Romanoff’s, the Brown Derby and The Luau were some of the most famous restaurants on the West Coast and the chic celebrity hangouts of 1940s and ’50s Beverly Hills. All were on the three blocks of Rodeo Drive between Santa Monica and Wilshire Boulevards, forming the heart of what’s been dubbed the Golden Triangle.
There was a time when locals could wave to neighbors like Gregory Peck and Jimmy Stewart as they went to buy shirts at Carroll & Company or fill up at the Standard Station. The Anderton Court Shops building that housed the Rodeo Coiffures beauty parlor was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
“It reminded me of Palm Springs,” says Marc Wanamaker, author of Early Beverly Hills. “It was like an oasis of beautifully designed stores down to the smells and look of everything. In the ’50s, Uncle Bernie’s Toy Shop had trains on the ceiling and a giant fantasy tree where you could push a button and lemonade came out. The London Shop was like stepping into England and just walking around felt like entertainment.”
All that changed, seemingly overnight, around 1968. “The whole street became a disaster zone,” Wanamaker says. “It was a strange time with the rejection of capitalism, Vietnam War marches and all the hippie stuff . With the whole climate of protest, not enough people supported those stores.” In the 1970s, we reported the Carroll & Company men’s shop enticed bargain hunters with free coffee and sweet rolls and discounts of up to 50% off .
Giorgio founder Fred Hayman launched the Rodeo Drive Committee in 1977 to reinvent and upscale the street, and Los Angeles has documented the evolution ever since. By 1979, we’d dubbed it the “Fifth Avenue of Los Angeles.”
Wanamaker cites the Iranian revolution as the spark that reinvented Rodeo Drive. Wealthy refugees from Iran poured into Beverly Hills, changing its economics. “There were empty stores everywhere until Bijan showed up,” the longtime Beverly Hills resident says of the iconic retailer. “Bijan and the Iranians changed the whole area. It was transformed into something international.”
The first Prada, Versace and Fendi stores were franchises run by “mom- and-pop people,” realtor Gilbert Dembo told Los Angeles in 2021. These global companies gradually displaced local shops through the ’80s, and today, rents have soared to $70 per square foot, making the street one of the most expensive in America.
Rodeo Drive of the 1990s is immortalized in the film Pretty Woman when Julia Roberts goes on a shopping spree there, and by the end of that decade, European apparel powerhouses lined the street: Hermès, Gucci, Armani, Louis Vuitton and Yves Saint Laurent. In 2004, boutique owner Herbie Fink pointed to Cartier and told our reporter he remembered when it was a gas station.
“I really don’t regret any changes,” Hayman told Los Angeles in 1991. “The past was charming, but if I want charming, I go to Larchmont Village.”
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