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1903: A Hollywood Development
By 1903, Harvey Wilcox and his wife had fashioned a habitat that was in keeping with their temperate, clean living ways. Hollywood was still a sleepy little nothing town with a population of around 500 people and a prohibition on saloons. The residents of the Cahuenga Valley were growing restless, however: maintenance of the town’s streets didn’t correspond with the tax levied on the population by the county, and there was a lack of school facilities.
A petition, submitted to the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors in August 1903, requested the incorporation of the City of Hollywood, and an election to gauge approval among the populace was held on 14th November, with voting lasting until 5pm. The vote was 88 for incorporation and 77 against, so Hollywood was subsequently awarded city status of the sixth class with boundaries that extended from Normandie on the east, to Fairfax on the west, and from the peaks of the Santa Monica Mountains on the north to DeLongpre and Fountain avenues on the south.
Future LA Times publisher Harry Chandler and railroad tycoon General Moses Hazeltine Sherman, knowing of the change in the area's fortunes that would surely occur with the arrival of a water supply, formed a syndicate in the same year, buying all the land they could and incorporating it as an independent municipality. They built a trolley line from downtown and a 33-room Spanish-style hotel on Hollywood Boulevard (which was still to be paved). In order to generate sales, they ingeniously posted sold signs among the vacant lots.
The syndicate carried on the pious standards of the Wilcox’s in order to attract the kind of buyer they were looking for – chiefly mid-western farmers. Alcohol was banned unless it was for medical purposes; bicycles and velocipedes were banned from the sidewalks, and cattles and mules were not to be driven through the streets of Hollywood in numbers greater than 200. Herds of 2000 or more hogs or sheep had to be attended by a ‘competent man.’
Ironically, in 1910, the Hollywood Board of Trustees would officially ban movie theatres from the town – even though Hollywood didn’t actually have any at the time. [ADD]
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