Gentle reader,
There was a huge fire on December 26 in Downtown Los Angeles, and many media outlets reported that the historic Morrison Hotel burned down. They are wrong. Yes, it burned, but did not burn down, and you can help save this cultural and architectural landmark.
Read on for the back story, or just click the photo below—and pass it on!
If there is an unseen author crafting our lives as preservationist L.A. tour guides, that s.o.b. has a sick sense of humor and wicked timing.
You see, there we were, on the corner of 7th and Main Streets in the heart of historic Skid Row, leading our last public tour of the year.
Human Sacrifice is a different sort of true crime tour, looking at notorious cases through the lens of public corruption, housing insecurity and real estate greed. We seek to expose the role of public policy in the deaths of Black Dahlia victim Beth Short, Cecil Hotel guest Elisa Lam, Hope+Flower visitor Heidi Planck and the mostly homeless and alcoholic men preyed upon by the Skid Row Slasher. A central theme is that for decades, Los Angeles has allowed property owners to hoard empty buildings, including some that are supposed to be very affordable housing.
Kim pointed out the brass plaque in the sidewalk that honors a comical competition between LAPD beat cops to see who could write the most jaywalking tickets, then crossed the street to take a photo of our tour guests listening to Richard and Rev. Dylan Littlefield against the backdrop of the defaced facade of the Hotel Cecil, where Dylan is the chaplain.
A firetruck passed between them, emblazoned with its Boyle Heights station home and heading west. Richard waved. Kim captured the exchange. The cellphone pinged with two urgent messages from two freaked out preservation pals.
The Morrison Hotel was on fire.
If you’ve been reading our posts, you know that the long shuttered Morrison Hotel—a vacated slum property that was illegally gutted by party hotel operators Relevant Group to keep it from being named a city landmark—finally has an owner who cares not just about the association with Jim Morrison and The Doors, but about the 111 affordable housing units and the beautiful, historic architecture.
On December 19, 2023, Healthy Housing Foundation held a celebration on the Hope Street side of the building by the famous lobby window, to share their plans to bring the Morrison back to life as very affordable housing. Morrison Hotel album cover photographer Henry Diltz was there, along with Doors drummer John Densmore, and it was a joyous event.
The video embedded above includes the formal remarks, and Kim’s solitary walk through the dark and swampy lobby and commercial spaces, stripped to bare brick and wooden joists, but still holding so much potential.
Getting LADBS construction permits for anything other than a fast tracked new build affordable housing project is a slow process in Los Angeles. In the case of the Morrison Hotel, the building had been kept in squalid conditions for many years before it was boarded up, then during lockdown every interior feature was removed without permits. Now there is no power, no water, holes in the floors where fixtures were ripped out, extensive graffiti tagging and evidence of past fires in the elevator chute.
Turning the empty shell back into individual apartment units and community spaces would probably take several years. And HHF’s parent organization AIDS Healthcare Foundation has also been grappling with a ballot measure funded by the landlord lobby, seeking to restrict their work buying empty buildings and returning them to use as affordable housing. But as far as we know, plans were moving forward.
The Morrison Hotel, it turns out, couldn’t wait. It was burning, and although we were just a mile away, we couldn’t be there to bear witness. But once the tour ended and we’d said farewell to our guests, we headed over to Hope and Pico to find the fire extinguished, and to thank the exhausted firefighters for battling hard to save the structure and for assisting the unhoused folks on the fire escapes to get down.
The sidewalks in front of the hotel were clotted with foam and hoses, fire trucks parked at odd angles, crews still moving in and out of the building. But around the east side where the E-shaped bays let air into interior rooms, we could walk right up to the hotel and even look inside. Here, we were surprised to see that the building was already red tagged, with an LADBS notice warning that the structure was unsafe for occupancy and should not be entered.
Had a building inspector arrived during the fire? No. A check of the LADBS code violations portal shows a flurry of complaints beginning in early December (as well as the complaint we filed in June 2022 about the illegal interior demolition). The red tag we saw was dated 12/22/24 at noon—four days before the fire broke out. It was signed by K. Beauchamp, an inspector who is not assigned to any of the recent code violations.
