Hollywood, Los Angeles

Hollywood, sometimes informally called Tinseltown, is a neighborhood and district in Central Los Angeles, California. Its name has become synonymous with the U.S. film industry and the people associated with it. Many notable film studios such as Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., Walt Disney Studios, and Sony Pictures are located in or near Hollywood.
Hollywood was incorporated as an independent municipality in 1903. The municipality of Hollywood was consolidated with the City of Los Angeles in 1910 following a referendum. Soon thereafter, the prominent film industry migrated to the area.

History

Initial development

, a real estate developer, arranged to buy the E.C. Hurd ranch. Whitley shared his plans for the new town with General Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and Ivar Weid, a prominent businessman in the area.
Daeida Wilcox, who donated land to help in the development of Hollywood, learned of the name Hollywood from an acquaintance who owned an estate by that name in Illinois.
Wilcox is quoted as saying, "I chose the name Hollywood simply because it sounds nice and because I'm superstitious and holly brings good luck." She recommended the same name to her husband, Harvey H. Wilcox, who had purchased 120 acres on February 1, 1887. It was not until August 1887 that Wilcox decided to use that name and filed with the Los Angeles County Recorder's office on a deed and parcel map of the property.
By 1900, the region had a post office, newspaper, hotel, and two markets. Los Angeles, with a population of 102,479, lay east through the vineyards, barley fields, and citrus groves. A single-track streetcar line ran down the middle of Prospect Avenue from it, but service was infrequent and the trip took two hours. The old citrus fruit-packing house was converted into a livery stable, improving transportation for the inhabitants of Hollywood.
The Hollywood Hotel was opened in 1902 by Whitley, president of the Los Pacific Boulevard and Development Company. Having finally acquired the Hurd ranch and subdivided it, Whitley built the hotel to attract land buyers. Flanking the west side of Highland Avenue, the structure fronted on Prospect Avenue. Although it was still a dusty, unpaved road, it was regularly graded and graveled. The hotel became internationally known and was the center of the civic and social life and home of movie stars for many years.
Whitley's company developed and sold one of the early residential areas, the Ocean View Tract. Whitley did much to promote the area. He paid thousands of dollars to install electricity and arrange for electric lighting, and he built both a bank and a road into the Cahuenga Pass. The lighting ran for several blocks down Prospect Avenue. Whitley's land was centered on Highland Avenue. His 1918 development, Whitley Heights, was named for him.

Incorporation and merger

Hollywood was incorporated as a municipality on November 14, 1903, by a vote of 88 for and 77 against. On January 30, 1904, the voters in Hollywood decided, 113 to 96, to banish the sale of liquor within the city, except for medicinal purposes. Neither hotels nor restaurants were allowed to serve wine or liquor before or after meals.
In 1910, the city voted for a merger with Los Angeles in order to secure an adequate water supply and to gain access to the L.A. sewer system.

With annexation, the name of Prospect Avenue was changed to Hollywood Boulevard and all the street numbers in the new district changed. For example, 100 Prospect Avenue, at Vermont Avenue, became 6400 Hollywood Boulevard; and 100 Cahuenga Boulevard, at Hollywood Boulevard, changed to 1700 Cahuenga Boulevard.

Motion picture industry

By 1912, major motion-picture companies had come West to set up production near or in Los Angeles.
In the early 1900s, most motion picture camera and equipment patents were held by Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company in New Jersey, which often sued filmmakers to stop their productions. To escape this, filmmakers began moving to Los Angeles, where attempts to enforce Edison's patents were easier to evade. Also, the weather was ideal for filmmaking and there was quick access to various settings. Los Angeles became the capital of the film industry in the United States. The mountains, plains and low land prices made Hollywood a good place to establish film studios.
Director D. W. Griffith was the first to make a motion picture in Hollywood. His 17-minute short film In Old California was filmed for the Biograph Company. Although Hollywood banned movie theaters—of which it had none—before annexation that year, Los Angeles had no such restriction.
The first studio in Hollywood opened in early 1913, on Formosa Avenue down the street from Helen Muir's home. Her father John Muir returned from his tour of Europe and East Africa a few months later and continued working on Yosemite and his book The Yosemite. The Nestor Film Company was the first studio, established in October 1911 by the New Jersey–based Centaur Film Company in a roadhouse at 6121 Sunset Boulevard. Four major film companies – Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO, and Columbia – had studios in Hollywood, as did several minor companies and rental studios. In the 1920s, Hollywood was the fifth-largest industry in the nation. By the 1930s, Hollywood studios became fully vertically integrated, as production, distribution and exhibition was controlled by these companies, enabling Hollywood to produce 600 films per year.
Hollywood became known as Tinseltown
and the "dream factory" because of the glittering image of the movie industry.

