Hooray for Hollywood. That song featured in the 1937 movie Hollywood Hotel celebrates Hollywood, California, the glitz and glamor home of movie-making. So what does “Tinseltown” have to do with the towns along the Q?
Hollywood historian Gregory Paul Williams, in his book The Story of Hollywood: An Illustrated History describes the connection. In the mid-1880s, Daeida Wilcox, who had grown up in western Ohio, and her husband Harvey Wilcox began subdividing 120 acres of land northwest of Los Angeles. On one of her trips back to her native Ohio, Daeida, engaged in conversation with a fellow train passenger, Mary Peck. In answer to the usually asked “oh, where are you from?” question asked of fellow traveler, Peck replied that she and her husband had a country estate near Chicago which they had named Hollywood.
In 1880, privileged Chicagoans with the means to do so established suburban retreats away from the heat, soot, and unsanitary conditions in the city. Walter and Mary Peck did just that, establishing their summer home on land between the Des Plaines River and Salt Creek. Mary and Walter must have liked their privacy. Though the property was bisected by the CB&Q railroad, no stop was established there, nor were bridges constructed over the Des Plaines River or Salt Creek there until the early 1890s. Your author is baffled as to how they gained access to their summer paradise.
Daeida and Harvey were smitten with the Hollywood name, and in 1887, filed a plat with the Los Angeles Country recorder’s office using the name that Daeida reportedly heard in the conversation on the train. In that same year Mary and Walter sold their isolated property west of Riverside. The first of that land between the Des Plaines and Salt Creek itself would be subdivided early in the 1890s, ultimately becoming the little present-day community of Hollywood – but that is a story for another day.