Hollywoodland (Images of America Series)
by Mary Mallory and Hollywood Heritage, Inc.
(Arcadia Publishing)

Part of Arcadia Publisher’s Images of America series Hollywoodand by Mary Mallory and Hollywood Heritage, Inc. features over 200 vintage pictures dating back to the beginning of the 19oo’s, way out west in California.

Detailing one of the first hillside communities in the U.S., we see how Hollywood came into being from the vision of real estate developers Tracy E. Shoults and S. H. Woodruff in 1923. Featuring Spanish, Mediterranean, French Normand and English Tudor-style homes, plus that infamous sign we have all come to regard with iconic wonder linked with a multi-billion dollar industry, it’s amazing to see what it was all like way back when it was all hillsides and canyons, which we see plenty of in the great pictures Mallory has collected.

There’s a brief section on the famous residents who have lived in those houses over the years, a long history on the sign itself and pretty much all you’ll need to ever know about the development of Hollywood from as much a pictorial history as a written one.

Hollywoodland is a great document of an early time in our nation’s housing development.