For a place born of fantasy and nourished on the magic of the silver screen, Hollywood fittingly bears a name based on make-believe. Holly, as shrub-savvy citizens and vegetation-virtuoso visitors will attest, does not grow in Hollywood, despite its appellation. Citrus fruits, avocados and figs bask gloriously in the famous Southern California sunshine, but as for nature's favorite Christmas ornament, the plant just doesn't take root here.
So who put the holly in Hollywood? The answer lies with the wife of Kansas-born Horace H. Wilcox, who built a country house in the middle of a fig orchard in 1886. While on a train to the East, Mrs. Wilcox met a woman who described her summer home near Chicago which she called Hollywood. The name so pleased Mrs. Wilcox that on her return she christened the family's Cahuenga valley ranch 'Hollywood.'
Eventually, the fig orchard became a subdivision which in turn became a city in 1903. Only seven years later, the people of Hollywood decided to merge with its expanding neighbor to the southeast, Los Angeles.
It was during this period when a Chicago filmmaker named Cot. William Selig was growing more and more frustrated over the lack of perpetual sunshine in the Windy City, thus limiting the number of days he could produce motion pictures. Recalling literature he received from the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, which mentioned that the area was bathed in sunshine some 350 days a year, an impressed yet skeptical Selig sent two men out West 'to see if rumor spoke the truth.' Seeing was believing, and on the recommendation of his scouts, Selig in 1908 went onto shoot the first full-length movie in California, 'The Count of Monte Cristo.' Suddenly, the entire film industry began making the western migration, and in 1911 Hollywood's first full-fledged motion picture studio and movie were created: the Nestor Film Company's 'Her Indian Hero?'
Thanks to the likes of such pioneer filmmakers as D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMilie, the creation of motion pictures had become the country's fifth largest industry by 1917, the year the United States entered World War I. Hollywood was not only growing, it was bustling with some 52 studios operating by 1922.
As the movie industry grew and prospered, so did the entire community. Major commercial and residential developments sprang up, including a tony housing tract named Hollywoodland. Although contemporary maps of Los Angeles no longer recognize this once-fledgling subdivision, a legacy remains in a mammoth sign atop adjacent Mount
Lee. What was originally erected in 1923 to attract prospective residents to Hollywoodland is now the world-famous Hollywood Sign, minus four letters. (The 'LAND' portion slid down the hillside in 1949, never to be replaced.)
As Hollywoodland and neighboring communities were being built to accommodate the explosive population rise of the Los Angeles area, an 18,000-seat amphitheater called the Hollywood Bowl opened in 1922 to tremendous fanfare. Its grand outdoor concerts are as popular with residents and visitors today as they were more than 70 years ago.
By the late 1920s, more studios were being built around Hollywood than in it. But when a movie had a star-studded world premiere, the only place to be was on bustling Hollywood Boulevard. In 1927, the most glamorous of all movie palaces in town was built by Sid Grauman, whose Chinese Theatre still draws visitors by the thousands daily.
Now named Mann's Chinese Theatre, the landmark is adorned with footprints and handprints of Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplan and dozens of other movie legends.
During Hollywood's heyday, wishful men and women by the busloads flooded into the area in hopes of being discovered by such major film factories as Paramount, Columbia, Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Universal. A few aspiring actors and actresses succeeded, while others became waiters and waitresses in area restaurants ... not unlike the way thi
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