Rodeo Drive derives its name from an old Spanish-Mexican land grant: Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas (“roundup of the waters”, for the confluence of two canyon streams). The 4,539 acre rancho was deeded c. 1838 to María Rita Valdez de Villa (c. 1791-1854), whose father was reportedly gifted the land in the late 1700s by the King of Spain. (Her mother was the mixed-race daughter of one of the 44 pobladores who founded Los Angeles in 1781.) Doña Rita raised livestock and built two adobes near present-day Sunset Boulevard and Alpine Drive, but the hardships of managing this vast property were too great and so in 1854 she sold the struggling rancho to Benjamin Davis Wilson and Henry Hancock. Then she died. The land went through several more owners (their names survive in Hamel Drive, Preuss Road, and Whitworth Drive) before finally becoming Beverly Hills in 1906, courtesy of Burton Green’s Rodeo Land & Water Co., which took the rancho’s name and gave it to this street. Note the median on Rodeo north of Santa Monica Boulevard: in 1907, trolley tracks were laid out here. The so-called “Coldwater Canyon Line” ran streetcars up to Sunset until 1923, when the Pacific Electric Railway got tired of losing money on it and shut it down. The median then served as a bridle path for residents and their horses until around 1954. Now it’s a bunch of bushes.
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