Gentle reader,
Midway through six days of preliminary hearing testimony for councilmember Curren Price’s public corruption case last month, we got the nugget we came for: explicit evidence presented by Deputy District Attorney Casey Higgins that elected Los Angeles officials and their staff actively kill landmark nominations for the benefit of real estate developers.
The landmark in question was the Selma Las Palmas Apartments. Price’s wife Del Richardson was paid to get the tenants out of 84 beautiful, pre-war garden units. Hollywood councilmember Mitch O’Farrell had supported the nomination by the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles, but suddenly, shockingly flipped at the PLUM Committee hearing on 08/21/2018, clearing a path for a massive redevelopment project called Crossroads Hollywood that has yet to break ground.
Half a block south, across Sunset Boulevard, this suspicious vote sealed the fate of the Hollywood Center Motel.
In commercial real estate, comps are everything.
With the neighboring apartments empty and new towers approved, the fascinating, derelict, low-rise complex with its 1905 Queen Anne house, ring of 1920s bungalow units, kidney-shaped pool where 1960s rock stars sunbathed, mid-century neon sign and breeze block wall was worth more demolished than standing, restored and occupied.
And because it had never been officially designated as a landmark, the attempt to do so, initiated by Hollywood Heritage late last year, would shine an uncomfortable light on the many ways that Los Angeles City Hall refuses to enforce laws and policies that could protect not just historic buildings, but everyone who lives, works and plays nearby.
Tomorrow, Thursday February 5 at 10am in Los Angeles City Hall Room 1010, the Cultural Heritage Commission meets to hold its second vote on landmarking Hollywood Center Motel.
It is agenda item #6, following discussion of renovations at the Venice Lifeguard Station for Baywatch filming and landmark status for King Taco #1.
The City Planning staff report recommends a no vote, but the Cultural Heritage Commissioners do not have to vote no.
If you disagree with staff, and think the property that’s still filled with rent stabilized bungalows merits recognition rather than being bulldozed and carted to the dump, or if you want to hold the City and the CHC accountable for their failure to protect Hollywood Center Motel, you can show up in person or call/Zoom in and make a one minute public comment (access the meeting via Zoom at https://planning-lacity-org.zoom.us/j/86466616002 or by calling (213) 338-8477 or (669) 900-9128. Use meeting ID 864 6661 6002 and passcode 003098.).
If you prefer to email, send that today (send emails to chc@lacity.org, subject: PROPOSED MONUMENT: HOLLYWOOD CENTER MOTEL CHC-2025-6242-HCM).
For months, concerned citizens have been begging the office of councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez, Cultural Heritage Commission, LADBS, LAFD and LAPD: do something, before the house burns down and people get hurt!
They did nothing, the house burned down and people got hurt.
After the fire and rushed LAFD demolition on Sunday, January 4, the debris was removed from the site. In his latest newsletter, Mike Callahan raises alarming questions about the reported presence of asbestos and who may have been exposed if this toxic material was present to be burned, then disturbed.
Do you want answers? We do. Read on for what’s been happening at Hollywood Center Motel since the first landmark hearing, the many ways the City has helped make things worse and how Mayor Karen Bass put her thumb on the scale by removing Hollywood Center Motel’s biggest fan on the Cultural Heritage Commission.
It’s been an unhappy new year for El Nido, which until Sunday, January 4 was the oldest house still standing on Sunset Boulevard in the heart of Hollywood.
The 121-year-old Queen Anne at the center of the Hollywood Center Motel parcel was about to get a visit from the Cultural Heritage Commissioners, after which they would discuss what they saw and vote on landmark status.
At the first CHC hearing, on December 4, community members expressed alarm about the unsecured property, squatters, vandalism, fires and ongoing demolition by neglect and pleaded with the property owner’s representative to get it under control by properly sealing up the compound and individual buildings and hiring a security company to patrol the property.
But that didn’t happen.
A vacated building notice was posted on the fence and structures by LADBS around Christmas. However, homeless people continued to shelter inside the bungalows and El Nido.
Then in the pre-dawn hours of January 4, a very strange fire broke out.
Because Los Angeles has journalists who track emergency calls, shooting footage for licensing, we can all watch how El Nido burned just before dawn, and then watch the fire department’s heavy equipment division demolish the historic house before most Angelenos have even had breakfast.
And local news will falsely tell them that homeless people trying to get warm accidentally set the house on fire, and that the house was destroyed in that fire.
But the house was still standing after the fire was put out, which means it could have still been seen by the Cultural Heritage Commission, documented in photographs, historic materials salvaged—perhaps even restored, like the house of similar vintage in the video at the top of this newsletter, which after a decade in ruins has found new, preservation minded owners.
If the firemen looked Hollywood Center Motel’s address up on the city’s ZIMAS portal, a flag would pop up warning them that El Nido and the bungalows were protected.
