There is an old complaint about Los Angeles. The Weimar intellectuals who fled here in the 1930s loved the sunshine but decried the city’s lack of civic culture. Los Angeles did not have the cafe society of Paris or Berlin; instead it had consumers in their automobiles navigating through an endless sprawl of single-family homes.
Nearly a hundred years later, the Weimar critics would hardly be surprised that a giant advertisement on a hill, monitored 24/7 by surveillance cameras, may still be the closest thing Los Angeles has to a town square.
The Hollywood sign, originally constructed as an advertisement for a local real estate development, turns 100 this year, and like any star, it’s been primping and preening in advance of its big day. It’s received multiple highly publicized makeovers, and its PR team (yes, it has a PR team) has been readying for major coverage, with centennial events planned and a fundraiser launched to build more amenities for tourists.
On a sunny morning in January, the trails beneath the sign are crowded with shapely visitors in athleisure doing a kind of Hollywood calisthenics, lifting hands and contorting bodies so that they can appear, in their tiny camera phone pics, to be tapping or lifting the letters.
The Hollywood sign may be one the most recognizable places on Earth, but the process of getting close can be absurd and torturous. The letters are near the top of a steep, barren hill, guarded by wild coyotes and the occasional rattlesnake. You can’t drive there. Your phone may not even give you the correct walking directions.
Some choose to hike to the sign via one of several miles-long trails that wind through Griffith Park, a 4,000-acre wilderness that the sign sits within. Others opt for a semi-illicit shortcut through Beachwood Canyon, a wealthy neighborhood in the hills beneath the sign, where there are no sidewalks and street parking is forbidden.
If you ask Google Maps how to drive to the sign, it will send you to a completely different landmark, the Griffith Observatory, approximately three miles away. From the Observatory, where parking costs $10 an hour, you can hike across the hot and dusty hills until you reach the vicinity of the sign itself. Even then, you will be peering down at the letters through a giant wire fence, surveilled by the LAPD.
The public aren’t allowed past the security fence, but if you have the opportunity to get through, as I did during a centennial press tour, the view is magical.
People who meet movie stars often say they’re genuinely beautiful up close, although much shorter than they look on screen. The Hollywood sign is like that, but the opposite: it is genuinely gorgeous and shockingly huge. Behind the giant backwards letters, Los Angeles shimmers in the distance. Cars move along the freeways in rivulets of glitter, like blood cells rushing through the city’s exposed veins.
It’s easy to understand why, despite all the barriers, tourists from around the world continue to flock as close to the letters as possible.
“In a city that doesn’t have a center, it feels like a real place to go,” Jesse Holcomb, one of the sign’s PR reps, said.
Hollywood facelifts
Like the Eiffel Tower, the Hollywood sign was originally supposed to be temporary, built to last 18 months as a flashy advertisement for the “Hollywoodland” real estate development. But the sign stayed on, successfully navigating the transition from saucy newcomer to icon, and it now presides over the dreamy city with the dignity of Meryl Streep or Judi Dench.
The path from gaudy advertisement to grand dame wasn’t easy. Over the decades, the Hollywood sign had to survive tragedy, abandonment, bad press, and outright calls for destruction. As with many of its industry colleagues, the process of becoming a star required a partial name change, and, in its later years, regular facelifts in the form of coats of “extra white” paint – plus experts monitoring it for the effects of erosion.
There’s no precise record of when developers first put the letters, which originally read HOLLYWOODLAND, on the hill; housing ads rarely make the news, even though one of the developers, Harry Chandler, was also the publisher of the Los Angeles Times. The first passing newspaper references to the “electric” sign, which was originally covered in lights that blinked at night, came in December 1923; the development that it advertised broke ground earlier that year.
The letters become infamous in 1932, when Peg Entwistle, a 24-year-old British actor and aspiring movie star, died by suicide at the sign, which came to symbolize both the lure and the danger of film industry success. During the Great Depression, the development the sign advertised struggled economically, and it eventually became defunct.
“It is silly to say that Hollywood, or any other city, is ‘unreal’,” the British writer Christopher Isherwood wrote upon his arrival in 1939, as he searched for an apartment in the lush neighborhoods beneath the “Hollywoodland” sign. “But what the arriving traveler first sees are merely advertisements for a city which doesn’t exist.”
By the 1940s, the letters were crumbling and dilapidated, and officially given to the city to manage. “A recent windstorm made a cockney out of Hollywoodland,” the Los Angeles Times observed in 1944, with the sign now reading “OLLYWOODLAND”. In 1949, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce finally made a deal to restore the sign while removing the “LAND”.