Further development

was erected in the Hollywood Hills in 1923 to advertise real estate developers Woodruff's and Shoults' housing development. In 1949, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce entered a contract with the City of Los Angeles to repair and rebuild the sign. The agreement stipulated that LAND be removed to spell HOLLYWOOD so the sign would now refer to the district, rather than the housing development.
During the early 1950s, the State of California constructed the Hollywood Freeway through the northeast corner of Hollywood.
The Capitol Records Building on Vine Street, just north of Hollywood Boulevard, was built in 1956. The Hollywood Walk of Fame was created in 1958 as a tribute to artists and other significant contributors to the entertainment industry. The official opening was on February 8, 1960.
In June 1999, the Hollywood extension of the Los Angeles Metro Rail Red Line subway opened from Downtown Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley, with stops along Hollywood Boulevard at Western Avenue, Vine Street, and Highland Avenue.
The Dolby Theatre, which opened in 2001 as the Kodak Theatre at the Hollywood & Highland Center mall, is the site of the annual Academy Awards programs. The mall is located where the Hollywood Hotel once stood.

Preservation and revitalization

The Hollywood Boulevard Commercial and Entertainment District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. In 1994, Hollywood, Alabama, and ten other towns named Hollywood successfully fought an attempt by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to trademark the name and force same-named communities to pay royalties to it.
After the neighborhood underwent years of serious decline in the 1980s, with crime, drugs and increasing poverty among some residents, many landmarks were threatened with demolition. Columbia Square, at the northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street, is part of the ongoing rebirth of Hollywood. The Art Deco-style studio complex, completed in 1938, was once the Hollywood headquarters for CBS. It became home to a new generation of broadcasters when cable television networks MTV, Comedy Central, BET and Spike TV consolidated their offices there in 2014 as part of a $420 million office, residential and retail complex. Paramount Skydance Corporation moved their corporate headquarters to Hollywood in August 2025 following the merger of Skydance Media and Paramount Global.
Since 2000, Hollywood has been increasingly gentrified due to revitalization by private enterprise and public planners. Over 1,200 hotel rooms have been added in the Hollywood area between 2001 and 2016. Four thousand new apartments and over thirty low to mid-rise development projects were approved in 2019.

Secession movement

In 2002, some Hollywood voters began a campaign for the area to secede from Los Angeles and become a separate municipality. In June of that year, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors placed secession referendums for both Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley on the ballot. To pass, they required the approval of a majority of voters in the proposed new municipality as well as a majority of voters in all of Los Angeles. In the November election, both measures failed by wide margins in the citywide vote.

Geography

According to the Mapping L.A. project of the Los Angeles Times, Hollywood is flanked by the Hollywood Hills to the north, Los Feliz to the northeast, East Hollywood or Virgil Village to the east, Larchmont and Hancock Park to the south, Fairfax to the southwest, West Hollywood to the west, and Hollywood Hills West to the northwest.
Street limits of the Hollywood neighborhood are: north, Hollywood Boulevard from La Brea Avenue to the east boundary of Wattles Garden Park and Franklin Avenue between Bonita and Western avenues; east, Western Avenue; south, Melrose Avenue, and west, La Brea Avenue or the West Hollywood city line.
In 1918, H. J. Whitley commissioned architect A. S. Barnes to design Whitley Heights as a Mediterranean-style village on the hills above Hollywood Boulevard. It became the first celebrity community.
Other areas within Hollywood are Franklin Village, Little Armenia, Spaulding Square, Thai Town, and Yucca Corridor.