The Hollywood Premiere Motel hasn’t won any prizes lately. It has a 1.5 star rating on Trip Advisor, which ranks it 112th of 118 motels in Los Angeles.
“Never again,” writes one reviewer.
“I prefer to sleep in my car,” writes another.
But the motel’s chances of being named a Los Angeles Historic Cultural Monument? Strong. In fact, the Hollywood Premiere might become the first motel on the city’s monuments list.
The motel, which stands at Hollywood Boulevard and Serrano Avenue, is a 1960 throwback whose neon sign rises over a gritty stretch of Hollywood Boulevard.
On Thursday, the L.A. Cultural Heritage Commission voted unanimously to move forward with the motel’s nomination as a monument. That action clears the way for a site inspection and another vote, probably in May. Then the nomination would move on to a vote by the City Council.
“This to me is a landmark that defines the entire neighborhood of East Hollywood,” said James Dastoli, a preservationist who nominated the property and spoke at the meeting. He called it “an excellent example of the Midcentury Modern style,” noting its Googie-style sign, “simple geometric volumes, low sloped roof, relatively chaste exterior walls and decorative concrete blocks.”
“My initial response, looking at the nomination, was, really?” said commission President Barry Milofsky. But the more he read, the more he was persuaded.
As the early decades of car culture and roadside design begin to shrink in the rear-view mirror, historians and preservationists say public officials are increasingly wrestling with the question of which artifacts to protect. A $99-a-night Hollywood motel might not carry historic grandeur to rival the Ahwahnee in Yosemite or the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, but as author John Margolies writes in “Home Away from Home: Motels in America,” a motel in context also tells a valuable story — as “part of the ethos of American mobility and popular culture.”
The Hollywood Premiere was built in 1960 with 42 units in a two-story, stucco-clad building, a tall, Googie-style neon sign on a pole, parking near the guest rooms and a swimming pool at the corner of the lot behind breeeze blocks. It once had a coffee shop, but that space is now idle. The architect was Joyce Miller, a woman working in a trade then dominated by men.
By 1973, Dastoli noted, fewer independent motels were being built, Midcentury style was fading and the Hollywood Premiere was advertising its waterbeds and adult movies in back pages of the Los Angeles Times. Yet in the course of 65 years on the boulevard, Dastoli wrote, the building itself has seen only “minimal alterations.” The motel’s look has attracted frequent filming in the last decade, including TV’s “Twin Peaks,” “Fargo” and “NCIS: Los Angeles,” and Justin Timberlake’s 2016 “Can’t Stop the Feeling” music video.
If approved, the motel would join a large, diverse Historic-Cultural Monuments list, which includes more than 1,300 businesses, homes and landscape features. The list, begun in 1962, includes many familiar icons (Union Station, the Bradbury Building, the Hollywood sign, etc.) but also many less obvious choices, including TAIX French Restaurant; the Biltmore Los Angeles hotel; the Studio City site of the now-closed Oil Can Harry’s bar; and Green Dog & Cat Hospital in South L.A.
Designation as a city Historic-Cultural Monument doesn’t automatically protect a building from changes or demolition, nor does it trigger any government spending on preservation. But once a building is designated a landmark, the city’s Office of Historic Resources must review permit application before any alterations are allowed. Demolition is forbidden unless an environmental review has been approved.
Property owners sometimes support historic designations and sometimes oppose them, hoping to keep more flexibility in making changes. Bonnie Xi, whose family has owned the motel since the 1980s, said she hasn’t taken a position on the nomination. She also said that dealing with homeless people in the neighborhood had become more difficult and that she might consider selling soon.
Though the Hollywood Premiere would be the city’s first landmarked motel, the principal city planner in the city’s Office of Historic Resources, Ken Bernstein, pointed out that the city’s historic landmark list does include one precursor to the motel.
That would be the Monterey Trailer Park, which was named a landmark in 2002. Before it evolved into a trailer park, that property in the Hermon neighborhood (near South Pasadena) served in the 1920s and beyond as an “auto camp” for motorists enjoying the new possibilities of automobile travel. The word “motel” was coined in 1925 after many auto camps, auto courts and motor hotels had sprung up across the U.S.
Beyond L.A. city limits, at least one Southern California motel has won historic designation — San Bernardino’s Wigwam Motel, which has been listed in the National Register of Historic Places since 2012. (Its 19 concrete “teepees” along Route 66 remain open for business.)
The Hollywood Premiere nomination also noted two other Midcentury motels with prominent signs nearby on Hollywood Boulevard east of the 101. One is the Harvard House Motel (built in 1947). The other is the Hollywood Downtowner Motel (1956), which has been bought up by the state’s Project Homekey program. Through that program, L.A. County and Covenant House are converting the 30-unit property to serve as interim housing for youth at risk of homelessness.
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