If you stood at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1915 and looked east, this would have been your view. I was recently reading about the Beverly Hills development and how it was a while before it took off. It wasn’t until Douglas Fairbanks & Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, and Will Rogers build homes there in the 1920s that people took notice. But until then, there was a whole lot of wide-open spaces of empty land.