By the late 1970s, with the sign again in disrepair, the original letters were finally replaced after Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine, led a campaign to save them. The length and girth of the new sign became a matter of pride: 450ft long, with 45ft-high letters, and a total weight, in steel and concrete, of 480,000lb.
In more recent years, the sign has become the scene of repeated pranks, which have changed the letters to read “Hollyweed” and “Hollyboob”. It’s become a favorite setting for disaster films, getting destroyed on screen at least eight times.
There have been news reports about pieces of the original Hollywood sign being auctioned online and sold off in fragments, like some kind of film industry equivalent of the true cross, though it’s not clear if those mementos are legitimate. Parts of the original tin sign were said to have been sold for scrap.
Look but don’t touch
Today, the sign remains both omnipresent and oddly remote. Angelenos can spot the letters in their rearview mirrors or from rooftop bars, but many have lived here for years without ever visiting.
Tourist access to the sign has sparked years of fierce battles, which have played out through pressure on tech companies to change their GPS directions to the sign, as well as in lawsuits, including one that resulted in the city locking a popular access point. The neighborhoods beneath the letters are full of stern warnings: “NO ACCESS to the Hollywood Sign”, and some of the wealthy residents argue that the star-struck visitors clogging their steep, winding streets represent a health hazard.
“If Disneyland had this sort of operation, they would close it in 10 seconds,” one resident told the Guardian in 2015 of the chaos that tourism brought to the neighborhood.
Given the controversy, I decided to try to hike some of the available routes myself. Starting at Griffith Observatory, known for its appearances in Rebel without a Cause and La La Land, I walked for miles along a battered asphalt road, with only the distant grumble of an LAPD helicopter for company. Wild coyotes trotted alongside me, eyeing me with resentment for being not quite small enough to eat.
Following my Google Maps directions, rather than the posted signs, I found myself on a narrow dirt trail that took me along a precipitous drop. I thought I must have taken a wrong turn, but some other hikers told me that I had not. “This is the easiest way,” a man in a Dodgers cap reassured me, as I shimmied down some rocks.
An Irish tourist I met near the sign’s summit told me she and her friends had started their journey to the sign by hiking through a field, then gotten yelled at, before eventually finding a path to the top.
There’s a shorter route to the sign, if you don’t mind risking the wrath of wealthy homeowners. Up the twists and turns of Deronda Drive in Beachwood Canyon, a pedestrian gate into the park is typically surrounded by a scrum of double-parked cars and drivers reaching a dead end and desperately trying to turn around.
I walked down that way, dodging Teslas through the verdant, sidewalk-free streets of Beachwood Canyon, and thinking of Bertolt Brecht’s journal entry from 1941, in which he compared Los Angeles to “Tahiti in the form of a big city” and complained that “an incessant, brilliantly illuminated stream of cars thunders through nature”. (Los Angeles’s lush nature was itself an illusion, he added: “Stop paying the water bills and everything stops blooming.”)
Recognizing the continuing travails of sign tourism, the Hollywood Sign Trust, which manages the monument, announced that it would use the sign’s centenary to raise funds for an official visitors’ center, complete with lecture halls, a movie theater, museum, gift shop, and, presumably, bathrooms, something sign visitors have lacked for years.
“The people have asked for it, tourists have asked for it, the community at large has asked for it, so we’re doing it,” Jeff Zarrinnam, the chairman of the trust, announced in January as he stood below the letters, wearing a miniature version of the sign on his lapel.
This sounds like a great solution, until you learn that the current location options for the visitors’ center may not get tourists much closer. Proposed sites include the old pony stables in Griffith Park, about five miles away, “down on Hollywood Boulevard”, about two miles away, or even “behind the Hollywood sign, on the other side of the mountain”.
The current inaccessibility of the sign does have an upside. The area around the giant letters has remained a little patch of wild earth, a sanctuary for deer, foxes, coyotes, even the city’s celebrity mountain lions. On the steep dirt slope around the sign, it’s so quiet that it’s almost possible to hear the sun beating, or the flick of shadows from birds overhead.
“For some reason, the crows and hawks are always circling by the letters,” Holcomb, the PR rep, told me. “The gusts of wind must be fun to ride.”
Holcomb let me walk a few feet inside the giant fence around the sign, but said we had not been cleared by security to get any closer. Crouching on the dirt, between clumps of wildflowers, was as close to the sign as I was going to get.
And yes, I asked: they wouldn’t let me touch it.
