Hollywood and Vine: Where a Ranch Became a Dream

The intersection of Hollywood and Vine is one of the most mythologized corners in America, but its origin is entirely domestic. In eighteen eighty-seven, Harvey and Daeida Wilcox subdivided their ranch in the hills north of Los Angeles. They called the dirt crossroads Prospect Avenue and Weyse Avenue. Prospect was later renamed Hollywood Boulevard.

The Wilcoxes were Midwestern prohibitionists who imagined a quiet, temperate community far from the saloons of Los Angeles. They could not have anticipated what followed. Within twenty years the film industry, drawn by reliable sunshine, cheap land, and distance from Thomas Edison's patent enforcers on the East Coast, began moving in. By the nineteen twenties Hollywood was synonymous with the movies worldwide. The corner of Hollywood and Vine became shorthand for glamour, scandal, and ambition, though the ranch it replaced was simply a place two roads happened to cross.