In 1980s, Harvey Henderson Wilcox of Kansas and his wife, Daeida bought 160 acres (0, 6 km") of land in the countryside to the west of Los Angeles. Mrs. Wilcow met a woman who spoke of her country home in Ohio named after a Dutch settlement called "Hollywood". Daeida liked the sound of it and bestowed the name to the family ranch. Harvey Wilcox soon drew up a grid map for a town, which he filed with the county recorder's office on February 1, 1887, the first official appearance of the name Hollywood. By 1900, Hollywood also had a post office, a newspaper, a hotel and two markets, along with a population of 500 people. Los Angeles, with a population of 100,000 people at the time, lay seven miles (11 km) east through the citrus groves. The first section of the famous Hollywood Hotel, the first major hotel in Hollywood, was opened in 1902.
Los Angeles and Griffith Observatory, as viewed fr...
English: en: Grauman's Chinese Theatre, photograph...
English: Hollywood Boulevard from the top of the K...Hollywood was incorporated as a municipality in 1903.
Among the town ordinances was one prohibiting the sale of liquor except by pharmacists and one outlawing the driving of cattle through the streets in herds of more than two hundred. In 1904, a new trolley car track running from Los Angeles to Hollywood up Prospect Avenue was opened. The system was called "the Hollywood boulevard." It cut travel time to and from Los Angeles drastically. By 1910, because of an ongoing struggle to secure an adequate water supply, the townsmen voted for Hollywood to be annexed into the City of Los Angeles, as the water system of the growing city had opened the Los Angeles Aqueduct and was piping water down from the Owens River in the Owens Valley. Early DevelopmentThe birth of cinema, as well as its radical development, can largely be traced back to the...