A 120-year-old shingle-style house that was the centerpiece of the Hollywood Center Motel, a vacant but historic site on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles that was the backdrop for movie scenes and a hangout for rock stars, has been destroyed in a fire, officials said.
On Sunday around 4:30 a.m., firefighters responded to reports of a rubbish fire at the motel site. They arrived to find the main structure, a boarded-up, three-story building dating to 1905, engulfed in flames, Capt. Adam VanGerpen of the Los Angeles Fire Department said in video footage from the scene that the department shared on YouTube.
Firefighters could hear someone inside the dilapidated building calling for help, and rescuers guided a man down a ladder to safety, Captain VanGerpen said. The person they rescued, a 42-year-old man, was taken to a hospital in stable condition, he said, and two other people who emerged from the back of the structure wandered off.
It took 70 firefighters an hour and 12 minutes to knock down the fire.
In an interview on Tuesday, he said it was the fourth time in recent months that firefighters had been called to the site. After the fire was extinguished, the building was torn down because it was structurally unstable. “As soon as we leave, sometimes people will go back in there,” he said.
The cause of the fire is under investigation, he said.
In a region still recovering from wildfires last year that destroyed buildings that symbolized the architectural legacy of Los Angeles, the loss hit hard. Preservationists said the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission voted on Dec. 4 to consider the site as a potential landmark as part of the city’s architectural and cultural legacy.
Hollywood Heritage, a nonprofit organization, has been lobbying for the motel’s designation as a Cultural Heritage Monument. That group’s preservation committee had been scheduled to visit the site in the coming days with members of the Cultural Heritage Commission to highlight the motel’s unique role in the city.
“The reason why you get a local designation is so that there is a stay of execution if somebody wants to tear something down that has been landmarked,” Margot Gerber, the president of Hollywood Heritage, said on Tuesday.
The motel’s central structure, a Queen Anne-style building with a balcony, was first used as a house. One of its first owners, Sarah Avery, nicknamed it El Nido, which means the nest.
Colonial-revival bungalows were added in 1922 to create a bungalow court. By midcentury, a pool and a marquee had been added and breeze-block walls were erected to surround the property as it transformed into a midcentury tourist motor hotel, the Hollywood Heritage statement said.
It was most likely the last single-family home on Sunset Boulevard dating from the early days of Hollywood, Ms. Gerber said. “It had so many styles of architecture on it,” she said.
The motel became a “seedy backdrop” for film and television productions, including “The Rockford Files” and “L.A. Confidential,” the Hollywood Heritage statement said.
In the 1960s and ’70s, it became “a low-rent option for rock ’n’ roll hopefuls,” as musicians — “some who made it and some who did not” — called the motel home, the statement said.
Brian Curran, a co-chair of the Hollywood Heritage Preservation Committee, said Neil Young, David Crosby and Janis Joplin were among the musicians who had either stayed or jammed at the hotel.
Hollywood Heritage, he said, would continue to pursue protections for the motel’s 13 bungalows, the breeze-block walls and the decorative roadside signage.
Mr. Curran said the site ceased operating as a motel in 2018, changed ownership and was vacant by 2025. Properties that are unsecured “become targets for transients,” he said. “And then they burn.”
Athena Novak, a land-use consultant, said she was hired last year to work with Andranik Sogoyan, a businessman who is the current owner. She said Mr. Sogoyan had lent the previous owner money to buy the property, but then ended up owning it himself when it went into foreclosure. Despite efforts to secure it with barbed wire and signage, it had been repeatedly broken into, she said.
“My client got it when it was dilapidated,” Ms. Novak said.
Security and fire risk are of concern because the property is surrounded by residences, she said. “We are going to determine how we will move forward,” she said. “The Fire Department made the judgment call to tear down the structure.”
The Cultural Heritage Commission said on Tuesday that it would still consider the motel site for monument status in February, but “will likely evaluate how the historic significance of the property has been affected by the fire.”
Mr. Curran said although the main house was the most significant element of the complex, “all is not completely lost.”
“But what we take away from this terrible gut punch of a tragedy,” he added, “is the fact that buildings like these, and Hollywood has a number of them, they are vacant, vulnerable historical sites.”
Christine Hauser is a Times reporter who writes breaking news stories, features and explainers.
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