Old Hollywood
March 08, 2010I think it is so cool to learn the history of a place. To know what it took to build the city up to where it is, and what was there before, especially right around where you live. California has so much history, with the Gold Rush, and all of the pioneers that came out here, and then of course there's Hollywood, with its own history. Did you know that before this town turned into the entertainment capital, there was no theater, singing or dancing allowed???
I told Justin that I wanted to do a Hollywood History photo safari every weekend, you know, researching a certain area, finding old photos, and then taking photos of what it looks like now. This weekend we went to the Hollywood Heritage Museum. Looks can be deceiving, it's a tiny barn in a parking lot right around the corner from my apt. (sounds shady). But it was really cool. The history of the barn is so interesting. Before Hollywood was Hollywood, it was a "quiet farming town". In 1913 three guys came out here (Cecil B. Demille was one of them). They rented the barn to shoot their movie, "The Squaw Man", (the first feature film shot here). Long story short, they bought the barn, which, with add-ons, was turned into Paramount Pictures, the barn was then moved when they re-located Paramount Pictures to Melrose and Vine (the lot I first worked at when I moved out here), moved the barn again when they didn't want it anymore and then again to where it is now. It's not that big, but they've managed to fill it with tons of Hollywood historical memorabilia, the kind of stuff that makes you want to go back in time and live there for a while. I find that stuff so cool. One of the coolest things was that most of the stuff that happened at this time, and a lot of the photos they took from back then, take place right where I live!
On the way out we bought a book called "Early Hollywood". There is a really interesting part in there about how Hollywood got it's name:
"Cahuenga Valley was by 1883 a small farming community at the mouth of the Cahunega Pass, eight miles north of growing Los Angeles. Kansas businessman Harvey Wilcox bought land to subdivide and, by 1886, had purchased a 120-acre tract ... It became the family's most important parcel. Wilcox's wife, Daedia, visited her old home in Ohio, and, on the train back, was said to have met a woman who described her own summer home in the Chicago area as "Hollywood". Daedia liked the name so well that she convinced her husband to name their new development Hollywood."
Here are a few pics we took at the museum:
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