• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

Photo

  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.