There were just a few hundred residents, and the hamlet banned alcohol, bowling alleys and, even briefly in 1910, movie theaters. But the same year, Hollywood voted to merge into Los Angeles.

Soon, movie studios fled the enforcement of Thomas Edison’s monopoly on film patents and started setting up shop in the ideal Southern California light.

In 1923, the Hollywoodland sign went up (it was truncated to Hollywood in 1949). Animated by the same frontier puritanism as early Hollywood, it was an illuminated billboard for a segregated housing development that called itself a fortress against “metropolitanism”; an ad urged, “Protect your family.”

The sign was left up as the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood arrived, a noirish era embodied by the starlet Peg Entwistle, who jumped to her death from the H in 1932.

Penn Bullock contributed reporting.

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