Official registration of Hollywood
On this day in 1887 Harvey Wilcox officially registers Hollywood with the Los Angeles County recorders office.Wilcox and his wife Daeida had moved to Southern California four years earlier from Topeka Kansas where Harvey had made his fortune in real estate.They bought 160 acres of land in the Cahuenga Valley located in the foothills to the west of the city of Los Angeles.
A once-sleepy settlement founded in 1781 as El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Poricuncula Los Angeles was by then expanding rapidly thanks to the completion of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1876 (the Santa Fe Railroad would arrive in 1885).Wilcox who had lost the use of his legs as a child due to polio envisioned the land as the perfect site for a utopian-like community for devout Christians where they could live a highly moral life free of vices such as alcohol (Wilcox was a prohibitionist).Daeida Wilcox called the new community Hollywood borrowing the name from a Chicago friend who told her that was the name of a summer home she had in the Midwest.Harvey laid out a street map of the settlement centered on a main street he called Prospect Avenue (it was later renamed Hollywood Boulevard).
After filing the map with the L.A.County recorders office Wilcox set about laying out Hollywoods streets made of dirt and lined with pepper trees.As Harvey sold lots Daeida worked to raise money to build churches a school and a library.By 1900 nine years after Harvey Wilcoxs death Hollywood had a population of 500 compared with 100000 people in Los Angeles at the time.
It was connected to L.A.by a single-track streetcar running down Prospect Avenue it took two hours to make the seven-mile trip and service was infrequent.In 1910 the community of Hollywood voted to consolidate with Los Angeles due to an inadequate supply of water.
Shortly thereafter the fledgling motion-picture industry began growing exponentially as moviemakers found their ideal setting in the mild sunny climate and varied terrain of Southern California.As the years went by Harvey Wilcoxs dreams of a sober conservative religious community faded even further into the background as Hollywood became known throughout the world as the gilded center of an industry built on fantasy fame and glamour.