Yet the LAFD Public Information Officer on the scene was clearly oblivious and demolition still took place.
As Rev. Dylan Littlefield writes on Facebook, “El Nido was more than a structure. It was part of Hollywood’s early story — a piece of working‑class, immigrant, and vernacular architecture that survived more than a century of change. Its loss is not just a fire. It is a policy failure — of housing, of preservation policy, and of basic inter‑departmental responsibility.”
We’ve watched a lot of footage of fires in historic wooden houses, and have never seen one like this. Despite all the media attention around this fire (the New York Times even covered it), there has been no reporting about its odd details.
Nightcrawler AXN News was on the scene early that morning and captured some curious things, which we will timestamp link to make it easy for you to see for yourself:
• an injured trespasser is taken to the hospital after self evacuating through a broken window and climbing down an LAFD ladder (timestamp 5:35)
• the fire fighters milling around the smoky yard, having seemingly extinguished the blaze (timestamp 5:36).
• but then roaring flames erupt from the second floor on the west side, followed immediately by a similar blaze on the east (timestamp 5:37).
• the firefighters stand around, hoses unused by their feet; four uniformed police officers arrive on the scene, and they too stand and watch the fire begin to consume the historic house (timestamp 5:38).
• it is three full minutes until a firefighter is seen hosing down the flames (timestamp 5:40), which are now roaring out of the second story window, while others hose down the blaze from each side.
• the fire grows larger, looking as if accelerant was feeding it (timestamp 5:48). A police officer tells the reporter to move across the street, directing him to the opposite sidewalk, presumably in case of flying projectiles (timestamp 5:58).
The sky behind the house glows hot orange, the hoses of trucks that have now moved in close having little apparent effect. Finely, the blaze begins to fade (timestamp 6:00), it starts to rain and firefighters douse the fire from extended ladders.
The sun came up. And although the historic house scheduled to be toured by the Cultural Heritage Commission was still standing, a call was made to bring out the LAFD heavy equipment unit and pull the structure down, allegedly for purposes of public safety.
We filed a public records request, and learned that there appears to have been no consultation with Office of Historic Resources, which put a flag on any construction or demolition pending the second landmark hearing.
So there was not any opportunity to document the structure or salvage historic materials before it was reduced to scrap. Nor was the supposed asbestos present remediated, as far as we are aware.
Why did this happen? Repeatedly, at major Los Angeles fire scenes, LAFD public information officers have made the statement that they assume any empty building has people in it.
Has LAFD formed an internal policy to demolish unsecured, burned structures because homeless people might return to them? If so, that policy needs to be made public, and other City agencies need to affirmatively ensure that “protected” landmarks are not rush demolished like El Nido was.
At 4:54am on Sunday, January 4, a false statement was transmitted to fire fighters: “This structure has been burned before, heavily compromised.”
In fact, it was a separate building, a small bungalow on the east side of the property, which had been left open to burn previously. A separate, previous fire at the main house, which was now on fire, left only minor damage.
We were on the scene that day, but not fast enough to pay our respects to El Nido, nor to correct the record about the misinformation broadcast to fire fighters.
You can see what we observed in the livestream videos embedded below, first the vista from the Sunset Boulevard sidewalk…
…then a walk through of the entire time capsule parcel, including the unsecured and as yet unburned 1920s bungalow units—all of them historic rent stabilized housing that could, should and might yet still be returned to use for Angelenos or visitors, if only the property can be kept secure.
And so we might have left it, a suspicious fire, an architectural and cultural loss, a final pending landmark hearing, had the vultures not begun to pick at a body that was not yet dead.
It started with the “C” in the Hollywood Center Motel signage on the breeze block wall. Someone who claims to have witnessed it posted to a Facebook group (that has blocked us from viewing its content) about “a happy guy” paying a homeless person to kick it down. A concerned citizen shared this information.
Within days, most of the historic signage had been stolen or destroyed.
The site visit photographs taken during the Cultural Heritage Commission tour four days after the fire are stark evidence of what we believe was LAFD’s wrongful demolition and the squalid conditions that have been allowed to exist. See pages 8+ here.
But most of the Hollywood Center Motel is still here, and it’s not too late to do the right thing and make it a landmark.
As Mike Callahan writes, there are several demolition threatened historic buildings left over from the Crossroads Hollywood scheme located nearby that could be moved onto the property where El Nido used to stand, and the whole thing reactivated as a cool, creative residential, commercial or motel complex.
The alternative is giving the new owner what he wants: permission to demolish rent stabilized housing units for no new project and essentially telling Angelenos that what has happened here, with a property owner and the City working in tandem to allow demolition by neglect, is okay.
It is not okay.
