A Century of Bel-Air: How a Rancher’s Land Deal Became LA’s Most Private Suburb

A century after oil money carved it out of empty Los Angeles ranchland, Bel-Air remains one of America’s wealthiest neighbourhoods – and, unlike Beverly Hills or Hollywood, one the public still knows almost nothing about.

That obscurity is partly by design. “When people visit LA, the tour buses go around Beverly Hills but they don’t typically go to Bel-Air because you can’t really see much. A lot of it is behind walls and bushes,” says David Silverman, author of a new book marking the area’s centenary, Bel-Air: The Centennial. Most people’s only reference point is the 1990s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which wasn’t even filmed there.

From gentlemen’s estate to movie colony

The neighbourhood was the creation of Alphonzo Bell, a rancher who struck oil and used the proceeds to buy roughly 18,000 acres once known as the Danziger Ranch, naming his development Bel-Air – “Beautiful Air,” with his own name folded in. A 1923 Los Angeles Times advertisement pitched it bluntly as “A Community of Gentlemen’s Estates” for “the highest class of homeseekers,” requiring new homes to cost at least $15,000, roughly $300,000 today. Bell threw in stables, a golf course and courts for tennis as further enticements, and moved his own family into a 42-room mansion he renamed Capo di Monte. Horses, not cars, defined the early community: some 65 miles of bridle trails eventually wound through the neighbourhood, complete with underpasses so riders never had to cross a street.

Bell, a devout man who considered Hollywood morally suspect, blocked sales to “movie people” for his development’s first six years – a rule the industry got around by buying through lawyers until the 1929 Depression forced Bell to relax it for financial reasons. Stars including Judy Garland, who bought a house there with her Wizard of Oz earnings, along with William Powell, Carole Lombard, Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, soon moved in, with postcards of their homes sold to fans.

From postcards to the Beverly Hillbillies

Bel-Air’s grandest homes later found their way onto television, too: the 1933 Kirkeby Estate served as the exterior for 1962’s The Beverly Hillbillies, under an agreement that its address stay secret – until TV Guide printed it anyway and fans began showing up at the gate. Lachlan Murdoch bought the estate in 2019 for a reported $150 million, a record at the time for a California home.

After World War Two, modernist architecture replaced the Spanish and Tudor styles that had dominated, taking advantage of a landscape Silverman says sits higher – and offers better views – than neighbouring Beverly Hills or Holmby Hills. The 1960s and 70s brought a different kind of celebrity culture: Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor, “like the Kardashians of their day,” according to Silverman, and musicians such as Sonny and Cher and John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, one of whom told Esquire in 1967, “I think I’ll buy some more land in Bel-Air. It’s going to be [a] very groovy scene.”

The Hotel Bel-Air, opened in 1944 on land Bell sold off, cemented the area’s reputation for discreet luxury – Silverman notes its secluded bungalows made it popular for private “assignations,” and that guests today pay to stay in what were once the estate’s stables. A century on from Bell’s first land sales, he says, the story has effectively come full circle.

Source: BBC News