Rodeo Drive and Dayton Way in Beverly
Hills. Tickets are $5 for adults and $1 for children and can be
purchased from the docent on a first come, first served basis. The
tours run through Dec. 29, and beginning July 3 through Labor Day
weekend they will run every hour from noon until 5 p.m. For the
winter and holiday schedule call (310) 285-2438.