Jaguars and Mercedeses crawl down the steep incline of Bel-Air Road this winter morning, giving way to the ascending cement trucks and tractor-trailers. At 9 sharp, the laborers on the Perenchio mansion drop what they are doing to crowd around a catering truck. As the men queue up for coffee and burritos, they ignore the lengthening stream of luxury cars. The drivers, on the other hand, are scarcely indifferent: each must wait his or her turn to file past the pickups bunched near the snack wagon. Finally clear, they step on the gas and hurry toward the city below.
Poor Bel-Air. Exclusive, desirable–and out of sorts. Unlike in much of the country, real estate in Los Angeles’s vest-pocket version of Monaco is still selling smartly, and at stratospheric prices. But that’s the problem: the buying and building boom has stirred up a lot of dust–and a lot of debate over what Bel-Air is becoming. Louis B. Mayer and Jeanette MacDonald once could live quiet lives here. Now longtime residents say Bel-Air is so popular it’s painful. Tour buses–and the customized hearse of Grave Line Tours–parade through daily, peeking at the homes of living and dead stars. Helicopters buzz overhead, giving tourists and paparazzi a vulture’s view of life, behind the locked gates. And two years ago Ronald and Nancy Reagan moved to 668 St. Cloud Road; overnight, Bel-Air became a scenic rival to the La Brea tar pits. “The disturbance is terrible,” says Arthur Marx, son of Groucho, who moved to Bel-Air Road in 1969. “It’s not like being in Watts, or Vietnam, but it’s definitely no fun.”
Marx’s biggest gripe is the construction. In the 1920s, when Bel-Air was first developed by oilman Alphonzo Bell, most of the mansions were built on the relatively flat ground near Sunset Boulevard, and hidden behind hedges. After World War II, smaller, two- and three-bedroom bungalows crept up the ridges. But as land became more scarce and Bel-Air became more chic, bigger houses began to squeeze onto smaller lots. Today you can’t buy anything in “old” Bel-Air for less than $1 million, most real-estate agents say. But if you want a $10 million fixer-upper–no problem. “People just seem to want bigger and bigger houses,” says Cecelia Waeshcle of Prudential Rodeo Realty. “Oh, sure, their dream is the same old Ozzie-and-Harriet, but with 10,000 square feet, "
The most astounding project in Bel-Air is the Perenchio mansion. In 1986, Hollywood dealmaker A. Jerrold Perenchio (former agent to Liz Taylor and Marlon Brando, former partner of Norman Lear and former owner of Loews theaters) bought the 15,000- square-foot Kirkeby chateau for $13.6 million. He quickly scooped up three neighboring properties for an additional $9 million. With a total parcel of 11.5 acres, Perenchio now owns the largest estate in Bel-Air. In the course of spending another $9 million on a tennis court, pool, pool house, guardhouse, underground garage and wine cellar, he has stripped his once lush hilltop of most of its foliage–and alienated many of his neighbors. They hate the noise, the dirt and the army of workers. Residents just above him on the hill–people like Art Linkletter and Zsa Zsa Gabor–don’t appreciate the half-hour wait when heavy equipment blocks the road.
Bel-Air’s boom is not likely to bust any time soon. “Marx wants to bring back the bungalow era, and it’s just not going to happen,” says one of his neighbors. At least not as long as Bel-Air remains the ZIP Code in Los Angeles, and wealthy foreigners and entertainment moguls are willing to buy cute old houses, tear them down and erect new monuments. (Most, in fact, pay cash–even as much as $20 million.) “As long as you believe the rich will get richer and the poor will have babies, then we will continue to see prices go up in the high end of the market,” says Jeff Hyland, president of the Alvarez, Hyland and Young real-estate firm.
Meanwhile, back on Bel-Air Road, the commotion continues. At 9:30, a truck rumbles past the Perenchio entrance, four portable toilets perched on its bed. Just as it passes St. Cloud Road, a black sedan whisks out of the drive at 668 and falls in behind. In the front seat are two men–presumably Secret Service, judging by the wires coming from their ears. Another man rides in the back seat, his profile vague behind the tinted glass. Mr. Reagan? The truck lumbers toward the east gate, with the former president’s car stuck behind a bunch of slow-moving potties. In Bel-Air? There goes the neighborhood.
title: “There Goes The Neighborhood” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-07” author: “Edward Morris”
For the past two decades, a trek through SoHo could put you inside perhaps 50 of the best contemporary galleries in the world and give you first looks at breakthroughs in everything from photorealism to performance art. Oh, there are still scores of galleries, but a number of important ones have left, driven out by upscale shops selling Italian shoes and expensive cosmetics – and by the suspicion that the place has become about as cutting-edge as Rodeo Drive.
