Hollywood Sign
A 1923 real-estate billboard that refused to come down — and ended up owning the word "Hollywood" itself.
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What started as a temporary advertisement for a Beachwood Canyon housing development became the defining image of Los Angeles. The last four letters — "LAND" — were quietly dropped in 1949, and the real-estate pitch became a city symbol. The steel structure standing on Mount Lee today was installed in 1978, replacing the original, and is owned by the City of Los Angeles, not Hollywood.
What to look for
- Each letter stands 45 feet tall on the 1978 all-steel replacement — shorter than the 50-foot originals from 1923
- The original HOLLYWOODLAND sign stretched 450 feet (137 m) across Mount Lee — today's nine-letter HOLLYWOOD sign is shorter, with no official length given in the record
- Spot where 'LAND' once extended the sign to read 'HOLLYWOODLAND' — the original real-estate branding
The sign is owned by the City of Los Angeles and protected by the Hollywood Sign Trust; closest legal viewpoints are in the surrounding hills — the sign itself sits on restricted city land.
Hollywood Sign is one of 33 sights worth the detour in Los Angeles, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Los Angeles pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Los Angeles
- Hollywood Walk of Fame2,850 names pressed into pink terrazzo underfoot — actors, inventors, fictional characters, all at six-foot intervals for 1.3 miles.
- Dolby TheatreThe red carpet runs up these stairs every awards season — where Hollywood officially crowns its year.
- SoFi StadiumA million-square-foot canopy embedded with 27,000 LED pucks bright enough to be seen from planes descending into LAX.
- U.S. Bank TowerLA sold the sky above a fire-gutted library to fund its own rebuilding — and got its second-tallest tower in the bargain.
- Rose BowlA century-old sunken oval where the 1994 World Cup Final was settled — and the 2028 Olympics will return to do it again.
- Los Angeles Memorial ColiseumThe only stadium that will have hosted the Summer Olympics three times — and it was commissioned in 1921 as a memorial to Los Angeles veterans of World War I.