The Hollywood sign is one of the watchful eyes resting over Southern California. It’s basically a cultural icon and a landmark. So, naturally, people want to blemish the land around it, and develop luxury condos.
Thankfully, an organization is doing everything it can to save the Hollywood sign and the land around it. Can you imagine a world where there are condos all around the Hollywood sign? Where people eschew aesthetics, legends, and gritty pragmatism for shiny new white buildings that nobody can afford during a terrible, terrible recession? There’s no way that anyone could’ve considered that a good idea. Nobody that wasn’t on drugs.
An organization, The Trust For Public Land — with the most banal name in the world — is raising the necessary funds to make sure that the land near the sign goes unperturbed by the gods of city planning. The price? 12 million dollars. That’s a hefty price to make sure history is preserved, and they’re at the six million mark right now and accepting donations.
Interesting fact: the land used to be owned by an ostrich farmer, who sold it because he claimed he saw the ghost of the old owner haunting it. What would’ve been cooler? If he was haunted by the ghosts of the ostriches he farmed. The Hollywood sign was built in 1923, and originally read Hollywoodland. That part of the sign was taken down in 1949, however, and it’d be reaaaaallly lame if the whole landscape was ruined because people want to build houses.
Comments
Jared
February 10th, 2010 - 5:48:43 PM
Kinda hard to get worked up by commercialism besmirching Hollywood. I mean, really.
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