Hollywood High School Historic District

About this property

Hollywood High School is a four-year public secondary school in the Los Angeles Unified School District, located at the intersection of North Highland Avenue and West Sunset Boulevard in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles, California. In September 1903, a two-room school was opened on the second floor of an empty storeroom at the Masonic Temple on Highland Avenue, north of Hollywood Boulevard (then Prospect Avenue). Hollywood was incorporated as a municipality in November 1903. The Hollywood High Organ Opus 481 was a gift from the class of 1924. After suffering severe water damage from the Northridge earthquake in 1994, it was restored in 2002. The campus was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 4, 2012. The school's mascot was derived from the 1921 Rudolph Valentino film of the same name, The Sheik. It was in the Los Angeles City High School District until 1961, when it merged into LAUSD. In the 2015–16 football season, the boys' varsity football team played in the school's third championship game led by head coach Frank Galvan. They finished the season with a 12–2 record. Coach Galvan ended his 6-year Hollywood coaching career with 4 league titles, 6 playoff appearances, 1 city championship appearance, city semi finals, beating rivals 5 years straight (owning SUNSET), 25 plus all city players and ended as the winningest coach in Hollywood history. In the 2016–17 season, coached by Beverley Kilpatrick, the boys' varsity volleyball team played in the school's first-ever championship game. Their historic season ended with an overall record of 17–5. Penn & Teller: Bullshit! (Season 5, Episode 1: "Obesity") During the rise of street skating in the '90s, the school became a famous skate spot. Many skate videos were filmed there and one of the more iconic sites at the spot is the set of stairs, called the "Hollywood High 16." In 2002, artist Eloy Torrez painted a mural of 13 famous entertainers, titled "Portrait of Hollywood", across the entire east wall of the school's auditorium. From left to right, the entertainers displayed are Dorothy Dandridge, Dolores del Río, Brandy Norwood, Selena, Lana Turner, Laurence Fishburne, Cantinflas, Carol Burnett, Cher, Ricky Nelson, Bruce Lee, Rudolph Valentino, and Judy Garland. In 2007, Torrez added a 50-foot (15 m) tall mural of John Ritter, who died four years earlier, on the connecting portion of the building's north wall. All but six of the entertainers—Cantinflas, Lee, Selena, Del Rio, Garland, and Valentino—were students at Hollywood High School. The artist said the mural is a celebration of a diverse ethnic range of actors and entertainers.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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