The city was not incorporated until 20 years ago at about the end of 1984. Basically, Beverly Hills has been a city for a while, LA basically had surrounded the entire area known as West Hollywood. It was unincorporated meaning that the County of Los Angeles had control over the laws and over public utility. In 1984, an increasing wave of Russian speaking immigrants were coming out of the former Soviet Union and also an increasing number of gay and lesbian individuals started settling here in this area. Community activists and community leaders started seeing that the county could not provide necessary resources available to them in terms of things like senior citizen recreation, senior citizen health issues, and affordable housing issues. And so they charted the city in 1984 and established their own city of West Hollywood. Before then, in the 20s, West Hollywood was known as Sherman. Sherman was an individual who helped start the Red Car Line, the old train systems that ran through Santa Monica Boulevard. He was famous here in Los Angeles. Sherman (the town) wasn't as glamourous, because you had Sunset Boulevard. Since it was a strip, there were a lot of nightlife locations that were famous back in those days. So people started the Hollywood glamour, they started calling it West Hollywood. West of Hollywood, where the nightlife was prevalent, that name kind of stuck and became official name in 1984 as the City of West Hollywood.
