Redacción.- The symbol of the city of Los Angeles and a multibillion-dollar industry: The famous Hollywood sign celebrates its 100-year history as the best letter of introduction to American cinema.
On July 13, 1923, Hobart real estate developer Johnstone Whitley, now known as the “Father of Hollywood,” erected a 45-foot-tall, 350-foot-long sign reading “Hollywoodland” on Mount Lee Hill in Los Angeles. .
The area was already an urban claim for movie figures after the first studio opened its doors in the Californian city fleeing the so-called “Edison tax”, a patent that all creators had to pay to the empire of Thomas Alva Edison for filming. movies on the US East Coast.
So much so that That sign, surrounded by luxury mansions and made up of square metal plates linked by wire and illuminated by 4,000 small lamps, became a worldwide icon.
In 1949 the Chamber of Commerce of the Los Angeles neighborhood of Hollywood decided to buy it from the Whitley family, who had already amassed an enormous fortune selling the land, for the symbolic amount of one dollar.
Since then, the sign began to say only Hollywood and the neighborhood saw how the influx of tourists and the curiosity of travelers from all over the world grew exponentially, spurred on by letters that have later appeared in hundreds of films such as “Superman” or series TV shows like “The Simpsons.”
“Many people locate Los Angeles and Hollywood in the world thanks to this sign that we have all seen in the movies,” said Efraín Serrano, a native of Sacramento.
