A Storied Hollywood Motel Is Engulfed in Mysterious Blaze — Simply Earlier than Turning into a Landmark

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

The Rockford Information shot there. So did Cannon, Mannix and T.J. Hooker. In 1997’s L.A. Confidential, a personality turns up in certainly one of its rooms together 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 older breeze-block partitions and glowing neon signal — and a foremost 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 utility nominating the property for landmark standing.

And on Jan. 4, it caught fireplace.

Seventy firefighters responded to the blaze close to the nook of Sundown Boulevard and Highland Avenue, steps away from Hollywood Excessive College, the place they discovered flames rising from a 121-year-old construction that was presupposed to be empty. It wasn’t — one man was rescued from inside; two different individuals emerged on their very own. By the point the hearth division was finished, the constructing was gone.

The motel began as a household house in 1905, simply earlier than Hollywood’s consolidation with the Metropolis 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. Within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, Neil Younger and the Buffalo Springfield are mentioned 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 utility, 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 instances. Because the neighborhood received 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. Within 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 Excursions, 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 presumably the primary time in its historical past.

However not for lengthy. Squatters moved in. A bungalow caught fireplace, allegedly damaging an adjoining property. Trash and graffiti amassed; a upkeep employee was reportedly chased off by a machete-wielding transient. Nonetheless, 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 difficult 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 Excessive College. A Nineteen 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.

However with the Hollywood Middle Motel, Sogoyan says he now feels trapped, describing presents from potential patrons as “pennies.” He had a tumor eliminated final yr; the motel ordeal, he says, is “like another cancer.”

He has his personal concepts for growing 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.”

In fact, when a property proprietor has been combating landmark standing and the constructing catches fireplace, suspicion is an comprehensible reflex. What occurred right here, although, isn’t that easy.

Novak says they labored to safe the positioning — fences, day by day visits by a upkeep individual — 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 Division, says indicators level to a homeless-related fireplace, in step with an Los Angeles Hearth Division report displaying that between 2018 and 2024, individuals experiencing homelessness accounted for a 3rd of all fires the division responded to. However the constructing was demolished inside a day of the hearth, making certainty unattainable.

“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 Might, an LAFD spokesperson mentioned 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 hearth is the neon signal and breeze-block wall. In February, the Cultural Heritage Fee amended the landmark nomination to cowl these parts; the total Metropolis Council accredited the designation on Might 1, in a matter of seconds. However preservationist Kim Cooper, who together with her husband runs the historic-tour firm Esotouric — which as soon as included the world 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’s going to in the end grow to be of the property remains to be up within the air. Fittingly, although, the midcentury steel letters that after spelled out “Hollywood Center Motel” atop that breeze-block wall have just lately disappeared. You may see them now solely on the display.

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