Los Angeles highlight
The Hollywood Sign on Mount Lee
Built in 1923 as a real-estate billboard reading HOLLYWOODLAND, rebuilt in 1978, and maintained today by the Hollywood Sign Trust.
The sign on Mount Lee went up in 1923 as a $21,000 advertisement for the Hollywoodland real-estate development of Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, and it was intended to last about eighteen months. It has instead become the shorthand for the city itself and for the film and television industry that grew up beneath it.
By the late 1970s the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce determined that the sign needed a complete rebuild carrying a price tag of a quarter million dollars. In 1978 a fundraiser at which individual letters were ceremonially auctioned to celebrity sponsors paid for it; the old sign was scrapped that August, and 194 tons of concrete, enamel and steel later the sign was reborn. Since 1992 the Hollywood Sign Trust has held the legal responsibility to maintain, repair and improve it for the public.
The sign is a good reminder that things built for a short season sometimes have to last for decades. Life insurance works the other way around: you choose the season. A 20- or 30-year term policy is meant to cover the years when a family or a business would be hurt most by the loss of an income, and then to end when that need has passed.