The Hollywood Dream (2): If You Build It…
Hollywood exerted its pull long before the invention of the motion picture camera. Originally, it teased a fantasy about real estate, of dwelling in blessed, perpetual sunshine.
California, the Golden State, has always represented the end of a journey West. Before the transcontinental railroad, however, that journey was dirty, difficult and dangerous. Three weeks by stagecoach, longer by sea. By train, just a few days. It rapidly became a dream holiday destination.
In the 1870 census, the population of Los Angeles was 5000. In 1876, Southern Pacific opened Los Angeles Junction Station. Los Angeles’ population swelled exponentially, to 11,000 in 1880 and, after the Santa Fe Railroad created another link in 1885, was almost 100,000 by 1899.
Some of those newcomers were incredibly wealthy. They’d made their money from genocide, from stealing land and exploiting slave labor, or from hellish industrial conditions in factories and ports back east. As they got older and their pioneer spirit dimmed, they had no desire to live around the grime and blood that had made their fortunes—and often affected their health, with tuberculosis or asthma. They wanted to live out their days in a clean, bright place, bathed in sea breezes and perpetual sunlight. They took day trips via horse-drawn buggy to the rolling hills that lay west of the city, an area known as the Cahuenga Valley, climbed high enough to enjoy the sea view and and thought “this is it”.
“It” was an odd place to envision founding any sizable, lasting community. There was no harbor, no river, no railway, few roads. But something about the area whispered to a series of land speculators. This is it–but what?
First up, Harvey and Daeida Wilcox from Kansas, where Harvey had made a pile in real estate. In 1883, the Wilcoxes bought 160 acres of farmland, centered on the Cahuenga Pass. They were devout Christians, unaware of the stories about Osiris and what might lay buried under their new foothills and their original plan was to build a “god-fearing suburb with a country club feel”. They put the industrial and commercial cities of the Midwest behind them in favor of elegant mansions perched on verdant slopes, surrounded by flowering shrubs. Of a grid of tree-lined streets named after a favored family, or family member. Of enforcing strict moral values within this new community, foremost among them sobriety. Of building a rail and streetcar line to connect this suburb to the city. Of parceling up the land into lots and reselling them at a vast profit.
When the Wilcoxes filed their map of their subdivision with the county recorder on February 1, 1887, they named their new fiefdom Hollywood.
The name has a hazy origin story. Some say a local farmer, Mathew Guirke who immigrated from Ireland and settled in the Los Angeles area, named it after his home town in County Wicklow. The ‘Holy Wood’ in Wicklow is associated with St. Kevin (Irish:Cillín Chaoimhín, meaning 'Kevin's small church'), a hermit who immersed himself in nature and was a protector of animals. Others say the area was known for the proliferation of toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia), a holly-like bush with red berries that thrives in the Southern California hills. Daeida Wilcox claimed she met a woman on a train who told her about an idyllic summer retreat named Hollywood, and she loved the name.
H.J. Whitley, a Canadian developer, told another tale. He was riding through the hills with his wife, Gigi, during their honeymoon in Los Angeles in 1886. They met a Chinese man driving a wagon, who greeted them with a wai. When H.J. asked the man what he was doing, he replied in heavily accented English, “I up at sunrise. Old trees fall down. Pick up wood. All time haully wood”. H.J. thought this was genius —Holly for his British ancestors and Wood for his Scottish — and proclaimed to Gigi that he would name the new town he envisioned on that spot ‘Hollywood’.
Eager to claim credit, Whitley later said his wife was the woman Daeida met on the train. Apparently, Gigi told her new acquaintance about the encounter and she stole the name.
No one knows which of these stories is the truth. Pick your favorite. In Hollywood, it’s standard practice to choose the fun story over the true one, and then to claim the inspiration was yours alone.
The first person to have a Hollywood dream was also the first to watch it go sour. Within two years of launching, Harvey Wilcox was begging people to buy the land from him.
He ended up selling a large block to E.C. Hurd in 1889. Hurd’s dream was more practical and immediate: he planted Eureka lemons and navel oranges. He envisioned a community of prosperous gentleman farmers, living in mansions surrounded by citrus groves, loosely linked by facilities such as schools, churches, and a couple of saloons. The main issue Hurd faced was a lack of water: local wells didn’t supply enough to keep the citrus groves green. A pipeline built by the West Los Angeles Water Company (incorporated 1895) solved the problem by bringing water from Burbank along what is now Los Feliz Boulevard.
Harvey Wilcox died in 1891, having watched his dreamed-of community root, but not fruit. Daeida (his second wife and thirty years his junior) took over, and remarried in 1894–the same year E.C. Hurd died. Despite the sale, she still owned a large tract and wanted to make money from it. She reasoned that people needed more than a Frostless Belt and laden citrus trees to lure them to the area. She also faced competition from H.J. Whitley, who bought the Hurd house and land in 1899 and was positioning himself to exploit the initial town-building work done by her late husband.
Also in 1899, Daieda made a deal with famous French painter Paul de Longpré, selling him a prime three-acre plot at the northwest corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga. She moved her own house to fit his in. De Longpré paid $10,000, not “three paintings” — another origin myth. De Longpré commissioned a palatial Mission Revival mansion, surrounded by ornate gardens filled with the flowers he loved to paint. Then he threw his doors open to the public.
Visitors came in their thousands, traveling from Los Angeles on the new streetcar—the tracks were diverted along Hollywood Blvd for this specific purpose. They wanted to enjoy the natural beauty of the area, as they’d always done, but the new attraction was Art. The Hollywood Dream mutated, as the orange trees gave way to manufactured landscapes, laid out with entertainment in mind. The crowds paid for an afternoon’s association with De Longpré’s fame, for the spectacle, for the experience of the sumptuous house and grounds. They wanted a peek at a more glamorous, elevated lifestyle where a day’s work involved the creation of something beautiful.
By the first decade of the twentieth century, the Hollywood brand was already associated with an aesthetic and a lifestyle. It was a place to aspire to, to retire to, the golden destination at the end of a long journey. But it was insubstantial, a half-built dream based on an inconsistent narrative. While the potential to make money was certainly there, it was not yet a solid business proposition. The land drew people to it, but they still weren’t quite sure why.
Until Hobart Johnston Whitley made his pitch. I’ll explore the ‘Father of Hollywood’ next time.
LOVE this!! I can never get enough history of my fave area of Los Angeles.