Thirty years ago artists started renting studio space in SoHo’s derelict factory buildings and living in them illegally. Eventually, they got the city to regulate rent increases and legalize their residences. Then came the ’80s art-market boom. Newly arrived artists could no longer afford the rents.Rents kept soaring even when the market bottomed out around 1990. Some galleries went out of business; others simply felt the pinch. Last fall, after 15 years in SoHo, big-time dealer Mary Boone (who promoted Julian Schnabel and now shows Barbara Kruger and Sean Scully) decamped to 57th Street – where the rents once drove dealers downtown.
The same sort of real-estate ““Hokey Pokey’’ (let the artists in/ price the artists out/ that’s what it’s all about) afflicts cultural districts in other major cities, too. Venice and Ocean Park, Calif., where artists rent industrial spaces a paintbrush throw from the beach, have been up, down and back up again. Now maybe they’re a little too far up. Arnold Schwarzenegger has opened a restaurant on Main Street in Ocean Park. The area still has upstart galleries, but its flagship is the elegant, three-story premises of L.A. Louver, which shows such blue-chip artists as Mark di Suvero and David Hockney. Yet it’s not quite the end of an era here. Sheila Goldberg, chair of the Venice Art Walk (a tour of artists’ studios, for charity), says, ““We’ve had this fear that we’re going to run out of artists because they can’t afford the area. But we’ve added between six and 12 new artists every year. They find a way.''
San Francisco’s SoMA (south of Market Street), once the city’s grittiest skid row, saw an influx of artists in the 1980s. There, painters and sculptors are competing for space not with Urban Outfitters and Starbucks but with multimedia artists. ““SoMA is not a SoHo story,’’ says David Weir, an executive with the online Hot Wired network, ““because a lot of young people are still streaming in.’’ But some real estate is definitely beyond the struggling artist: condos in a former Hills Bros. coffee plant run as high as $400,000. Galleries invaded Chicago’s River North area about 20 years ago.It, too, is now filling up with high-end furniture stores and restaurants. According to Jennifer Footlik, who opened Lineage Gallery in River North a year ago, ““People come here not just to shop but to get culture. That can work very well with the restaurants, or it can get pushed out. The next couple of years will tell.''
What’s the solution to the gentrification crunch? In Chicago, pioneers have set up shop in what they call Uncomfortable Spaces – three small, less polished venues in outlying districts like Wicker Park. Beer for one art opening was stored in the refrigerator – to keep it from freezing in the unheated gallery. In New York, some veteran dealers are trying out a new part of town. SoHo pioneer Paula Cooper, along with Barbara Gladstone Gallery and Metro Pictures, will reopen two miles away among the former garages in west Chelsea. The neighborhood is on its way to becoming the latest chic art stop – and it may be too out of the way for the trendy boutiques to follow. Tom Healy, a partner in the new Morris Healy gallery there, says, ““People have to make an effort to get here [subways are far away], so they’re serious.’’ Other young New York entrepreneurs show art in their apartments, in vacated galleries and in co-op spaces in hardscrabble Brooklyn neighborhoods – a movable scene for the newest generation of artists and their fans.
There’s even an alternative to SoHo springing up in SoHo itself. Dealers Friedrich Petzel and Paul Kasmin are happy in newish galleries on the neighborhood’s southern edge. (Did somebody say So-soHo?) ““SoHo cannot preserve the late ’70s and early ’80s,’’ Petzel says in defense of the area’s changes. ““We needed a hotel. And I need a restaurant where I can have lunch with a client.''
Whitney Museum curator Lisa Phillips moved to SoHo in 1978, saw the place as ““over’’ in ‘79 and left in 1980. But, she admits, ““it was far from over. It keeps recharging itself, shifting form.’’ Phillips is co-curator of the Whitney’s 1997 Biennial exhibition. Is she scouting current art in SoHo? ““Absolutely.’’ But if SoHo continues to go for the glitz, she may soon put it lower on her list.
