Los Angeles

The Hollywood sign, arguably the single most recognizable piece of signage in the world, began life as a straightforward real estate advertisement. Built in 1923, it originally read HOLLYWOODLAND, promoting a housing development in the surrounding hills, and was only ever intended to stand for about a year and a half. It outlasted that plan by decades — the development company eventually stopped maintaining it, the city took over its upkeep, and the final four letters came down for good in 1949, leaving the sign as it reads today.

That gap between temporary marketing and permanent icon captures something real about how Los Angeles works more broadly — a city built around the entertainment industry, where studio backlots, sound stages, and film history sit alongside genuinely ordinary neighborhoods rather than in some separate, curated tourist zone.

LA's sheer physical scale shapes almost every practical decision about visiting it. The metro area sprawls across roughly 500 square miles, built around car infrastructure from early in its 20th-century growth, and few of its most-visited spots sit within easy walking distance of each other — a rental car or consistent rideshare budget is less of an option than a near-necessity for seeing more than one or two neighborhoods.

Griffith Park, one of the largest urban parks in North America, holds both the Hollywood Sign's best viewpoints and the Griffith Observatory, an Art Deco-era building whose free admission and public telescopes have made astronomy genuinely accessible to the city for nearly a century.

The coastline itself splits into distinct character zones — Santa Monica's pier and shopping promenade draw a more mainstream crowd, while neighboring Venice Beach's boardwalk, muscle beach, and street performers have kept a rougher, more countercultural edge that's persisted even as the surrounding real estate has become some of the most expensive in the country.