The Hollywood sign at 100: how a hillside ad became an enduring monument

The familiar letters loom over a dreamy city – yet they remain surprisingly hard to reach

• Timeline: the strange history of the Hollywood sign as it turns 100

There is an old complaint about Los Angeles. The Weimar intellectuals who fled here in the 1930s loved the sunshine but decried the city’s lack of civic culture. Los Angeles did not have the cafe society of Paris or Berlin; instead it had consumers in their automobiles navigating through an endless sprawl of single-family homes.

Nearly a hundred years later, the Weimar critics would hardly be surprised that a giant advertisement on a hill, monitored 24/7 by surveillance cameras, may still be the closest thing Los Angeles has to a town square.