Oh, for a time machine that would take me back to 1922 where I could snap up even just a few plots of all this open land we can see in this aerial view of Beverly Hills. The road cutting diagonally across the bottom of this photo is Wilshire Blvd. (Which means that line of trees at the very bottom would be Charleville Blvd.) Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but the three main streets we can see here, running straight between Wilshire Blvd and Santa Monica Blvd, then curving are Rodeo, Beverly, and Canon Drives. Back then, Beverly Hills must have had a country-town atmosphere, where people could escape from the constant hubbub of downtown Los Angeles.

Here’s an auto-colorized version that’s probably pretty close to how it actually looked the day this photo was taken in 1922.

Here’s a 2021 satellite photo of that same area. Just a tad more crowded, isn’t it?