Present-day Hollywood is home to more than 300,000 residents. This city has long been a mecca for artistic types and keeps attracting young, eclectic crowds from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. If you enjoy cultural diversity and don’t mind the constant hubbub of the streets, this is definitely the place to be. The overall cost of living is 8% higher than in Los Angeles as a whole. As always with central locations, you may also expect to pay a premium for quality housing.

Hollywood’s attractions are perhaps some of the world’s most popular. The neighborhood includes pop culture staples such as the Roosevelt Hotel, the Chinese Theatre, the Hollywood Museum, and the Dolby Theatre, which is the venue for the Oscars.

If you’re searching for the opportunity to connect with nature in the heart of the city, visit Runyon Canyon. The park’s southern entrance is located in Hollywood. Dogs are allowed off-leash in the park, and a hike to the park’s highest elevation point, Indian Rock, provides you with excellent city views. The creation (and protection) of parks and open spaces add to the quality of life here.

Courtesy of RentCafeBlog

Hollywood was established in 1853, with a single adobe hut on land outside Los Angeles, California. Growing crops was so successful there that by 1870, Hollywood became a thriving agricultural community. One of its most notable historic figures was real estate tycoon, Harvey Henderson Wilcox and his wife, Daeida, who moved to Los Angeles from Topeka, Kansas, in the 1880s. The town’s name came from Daeida, who, while on a train trip east met a woman that described her country home in Ohio, that had been named for the Dutch settlement of Hollywood. Liking the name, Daeida christened their ranch “Hollywood,” upon her return.

In the early 1900s, filmmakers began moving to the Los Angeles area to get away from the strict rules imposed by Thomas Edison‘s Motion Picture Patents Company in New Jersey. Since most of the moviemaking patents were owned by Edison, independent filmmakers were often sued by Edison to stop their productions. To escape his control, and because of the ideal weather conditions and varied terrain, moviemakers began to arrive in Los Angeles to make their films. If agents from Edison’s company came out west to find and stop these filmmakers, adequate notice allowed for a quick escape to Mexico.

The first motion picture studio was built in 1919, in nearby Edendale, just east of Hollywood, by Selig Polyscope Company, and the first one built in Hollywood was founded by filmmaker David Horsley’s general manager Al Christie in 1911, in an old building on the southeast corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. Movie studios began to crop up all over Hollywood after Christie’s appearance, including ones for Cecil B. DeMille in 1913, the Charlie Chaplin Studio in 1917, and many others. The origin of the famous “Hollywood” sign is embedded in Americana. It was installed originally to advertise a new subdivision near the top of Mount Lee, called “Hollywoodland.”

Courtesy of United States History

Popular Home Searches