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If you've been following the Ed McMahon foreclosure story (the latest is that Donald Trump is helping out), the mainstream media has been saying that his now $4.6 million home is located in Beverly Hills. Even our our local paper, the LA Times continues to say Beverly Hills when talking up the TV icon's home.
But where does McMahon live within Beverly Hills? He lives on Crest Court in a gated community called The Summit, which is north of Mulholland Drive, east of Coldwater Canyon Blvd. But wait, isn't that Studio City? Isn't that represented by Councilwoman Wendy Greuel?
Yes, yes it is. To get to Beverly Hills from McMahon's home it's over two and half miles by car, or a few hundred feet short of a mile if you were a bird. What's happening is that media, and most unfortunately our local media, is being duped by ZIP codes and Realtor spin. The Summit does carry the famous 90210 ZIP code, but that really means nothing. The Zoning Improvement Plan (ZIP) is merely to help the post office have more efficient delivery and not to identify government or neighborhood borders.
This scenario is no stranger to the LA Times. They've recently claimed parts of Los Angeles as Burbank and West Hollywood. But to be fair, most of the city and its elected officials don't even know their own neighborhoods.
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Britney Spears lives in the same community and the media would constantly refer to her neighborhood as Beverly Hills.
Yup, it's really annoying.
Well, the mailing addresses in The Summit all end in "Beverly Hills, 90210." If it's good enough for the USPS, it's good enough for network anchors and newspaper gossip columns.
The Summit is also where the "center of the City of Los Angeles" (the geophysical centroid), as memorialized by the plaque in nearby Franklin Canyon Park, is actually located.
That's right, the center of LA is north of Mulholland, in Studio City; but it gets its mail as "Beverly Hills, 90210."
No wonder Britney lived there, eh? :-)
The amusing thing about the BHPO ("Beverly Hills Post Office") area is that it's where many of the biggest, gaudiest, glitziest mansions in LA are located. Much larger than anything in Beverly Hills itself. (Not The Summit, so much, but the Beverly Park and North Beverly Park developments.)
So for people in the know, "BHPO" isn't trying to pretend it's Beverly Hills; it's the richer, more upscale, more desirable section of LA above Beverly Hills.