A Dilapidated Suburb

A book about the sign is reviewed.

Braudy explores a time before the sign, and he knows that Hollywood was once a country road trip from downtown Los Angeles. Anita Loos, in 1914, called it “a dilapidated suburb.” She visited the Hollywood Hotel and observed “a veranda where elderly seekers after sunshine … sat in big red chairs and rocked their uneventful lives away.” One of its chief attractions was the peace and quiet, and so we should not forget that Hollywood’s first charm was as a rural retreat, not an urban factory.

That, more or less, was the aim behind the HOLLYWOODLAND development, led by Harry Chandler and others in 1923: well-to-do residences away from the smoke, the noise, the autos (and non-white neighbors), where you could “protect your family and insure their happiness.” So what happened? As Loos said, “Nobody dreamed a day was close at hand when that one word, Hollywood, would express the epitome of glamour, sex, and sin in their most delectable forms.”

If he had any idea what H'wood's like today, sad fuck Chandler would no doubt be spinning in his mausoleum.