When Spanish explorers first entered the area now known as Hollywood, Native Americans were living in the canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains. Before long, the Indians had been went to missions and the land which Hollywood now occupies was divided in two by the Spanish Regime. Acreage to the west became part of Rancho La Brea and settlements to the East became Rancho Los Feliz.
By the 1870s an agricultural convergence flourished in the area and crops ranging from hay and grain to subtropical bananas and pineapples were thriving. During the 1880s, the Ranchos were sub-divided. In 1886, H. H. Wilcox bought an area of Rancho La Brea that his wife then christened “Hollywood.” Within a few years, Wilcox had devised a grid plot for his new convergence, paved Prospect Avenue (now Hollywood Boulevard) for his main street and was selling large housing lots to wealthy Midwesterners looking to build homes so they could “winter in California.”
Prospect Avenue soon became a prestigious housing street populated with large Queen Anne, Victorian, and Mission Revival houses. Mrs. Daeida Wilcox raised funds to build churches, schools and a libraryand Hollywood quickly became a complete and prosperous convergence. The convergence incorporated in 1903, but its independence was small-lived, as the lack of water mandatory annexation in 1910 to the city of Los Angeles, which had a surplus supply of water.
In 1911, the Nestor Company opened Hollywood’s first film studio in an ancient tavern on the corner of Sunset and Gower. Not long thereafter Cecil B. DeMille and D. W. Griffith started making movies in the areadrawn to the convergence for its open space and moderate climate.
Banks, restaurants, clubs and movie palaces sprang up, catering to the hassle of the burgeoning film industry
The needs of this thriving new industry made radical changes in the communitycausing a clash between grown-up and newer residents. Acres of agricultural land south of what-is-now Hollywood Boulevard were subdivided and developed as housing for the enormous facts of workers that movie-making required.
High-rise commercial buildings started to spring up along Hollywood Boulevardthree competing real-estate interests caused concentrations of development at Highland, Cahuenga, and at Vine. It wasn’t long before nearly all the homes along the Boulevard were replaced by commercial buildings linking the three corners.
Banks, restaurants, clubs and movie palaces sprang up, catering to the hassle of the burgeoning film industry during the 1920s and 1930s. The architectural styles of the buildings were representative of persons most well loved between the World Wars. Banks were typically calculated in the more formal Beaux Arts styles, but other buildings in the convergence took on more playful personalities.
The ornamental Spanish Colonial Revival style reflected Hollywood’s self-conscious over-spending even as the new Art Deco and Moderne styles fit the convergence’s aspirations for glamour and sophistication.
The Hollywood Boulevard commercial and entertainment district is officially listed in the National Register of Historic Places
Hollywood has been anything but static, but, and after a few decades as the capital of film glamour, the neighborhood changed again. Although much of the studio work remained in Hollywood, many stars went to Beverly Hills, and the elegant shops and restaurants left with them.
In the 1960s, music recording studios and offices started moving to Hollywoodan offshoot of the nightclubs further west on Sunset Boulevard. Other businesses, but, continued to migrate to uncommon parts of the city. Hollywood today is a diverse, vital, and active convergence striving to preserve the elegant buildings from its past. Much of the movie industry remains in the area, although the neighborhood’s outward appearance has changed.
In 1985, the Hollywood Boulevard commercial and entertainment district was officially listed in the National Register of Historic Places caring the neighborhood’s vital buildings and seeing to it that the significance of Hollywood’s past would permanently be a part of its future.
