Past
Beverly Hills' main gas station - a fantastic Union 76 with an
enormous swooping orange awning - I turn in front of a jet-black
Bentley and into the complex that includes the Beverly Hills City
Hall, with the famous courthouse where the celebrity DWI and
shoplifters are rustled; past the Beverly Hills Fire Department,
where fire engines are gleaming like new Porsches behind glass; and
toward the police station. It's a world unto itself, sort of a
Disneyland of municipal government and
law enforcement - everything
in blinding white.
From there, it's on to the Flats, residential streets lousy with
stars and lined with incredible trees, each street different from
the next. It gets my vote as the most beautiful street in
America.
"The Flats are north of Santa Monica, south of Sunset," Martin
says. "I lived in the Flats of Beverly Hills for about 15 years.
They have beautiful, beautiful trees. I used to live on Bedford,
the one with palm trees. Then there's Elm and all of that. All the
streets have matching trees. Like Bedford is completely palm trees,
another street would be completely elm trees, and another street
would be something else … Most of the houses have been modified,
which is an unfortunate thing to happen to Beverly Hills. First, it
started with what we call "authentic" Spanish homes from the '20s
and '30s, and some of them were torn down to build uncontrollable
houses that were too big and too high. It used to be a little
community and now it's a little more of a show palace for a certain
kind of taste. But it's still beautiful."
You can see them for the cost of a gallon of gas. But, Martin says,
there's much more, architecturally, to see in Beverly Hills. There
is the ridiculous, like the
Rite Aid drug store he described in his
second novel, The Pleasure of My Company, as "splendidly
antiseptic. I bet the floors are hosed down every night with
isopropyl alcohol." There's also the sublime, including the new
Richard Meier-designed Museum of Television and Radio and the
venerable Anderton Court Center, a fantastic space-age Frank Lloyd
Wright-designed tiny shopping center in the middle of Rodeo Drive.