LOS ANGELES,

Jan 2,

(PTI),

THE famous Hollywood sign was vandalised early New Year morning to read “Hollyweed.”
In an apparent New Year’s prank, a person climbed up the Mount Lee, in the Hollywood Hills area of the Santa Monica Mountains and used tarps to change the O’s in the iconic sign to E’s.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) said that the incident was caught on surveillance cameras and they are investigating the act under misdemeanor trespassing crime.
Built in 1923, the Hollywood sign was first changed to “Hollyweed” on January 1, 1976, when a California State University, Northridge student similarly hung curtains over some of the letters to alter the sign.

The famed vista with the Hollywood sign was nearly spoiled by development in 2010 until a conservation group, with donations from Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner and others, purchased adjacent land to save the view.
The sign originally read ‘Hollywoodland’. The last several letters deteriorated in the late 1940s, and the part that remained was restored in 1978.