13 July: The Hollywood Sign

On this date in 1923 the Hollywood Sign: The famous Los Angeles landmark, was officially dedicated.

1. When the sign was first built, it had nothing to do with the film industry. Its original purpose was to advertise a real estate development by developers S. H. Woodruff and Tracy E. Shoults. It was, essentially, a giant advertising billboard. It cost $21,000 to build, the equivalent of $320,000 in 2019, and was meant to last just 18 months.
2. It was designed by Thomas Fisk Goff, who was originally from London, England, but had moved to America and started a sign company.
3. The sign is made from wood and sheet metal and is 45 ft (13.7 m) tall and 350 ft (106.7 m) long. However, the sign that was erected in 1923 looked somewhat different. It was bigger – some of the letters were 50ft tall, and it was longer, because the real estate development it advertised was called “Hollywoodland”. It was lit up with 4,000 8 watt light bulbs timed to blink so that the words “HOLLY,” “WOOD,” and “LAND” lit up consecutively, followed by the entire word.
4. The hill it stands on is called Mount Lee. It’s part of the Santa Monica mountain range, and didn’t have a name when the original Hollywood sign went up. It was named after Don Lee, a Los Angeles car dealer and Radio station owner whose son built a studio there that included the highest television tower in the world. However, in the 1940s the company decided that nearby Mount Wilson was a better location, and moved it.
5. In 1932, a struggling actress from New York, named Peg Entwistle, threw herself off the letter H to her death after failing to get the big part she’d hoped for. Her body was found next day with a note which read: “I am afraid, I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain. P.E.” Ironically, there was a letter on its way to her offering her the lead role in a play about a young woman who commits suicide. Her ghost is said to haunt the area around the sign.
6. The sign had a caretaker, named Albert Kothe, whose job it was to maintain the sign and change the light bulbs when they burned out. In the end, when the great depression hit and illuminating the sign was no longer a priority, he was the one who took down the wiring and sold it for scrap. He was also the only person ever to crash a car into the sign, after having a tad too much to drink. He survived but his car and the letter H weren’t so lucky.
7. By the time the City of Los Angeles bought the land where the housing development was to be, in 1944, the locals had grown rather fond of the sign and protested against it being torn down. In the end, they only took down the “LAND” and renovated the rest to represent the whole community. As you can imagine, renovations are needed quite often and it was sometimes a struggle to raise the necessary funds. In 1978 Hugh Hefner held a fundraiser at his Playboy Mansion. Each of the nine letters was auctioned for $28,000 to raise the money for renovation. He himself sponsored the letter Y. Singer Andy Williams paid for the W and rock star Alice Cooper coughed up for the first O. Today the maintenance of the sign is taken care of by The Hollywood Sign Trust, created in 1992.
8. There have been occasional alterations to the sign. Some were official, including lighting it up during the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games and a light show for the turn of the millennium. Others were unofficial such as hanging banners over some of the letters to make the sign say something else. It was altered to read “Hollyweed” when California legalised cannabis, “Holywood” to celebrate a visit from the Pope and “Oil War” during the 1991 Gulf War. On a lighter note, and unknown prankster in 1993 changed to sign to read “Jollygood”.
9. Thanks to the pranksters, tourists, local residents and America’s litigation culture, it is illegal to get up close and personal with the Hollywood sign. They were so serious about keeping people out that they got Homeland Security to help design the security system, which has been compared to that of Fort Knox. Local residents put up their own unwelcoming signs saying “Tourists Go Away” and even hacked into Google Earth so people couldn’t even visit it virtually. However, there have been proposals to build a cable car or tram way to it and a visitor’s centre so people can visit in a controlled way.
10. The Hollywood sign has been destroyed by Fire, Earthquakes and Tornadoes, shot down by fighter pilots, crashed into by a stray rocket, wrecked by a giant gorilla and has even been torn down by zombies. We’re talking about in the movies, here, of course.

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