Bel-Air at 100: The Gated Neighborhood as American Antique

Bel-Air turned 100 in 2023, and the Bel-Air Association marked the anniversary by commissioning a book that makes a provocative claim: this Los Angeles neighborhood is itself an American antique.

Bel-Air: The Centennial, by David Silverman and published by Rizzoli, is a voluminous compendium of vintage maps, site plans, aerial photographs, developer brochures and images of Hollywood stars at their homes. It documents a place most people can never see. Many of Bel-Air's grandest houses, estates and gardens stay hidden behind walls and hedges. The neighborhood has no sidewalks. Beyond a couple of gas stations and a modest cluster of offices and stores on Moraga Drive, it has no real town center — though writer David Masello, reviewing the book for Art & Antiques Magazine, suggests the Hotel Bel-Air functions as a kind of social town hall. Its only notable sculptural elements are the East and West Gates that mark its entrances.

What does 'antique status' actually mean here?

Silverman, who spoke to Art & Antiques from his Brentwood home, accepts the premise — with the caveat that the place is not locked in the past.

"I agree with that idea that Bel-Air could be considered having attained antique status," Silverman said. "Bel-Air remains a classic historical location that maintains a lot of its original historic character, with many of its original homes from the 1920s still in place."

The book's secondary argument rests on who lived there, not just what was built. Past residents include Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Frank Capra, Sonny & Cher, Henry Fonda, Kim Novak, Nancy and Ronald Reagan, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jack Ryan, the designer who helped develop Barbie and Hot Wheels. Zsa Zsa Gabor lived at 1001 Bel-Air Road from 1973 until her death in 2016 at age 99, after her first Bel-Air home burned in the 1961 fire.

The founder who banned Hollywood

Silverman's history carries an irony worth noting. Developer Alphonzo Bell bought the 1,800 acres that became Bel-Air in 1922 for $2.5 million and began selling lots. He then barred the very population that made the neighborhood famous.

"He restricted the town to having no movie people," Silverman said, "because he found them morally suspect. He enforced that for six years, but as the Depression hit and buyers became scarce, he changed the rules to attract anyone who could afford to be there."

Silverman runs LA House Histories, a one-man enterprise producing commissioned books on Los Angeles's historic houses. The Bel-Air Association invited him in 2022 to write the centennial volume; roughly 100 association members funded it before Rizzoli republished it as an oversized deluxe edition. Silverman counts it as his first book from a mainstream publisher and his first about a neighborhood rather than a single residence.

Whether a century-old subdivision built by a developer who banned film stars qualifies as an antique is a matter of definition. What the book establishes is narrower and more concrete: many homes from the 1920s and '30s still stand, largely unseen, and the neighborhood's roster of famous residents keeps acquiring, as Masello writes, a new luster.