The Hollywoodland sign looks fairly new and well maintained in this shot of the Hollywood hills, so do those lovely homes in the foreground. And Mt. Lee itself looks pretty bare of any other development, so I’m going to guess this photo comes from the mid-to-late 1920s. (The sign went up in 1923.) I’m sure that the people living in those homes would never have guessed how enduring and iconic that sign would become. To their minds, it was still “just advertising.”