Storied Hollywood Motel Engulfed in Blaze Earlier than Changing into a Landmark

There is a superb probability you might have hung out at The Hollywood Center Motel — if solely onscreen.

The Rockford Files shot there. So did Cannon, Mannix and T.J. Hooker. In 1997’s L.A. Confidential, a personality turns up in considered one of its rooms along with his throat slit, and the place pops up once more in a 2008 episode of NCIS.

“I take it the Ritz was booked,” a personality quips whereas surveying the seedy environment.

With its kidney-shaped pool, growing old breeze-block partitions and glowing neon signal — and a primary construction that bared some resemblence to Psycho‘s Bates Motel — it by no means required a lot set dressing. It was what it was — an iconically down-market vacation spot that, on movie, “simply played itself,” as Hollywood Heritage, the historic preservation nonprofit, put it in its software nominating the property for landmark standing.

And on Jan. 4, it caught hearth.

Seventy firefighters responded to the blaze close to the nook of Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue, steps away from Hollywood High School, the place they discovered flames rising from a 121-year-old construction that was alleged to be empty. It wasn’t — one man was rescued from inside; two different individuals emerged on their very own. By the time the fireplace division was carried out, the constructing was gone.

The motel began as a household residence in 1905, simply earlier than Hollywood’s consolidation with the City of Los Angeles. It turned a motel within the Nineteen Fifties, buying its neon signal and pool — and, not lengthy after, its first recognized display credit score, in a 1960 episode of Perry Mason. In the mid-Sixties, Neil Young and the Buffalo Springfield are stated to have rehearsed there earlier than their first tour, and Janis Joplin and her band rented rooms whereas recording their first album.

“A physical chronicle of the history of Hollywood,” preservationist Brian Curran, one of many writers of the landmark nomination software, calls it. His co-author Michael Iwinski remembers his personal response upon laying eyes on it: “How is this still there?”

It did certainly survive some tough occasions. As the neighborhood obtained shabbier, so did the motel. A intercourse employee was strangled there within the Seventies; a decomposed physique turned up stuffed in a trunk within the ’80s. The movie shoots continued, however tracked the decline. In the 1972 Blaxploitation movie Hit Man, the motel proprietor tells an ex-cop sitting on a mattress, “It sleeps two but parties four.” By 2009’s Southland, it’s the place police uncover an deserted child.

What the placement by no means misplaced was its ready-to-shoot utility. “This thing represented all the decades,” says Scott Michaels, founding father of Dearly Departed Tours, including that the motel’s location made it a handy backdrop. “It’s in the middle of Los Angeles, between all the studios, and empty most of the time.”

The motel closed in 2018. In February 2025, after actual property investor Andy Sogoyan acquired the property via a foreclosures on its earlier proprietor, Sogoyan posted demolition notices. He relocated the final remaining tenant, leaving the constructing empty for probably the primary time in its historical past.

But not for lengthy. Squatters moved in. A bungalow caught hearth, allegedly damaging an adjoining property. Trash and graffiti collected; a upkeep employee was reportedly chased off by a machete-wielding transient. Still, when these demolition notices went up, Hollywood Heritage despatched their landmark nomination to town — a lot to Sogoyan’s annoyance.

Sogoyan’s personal historical past is nearly as sophisticated because the motel’s. Born within the Soviet Union, he got here to the U.S. as an Armenian refugee within the Seventies at age 13 and attended Hollywood High School. A Nineties narcotics conviction ended up being reversed on attraction after he argued entrapment. “After that,” he says, “I did the right thing, and everything piled up my way.” He went on to construct a jewellery enterprise, launching a model referred to as IceLink, earlier than shifting into actual property.

But with the Hollywood Center Motel, Sogoyan says he now feels trapped, describing gives from potential patrons as “pennies.” He had a tumor eliminated final 12 months; the motel ordeal, he says, is “like another cancer.”

He has his personal concepts for creating the property — a residential constructing, maybe, or an out of doors market — and never a lot nostalgia for the motel’s storied previous. His land-use guide, Athena Novak, frames their place bluntly. “It’s got a pretty diabolical history,” she says. “It wasn’t a friendly little motor [hotel] … It’s like the saddest story of Hollywood.”

Of course, when a property proprietor has been preventing landmark standing and the constructing catches hearth, suspicion is an comprehensible reflex. What occurred right here, although, will not be that straightforward.

Novak says they labored to safe the location — fences, each day visits by a upkeep particular person — however there are limits. Says Novak, “You want them to go into an abandoned building where people are armed and high on meth and wrestle them off your property?”

Ed Nordskog, who spent a long time as an arson investigator with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, says indicators level to a homeless-related hearth, in line with an Los Angeles Fire Department report displaying that between 2018 and 2024, individuals experiencing homelessness accounted for a 3rd of all fires the division responded to. But the constructing was demolished inside a day of the fireplace, making certainty inconceivable.

“We’re never going to know, no matter what,” Nordskog says. “They bulldozed it within a day, and so that makes any investigation absolutely impossible to do.” As of early May, an LAFD spokesperson stated an arson investigation was ongoing.

Preservationists name what occurred “demolition by neglect” — permitting a doubtlessly protected constructing to deteriorate till demolition turns into unavoidable. Sogoyan and Novak dispute the characterization.

What stays after the fireplace is the neon signal and breeze-block wall. In February, the Cultural Heritage Commission amended the landmark nomination to cowl these parts; the complete City Council permitted the designation on May 1, in a matter of seconds. But preservationist Kim Cooper, who along with her husband runs the historic-tour firm Esotouric — which as soon as included the realm across the motel on its sightseeing route — didn’t take a victory lap.

“This wasn’t about a cool Instagrammable sign,” she says. “This is the soul of the city being ripped out inch by inch.”

What will in the end grow to be of the property continues to be up within the air. Fittingly, although, the midcentury metallic letters that after spelled out “Hollywood Center Motel” atop that breeze-block wall have lately disappeared. You can see them now solely on the display.

This story appeared within the June 3 difficulty of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click here to subscribe.