The Real Deal reports that the city’s investigation is ongoing and Beauchamp’s citation was for danger of walls collapsing. We’re perplexed. When we walked the entire structure from basement to roof in February 2024, and shot the footage included in the video at the top of this newsletter, we saw no evidence that any walls were compromised, only that the interiors had been gutted, leaving long corridors of wooden wall frames, floors, ceilings and stairs that burned so hot and high last week.
The Morrison Hotel is a solid, reinforced brick and steel structure. And while it now has only part of a roof, the building’s brick facade otherwise looks much the same as it did before the fire. It will be up to a structural engineer to tour the property and determine if its integrity has been compromised, and AIDS Healthcare Foundation has told reporters that this has not yet happened.
Even if there are structural issues, as with Skid Row Housing Trust’s remodel of the 19th century Pershing Hotel on Main Street, the historic facade can be shored up with steel braces and a new interior constructed. There could even be a set back with additional floors and residential units added above the roof.
We have questions about what’s happening here. If the building had previously been declared unsafe to enter, why were firefighters visible on the fourth floor when we arrived on Thursday, spraying the structure down with hoses? Why as of Sunday evening is the sidewalk open, the metered parking spaces on both sides in use and the surface parking lot next door still operating?
We don’t know the answers, but we know this: The Morrison Hotel matters. If it wasn’t significant, newspapers, magazines and broadcast reporters all over the world wouldn’t have covered the fire. It matters, and after so many years empty and neglected, it really needs a break.
As it stands now, the owners are responsible for clearing up the code violations that were cited a week ago, as well any new violations resulting from a fire that appears to have been accidentally set by trespassers, and which was exacerbated by illegal demolition work that was performed by prior owners Relevant Group, as cited by the city in October 2022. No remediation was done. AHF bought the damaged hotel in December 2023.
Since the flurry of complaints early this month, LADBS seems to be taking an unusually proactive approach under Section 91.8905. This city is full of derelict abandoned structures that citizens complain about, and code violation cases rarely escalate this quickly. The red tagging under this ordinance means the Morrison Hotel is in great danger, and could soon be subject to an unappealable Building and Safety Commission hearing about its demolition, or simply torn down by the city with no public notice at all.
As we told Spectrum News a day after the fire, tearing the Morrison Hotel down would be a tragedy and a waste. It can still be preserved, restored and reactivated as very affordable housing.
We love the Morrison Hotel and want to see the city use its vast resources, not to ensure the building is demolished quickly, but to help put it back together so that it can once again provide housing for Angelenos, and community serving spaces in the storefronts.
If you care about the Morrison Hotel, please sign and share this petition. We’re asking newly elected Downtown councilmember Ysabel Jurado and Mayor Karen Bass to use the power of their respective offices to direct LADBS not to demolish the building, and to work with city departments and the property owner to find a preservation solution.
Let’s do it for Jim Morrison and for all the poor poets and singers and bookworms and guitarists and dreamers and lovers and mystics and regular folks who deserve a home with dignity and beautiful big windows to look out on the City of Angels.
As for us, we’re doing it in memory of our friend Nat Dickholtz, who was evicted from the Morrison Hotel by slumlords twenty years ago, and whose brave fight and civic advocacy inspired us to try to do something about L.A.’s housing use crisis. This included tipping off Ron Garmon for his 2007 City Beat story about conditions at the hotel, an important piece which is now only available as an Internet Archive link. Nat spent his life reading, thinking about god, working low wage jobs and begging on the street. Through his begging, he experienced profound moments of grace and came to believe that god exists and believes in us. That includes the Morrison Hotel, which can still be saved. And you can help!
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
• Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (Sat. 1/18) • Broadway (Sat. 1/25) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (Sat. 2/1) • Film Noir / Real Noir (Sat. 2/15) • The Real Black Dahlia (Sat. 3/1) • Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice Downtown L.A. (Sat. 3/8) • Bunker Hill, Dead and Alive (Sat. 3/15) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown Los Angeles (Sat. 3/22) • Franklin Village Old Hollywood (Sun. 3/30) • John Fante’s Downtown L.A. (Sat. 4/5) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (Sat. 4/12) • Leo Politi Loves Los Angeles (Sat. 4/19) • Downtown Los Angeles is for Book Lovers (Sat. 4/26)
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