Long before Hollywood and Highland became one of the world's most famous intersections, strawberry fields, farmhouses, dirt roads, and scattered ranches lay beneath the foothills. Among the people who watched that landscape change was Mary Penman Moll, a schoolteacher who became a landowner, developer, businesswoman and civic figure during the years when Hollywood was still becoming a town. Her name is not nearly as familiar today as those of Daeida Wilcox Beveridge or H. J. Whitley, but portions of the Hollywood she helped create remain underfoot every day.

Long before Hollywood mail arrived in sackfuls addressed to movie stars, fan clubs, and motion-picture studios, it was sorted inside a little wooden hotel at the corner of a dirt road. The woman behind that early postal counter was Mary Maria Sackett, a pioneer who arrived in Hollywood before there was much of a Hollywood at all and lived long enough to tell Groucho Marx about it on national television.

This series, The Women Who Built Hollywood Before the Movies, looks back at the remarkable women who helped shape Hollywood when it was still a quiet community of orchards, ranches, homes, and dusty roads. Long before the studios, movie palaces, premieres, and stars made Hollywood famous around the world, women were already helping build the institutions, businesses, and civic life that gave the town its identity. Among the most important was a young woman from Ohio named Daeida Hartell, who would help give the emerging community not only its name, but much of the character that defined its earliest years.

On Thursday, January 21, 1988, Cybill Shepherd stood on Hollywood Boulevard at one of the highest points of her television fame and watched her name become part of the pavement. Her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, placed at 7000 Hollywood Boulevard in front of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, honored her work in television and, more immediately, the remarkable career revival created by ABC’s Moonlighting. I was there.

When Albert Einstein arrived in Southern California at the end of 1930, Los Angeles greeted him with an unusual combination of sunlight, scientific reverence and Hollywood stardust. He had come primarily to work at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, but Einstein was already more than a physicist. Since the dramatic confirmation of his theory of relativity in 1919, he had become one of the most recognizable men in the world.

Some Hollywood landmarks stand out with neon lights, marquees, searchlights, and stories sold in souvenir shops. The Woman’s Club of Hollywood is different. It sits quietly at 1749 North La Brea Avenue, set back from the busy street, and remains as a piece of Hollywood from before the city became all about spectacle. It may not be glamorous in the usual way, but it matters more than that.

The Hollywood in Miniature exhibit officially premiered in Hollywood in early 1946 under the sponsorship of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. Civic leaders promoted it as both entertainment and a celebration of the movie capital. Publicity described the attraction as one of the most remarkable exhibits ever shown in the city. Visitors praised the extraordinary craftsmanship and referred to it as “a dream come true” and “an artistic triumph.”

Long before preservationists fought to save Hollywood’s vanished landmarks, before coffee-table books documented lost movie palaces, and before miniature artists became television curiosities, an extraordinary and almost forgotten exhibit attempted something astonishing: to preserve the entire spirit of Hollywood itself in miniature form. Streets, theaters, homes, hillsides, palm trees, neon signs, traffic lights, film studios, and even the rolling surf at Malibu Beach were painstakingly recreated by hand in one of the most ambitious model-city projects ever attempted in Southern California. Known as Hollywood in Miniature, the sprawling exhibit became both a technical marvel and an accidental time capsule of a vanished Los Angeles.

At 6439 Hollywood Boulevard, just steps from the long-vanished Warner Hollywood Theatre, stands a relic from a time when the boulevard was not yet defined by souvenir stands and passing crowds, but by elegant storefronts, glowing marquees, and a civic-minded sense that even the most ordinary object could be rendered with beauty and purpose. The William Stromberg Clock, installed around 1928, is one of the last surviving emblems of that era—a stately street clock that has silently observed Hollywood’s cycles of glamour, decline, and reinvention for more than three-quarters of a century.

On the evening of April 7, 2026, one of Hollywood’s most storied and eccentric landmarks—the Magic Castle—was suddenly thrust into crisis when smoke began rising from its upper reaches, signaling a fire that threatened not only a building, but a living institution of theatrical illusion, secrecy, and history. Perched above Franklin Avenue in a 1909 châteauesque mansion long known as the “Holly Chateau,” the Magic Castle has stood for more than a century as both architectural curiosity and cultural sanctuary. That night, however, its mystique gave way to urgency.

Rising quietly above the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, perched on a ridge that surveys the Cahuenga Pass, the Hollywood Freeway, and even the distant curve of the Hollywood Bowl, stands one of Los Angeles’ most enduring—yet often overlooked—monuments. Officially known as the Hollywood Pilgrimage Memorial Monument, but more commonly called the Hollywood Cross, the 32-foot steel structure has watched the city evolve for more than a century, its glowing silhouette offering a silent benediction over the restless traffic below.

When the Academy Awards are presented tonight, the presenters, nominees, guests, and members of the press will file into the Dolby Theatre for the evening’s celebration. What most of them likely do not realize—or perhaps never considered—is that the very ground beneath their seats was once the site of the legendary Hollywood Hotel, owned and operated by the formidable Almira “Mira” Hershey.