Hollywood

Hollywood was invented, not settled. Joseph W. Young bought thousands of acres here around 1920, platted the town in 1921 and named it after Hollywood, California. The story runs that he wanted a motion-picture colony on the Atlantic coast, though his own advertising never promised one. He called it Hollywood by the Sea to separate it from his other venture, Hollywood in the Hills, in New York State. The city incorporated in 1925 with Young as its first mayor; the 1926 Miami hurricane wrecked it a year later, and local newspapers reported that its losses were second only to Miami's.

It remains a planned city, and the plan is still legible. Young's own Mediterranean-style house on Hollywood Boulevard, built in 1925, still stands. The city covers 30.8 square miles in southeastern Broward County and holds five to six miles of Atlantic beach, broken only by a stretch deeded to Dania Beach. Fort Lauderdale and Dania Beach lie north, Pembroke Pines west, and West Park, Pembroke Park and Hallandale Beach south; the Seminole Hard Rock, with its guitar-shaped hotel opened in 2019, sits on the tribe's reservation on the city's west side.

The brick-paved Broadwalk (the spelling is the city's own) runs nearly two and a half miles along the sand and is the city's signature, and it explains the shape of the residential market: buildings cluster on North and South Ocean Drive within a short walk of it, with a second, more urban group inland around Young Circle and Hollywood Boulevard. The 2020 census counted 153,067 residents, making Hollywood far larger and more mixed than its beachfront alone suggests.