Hollywood Sign
in pixels

About Hollywood Sign

The Hollywood Sign began as an advert. In 1923 the real estate developers Woodruff and Shoults put up huge white letters spelling “HOLLYWOODLAND” on the hillside above their new housing development in the Santa Monica Mountains, and lit them with around 4,000 light bulbs. It was meant to stand for a year and a half. It is still there a century later, on the south slope of Mount Lee in Griffith Park, and it has become the symbol of the American film industry.

The sign aged badly. The lights were switched off around 1933, and by the 1940s the letters were falling apart. In 1949 the city’s parks department agreed to repair it on one condition: the last four letters came down, so the sign would advertise the district rather than a housing estate. By the 1970s it was crumbling again, and in 1978 nine donors, among them Hugh Hefner and Alice Cooper, paid for one letter each to replace the sheet metal with steel letters on a concrete foundation.

Today the nine letters are about 45 feet (13.7 m) tall and the sign is about 350 feet (107 m) long. The city of Los Angeles owns it, and the Hollywood Sign Trust, set up in 1978, looks after the painting, repairs and security. Visitors are not allowed up to the letters: fences, cameras and an alarm system watched by the police keep people away, and fans are sent to viewpoints instead. The sign is normally not lit at night.

One of the best of those viewpoints is Griffith Observatory, on the southern slope of Mount Hollywood. Griffith J. Griffith gave more than 3,000 acres of land to the city in 1896, and his will paid for an observatory open to everyone. The white Art Deco building by John C. Austin and Frederic M. Ashley opened on 14 May 1935, and admission has been free ever since. Its 12-inch Zeiss telescope has been used by more than nine million people, and the lawn in front holds the Astronomers Monument of 1934.

The diorama

The diorama turns a slice of Griffith Park into a floating island. The dry chaparral hills of Mount Lee rise at the back, patched with tan grass, olive scrub and grey rock, with the communications mast on the summit. The nine letters stand on the slope on their scaffolding, built as blocky pixel letters and staggered a little along the hill like the real ones. On the next ridge sits the observatory: a white Art Deco block with a big copper-green dome in the middle and two smaller domes on the wings, a lawn with the Astronomers Monument, and visitors at the wall looking out.

A road winds up from the city with cars on it, fire roads cross the hills with hikers, a coyote trots through the scrub and a helicopter circles overhead. At the front the hills drop to a strip of the Los Angeles basin: a street grid, low buildings and rows of palm trees. At golden hour the hills turn orange in a warm haze. At night the observatory is floodlit, the street grid glows amber at the edge of the island, and the sign stays dark, catching only a little moonlight.

Things to spot

• The coyote trotting through the scrub on the foothills
• A helicopter circling over the hills
• Hikers on the fire roads behind the sign and up Mount Hollywood
• The Astronomers Monument in the middle of the observatory lawn
• Cars climbing the winding road to the observatory
• A red light blinking on top of the Mount Lee mast at night

What we simplified

• The sign and the observatory are much closer together than in reality, and the letters are drawn larger compared with the hills so the word can be read at pixel scale.
• The letters are blocky pixel letters rather than the real sign’s typeface, and the observatory is reduced to its main shapes.
• The Los Angeles basin is just a narrow strip of streets, low buildings and palm trees at the front of the island.

Isometric maps of Los Angeles

Los Angeles also has an isometric pixel-art map made by the community: the whole city drawn tile by tile in the same SimCity-like style. See the map of Los Angeles →