A Storied Hollywood Motel Is Engulfed in Mysterious Blaze — Just Before Becoming a Landmark

There is an excellent chance you have spent time at The HollywoodCenter Motel — if only onscreen.

The Rockford Files shot there. So did Cannon, Mannix and T.J. Hooker. In 1997’s L.A. Confidential, a character turns up in one of its rooms with his throat slit, and the place pops up again in a 2008 episode ofNCIS.

“I take it the Ritz was booked,” a character quips while surveying the seedy surroundings.

With its kidney-shaped pool, aging breeze-block walls and glowing neon sign — and a main structure that bared some resemblence to Psycho‘s Bates Motel — it never required much set dressing. It was what it was — an iconically down-market destination that, on film, “simply played itself,” as Hollywood Heritage, the historic preservation nonprofit, put it in its application nominating the property for landmark status.

And on Jan. 4, it caught fire.

Seventy firefighters responded to the blaze near the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue, steps away from Hollywood High School, where they found flames rising from a 121-year-old structure that was supposed to be empty. It wasn’t — one man was rescued from inside; two other people emerged on their own. By the time the fire department was done, the building wasgone.

The motel started as a family home in 1905, just before Hollywood’s consolidation with the City of Los Angeles. It became a motel in the 1950s, acquiring its neon sign and pool — and, not long after, its first known screen credit, in a 1960 episode of Perry Mason. In the mid-1960s, Neil Young and the Buffalo Springfield are said to have rehearsed there before their first tour, and Janis Joplin and her band rented rooms while recording their first album.

“A physical chronicle of the history of Hollywood,” preservationist Brian Curran, one of the writers of the landmark nomination application, calls it. His co-author Michael Iwinski remembers his own reaction upon laying eyes on it: “How is this still there?”

It did indeed survive some rough times. As the neighborhood got shabbier, so did the motel. A sex worker was strangled there in the 1970s; a decomposed body turned up stuffed in a trunk in the ’80s. The film shoots continued, but tracked the decline. In the 1972 Blaxploitation film Hit Man, the motel proprietor tells an ex-cop sitting on a bed, “It sleeps two but parties four.” By 2009’s Southland, it’s where police discover an abandoned baby.

What the location never lost was its ready-to-shoot utility. “This thing represented all the decades,” says Scott Michaels, founder of Dearly Departed Tours, adding that the motel’s location made it a convenient 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 real estate investor Andy Sogoyan acquired the property through a foreclosure on its previous owner, Sogoyan posted demolition notices. He relocated the last remaining tenant, leaving the building empty for possibly the first time in its history.

But not for long. Squatters moved in. A bungalow caught fire, allegedly damaging an adjacent property. Trash and graffiti accumulated; a maintenance worker was reportedly chased off by a machete-wielding transient. Still, when those demolition notices went up, Hollywood Heritage sent their landmark nomination to the city — much to Sogoyan’s annoyance.

Sogoyan’s own history is almost as complicated as the motel’s. Born in the Soviet Union, he came to the U.S. as an Armenian refugee in the 1970s at age 13 and attended Hollywood High School. A 1990s narcotics conviction ended up being reversed on appeal after he argued entrapment. “After that,” he says, “I did the right thing, and everything piled up my way.” He went on to build a jewelry business, launching a brand called IceLink, before moving into real estate.

But with the Hollywood Center Motel, Sogoyan says he now feels trapped, describing offers from potential buyers as “pennies.” He had a tumor removed last year; the motel ordeal, he says, is “like another cancer.”

He has his own ideas for developing the property — a residential building, perhaps, or an outdoor market — and not much nostalgia for the motel’s storied past. His land-use consultant, Athena Novak, frames their position 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.”

Of course, when a property owner has been fighting landmark status and the building catches fire, suspicion is an understandable reflex. What happened here, though, is not that simple.

Novak says they worked to secure the site — fences, daily visits by a maintenance person — but 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 decades as an arson investigator with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, says indicators point to a homeless-related fire, consistent with an Los Angeles Fire Department report showing that between 2018 and 2024, people experiencing homelessness accounted for a third of all fires the department responded to. But the building was demolished within a day of the fire, making certainty impossible.

“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 May, an LAFD spokesperson said an arson investigation was ongoing.

Preservationists call what happened “demolition by neglect” — allowing a potentially protected building to deteriorate until demolition becomes unavoidable. Sogoyan and Novak dispute the characterization.

What remains after the fire is the neon sign and breeze-block wall. In February, the Cultural Heritage Commission amended the landmark nomination to cover those elements; the full City Council approved the designation on May 1, in a matter of seconds. But preservationist Kim Cooper, who with her husband runs the historic-tour company Esotouric — which once included the area around 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 will ultimately become of the property is still up in the air. Fittingly, though, the midcentury metal letters that once spelled out “Hollywood Center Motel” atop that breeze-block wall have recently disappeared. You can see them now only on the screen.

This story appeared in the June 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.