The Hollywood Sign Used to Sell Houses

In 1923, Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler and real estate developer Sidney Woodruff put up a temporary billboard above their new hillside housing tract. It was meant to last about 18 months. It read HOLLYWOODLAND, in 50-foot-tall sheet-metal letters, framed in wood and lit at night by roughly 4,000 incandescent bulbs that flashed the syllables in sequence: HOLLY, WOOD, LAND.

The development sat below Mount Lee, in the Beachwood Canyon section of the Santa Monica Mountains. Lots sold from $4,500. The sign cost about $21,000. The plan was that buyers would see the lights from downtown and drive up.

The billboard outlasted the marketing campaign. By the 1930s, the lights were no longer maintained, and the structure deteriorated. In 1932, an aspiring actress named Peg Entwistle climbed a workman's ladder to the top of the H and jumped — the only documented suicide from the sign. In 1944 the developer ceded ownership to the City of Los Angeles, which agreed to maintain the first nine letters and dismantle the rest. LAND was removed in 1949.

By 1978, the sign was again in disrepair. Hugh Hefner hosted a fundraising party at the Playboy Mansion that pulled in nine donors — including Hefner, Alice Cooper, and Gene Autry — at $27,777.77 each, one for each letter, to fund a steel replacement. The current sign is the 1978 reconstruction, with letters about 45 feet tall, declared a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 1973 and now patrolled and floodlit, no longer flashing.