Hollywood Heritage has been advocating for the preservation and activation of culturally and architecturally significant places for forty years. Weeks ago, Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez recognized the organization for its efforts to put Hollywood Boulevard on the National Register with an official proclamation and attendance at a viewing of the amazing Hollywood miniature.
And yet the Hollywood Center Motel, under landmark consideration initiated by Hollywood Heritage, has been treated like garbage by the City, with Soto-Martinez’ office unwilling to apply the law and protect the property, despite concerned citizens and non-profit board members warning of the deteriorating conditions for many months.
A City proclamation isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on so long as elected and appointed officials only serve the interest of real estate speculators.
If the City won’t play fair, we believe it is the proper role of preservation non-profits like Hollywood Heritage, the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Conservancy to seek justice in the courts. That’s why citizens donate to these organizations.
We often say that historic preservation is the canary in the coal mine: the province of informed, sophisticated observers who document in real time the collapse and corruption of our civic systems.
It might just seem like preservationists are crying over a run-down mid-century motel property that doesn’t mean much to you, but the systemic rot that is exposed by the failure to protect this property should be of concern to all Angelenos, and to those who invest in commercial real estate.
The tragedy of Pacific Palisades: a devastating urban conflagration, its damage exacerbated by civic neglect and incompetence was, sadly no surprise to those of us who have been monitoring the grim state of affairs in Westlake, Hollywood, Echo Park and the Pico-Union district.
If we all don’t start to look after Los Angeles, things can and will get worse!
When the Cultural Heritage Commissioners toured Hollywood Center Motel last month, someone important was missing: Vice President Gail Kennard, the commissioner who had made the motion to consider the property as a landmark, observing that she knew the place well and thought it was important that the bungalows were affordable housing units.
Right after that December 4, 2025 meeting, Mayor Karen Bass nominated Dr. Laura Dominguez, a postdoc scholar at USC’s Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute who focuses on Los Angeles, to take Kennard’s place, ending sixteen years of public service on the CHC.
Without Gail Kennard on the commission, the effort to successfully designate Hollywood Center Motel will be even more of a challenge. She was the most enthusiastic about designation, and could have advocated to bring her colleagues around. Until Dominguez is seated, any vote will be stacked against designation. If two of the four sitting commissioners vote against it, as we learned with the Metropolitan Water District vote debacle in 2016, the answer is no.
Kennard is the second longtime Cultural Heritage commissioner quietly removed by Karen Bass after echoing the voices of concerned citizens regarding a contentious preservation matter. Diane Kanner was removed shortly after advocating that the Boney Island treehouse not be demolished and asking why the City was being so aggressive with the homeowner.
We don’t know what happened behind the scenes to take Kennard and Kanner off the CHC, but from the outside, we see a chilling effect on what was once a powerful commission, which now merely makes suggestions to City Hall: tow the line or you’re gone.
We’re sad about all that’s gone wrong with Hollywood Center Motel, but we’re also grateful—that so many people and journalists care about this place, about Hollywood, about doing something to change the blighted, vacant dead zones and let these cool places once again be activated by creative Angelenos.
And as we heard in court, just before the judge ruled that there was sufficient evidence to send councilmember Curren Price upstairs to stand trial, none of this is normal, legal or good for Los Angeles.
So let’s fight.
We hope to see you at City Hall, in person or virtually, tomorrow morning as we take a stand for Hollywood Center Motel, and for a city where Angelenos can live, work and have fun, not just a place where speculators can hoard good buildings until they burn and we all choke on the smoke and the waste.
Saturday’s tour is the new Hollywood Noir, a whirlwind ramble around the gritty streets of East Hollywood and the elegant mansions of Los Feliz, exploring civic reform and teenage runaway, mini golf, black magic and motion picture magic. Join us, do!
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
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Our work—leading tours and historic preservation and cultural landmark advocacy—is about building a bridge between Los Angeles’ past and its future, and not allowing the corrupt, greedy, inept and misguided players who hold present power to destroy the city’s soul and body. If you’d like to support our efforts to be the voice of places worth preserving, we have a tip jar, vintage Los Angeles webinars available to stream, in-person tours and a souvenir shop you can browse in. We’ve also got recommended reading bookshelves on Amazon and the Bookshop indie bookstore site. And did you know we offer private versions of our walking tours for groups big or small? Or just share this link with other people who care.
UPCOMING WALKING TOURS
• Hollywood Noir (2/7) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (2/14) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown L.A. (2/21) • Weird West Adams & Elmer McCurdy Museum Visit (2/28) • Film Noir / Real Noir (3/7) • Franklin Village Old Hollywood (3/14) • Bunker Hill, Dead and Alive (3/21) • Christine Sterling & Leo Politi: Angels of Los Angeles (4/4) • John Fante’s Downtown L.A. (4/11) • Early Hollywood’s Silent Comedy Legends (4/18) • Downtown Los Angeles is for Book Lovers (4/25)
