A Hundred Years of the Hollywood Sign

Thanks to the excellent detective work of the LA Daily Mirror for providing a definitive (or accurate, at any rate) answer to when L.A.’s iconic Hollywood sign was erected: late November/ early December 1923. Many, many outlets jumped the gun earlier this year and announced the centennial around July. It turns out that maybe some paperwork was filed around that time but the actual sign went up towards the end of the year. The sign’s original intention was to sell parcels of real estate. Later the “Land” part came down and it became the city’s most famous landmark, the equivalent of its Statue of Liberty or Eiffel Tower. You wouldn’t know it from down below, but the letters are 50 feet tall!

Some notable moments in its history:

Actress Peg Entwistle (13 Women) leapt to her death from the sign in 1932.

It was unthinkably shown to topple in the 1974 disaster movie Earthquake.

In 1978, a diverse committee of celebrities collaborated to restore the sign. The moneybags included Hugh Hefner, Gene Autry, Andy Williams, and Alice Cooper, who donated in honor of his pal Groucho Marx, who’d passed away a few months earlier. (True story, they actually were friends! Socially, anyway)

It would be nigh near impossible to list every movie that depicts the sign.

If you’d like to contribute towards it upkeep, the official Hollywood Sign website is here.