There’s an excellent chance you’ve spent time at The Hollywood Center Motel — if only on screen.
Rockford Files Shoot there. And so I did cannon, Manix and T. J. Hooker. In 1997 Los Angeles ConfidentialOne of the characters appears in one of his rooms with his throat cut, and the place appears again in a 2008 episode of the series NCIS.
“I think the Ritz is booked,” one character sneered as she surveyed the seedy surroundings.
With its kidney-shaped pool, old brick walls and glowing neon sign – and a main structure that looks nothing like… mental patientBates Motel – It didn’t take a lot of clothes. It was what it was — an iconic down-market destination, which “simply played up” in the film, as Hollywood Heritage, a nonprofit historic preservation organization, put it in its application to nominate the property for landmark status.
On January 4, it caught fire.
Seventy firefighters responded to the blaze near the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue, steps from Hollywood High School, where they found flames shooting from a 121-year-old building that was supposed to be empty. This was not the case, as one man was saved from within; Two other people appeared alone. By the time the fire department finished, the building was gone.
The hotel began as a family home in 1905, before Hollywood merged with the city of Los Angeles. It became a hotel in the 1950s, got its own neon sign and swimming pool, and soon after, its first known screen credit, in a 1960 episode of Perry Mason. In the mid-1960s, Neil Young and Buffalo Springfield reportedly rehearsed there before their first tour, and Janis Joplin and her band rented rooms while recording their first album.
“A physical record of Hollywood history,” preservationist Brian Curran, one of the authors of the historic nomination application, calls it. Its co-author Michael Iwinsky recalls his reaction when he laid eyes on it: “How is this still there?”
She has already survived some tough times. As the neighborhood became more chaotic, so did the hotel. A sex worker was strangled there in the 1970s. A decomposing body was found stuffed in a box in the 1980s. Film shoots continued, but tracked a decline. In the 1972 Blaxploitation film Hitman“He sleeps for two and celebrates for four,” the hotel owner tells a former policeman sitting on the bed. By 2009 Southlandwhere the police discover an abandoned child.
What the site has never lost is its photo-ready utility. “This thing represents all the decades,” says Scott Michaels, founder of Dearly Departed Tours, adding that the hotel’s location made it a fitting backdrop. “It’s in the middle of Los Angeles, between all the studios, and it’s empty most of the time.”
The hotel closed in 2018. In February 2025, after real estate investor Andy Soghoian acquired the property through foreclosure on its previous owner, Soghoian posted demolition notices. He moved out the last remaining tenant, leaving the building empty for perhaps the first time in its history.
But not for long. The squatters moved in. A single-storey house caught fire, damaging a neighboring property. Trash and graffiti piled up. A passerby reportedly chased a maintenance worker with a machete. However, when those demolition notices came out, Hollywood Heritage sent its historic nomination to the city, much to Soghoyan’s annoyance.
The history of the Sogoyan is almost as complex as the history of the hotel. Born in the Soviet Union, he came to the United States as an Armenian refugee in the 1970s when he was 13 and attended Hollywood High School. A 1990s drug conviction ended up overturned on appeal after he argued entrapment. “After that, I did the right thing, and everything piled up my way,” he says. He then started a jewelry company, launching a brand called IceLink, before moving into real estate.
But with the Hollywood Center Motel, Soghoyan says he now feels trapped, describing offers from potential buyers as “short.” I had a tumor removed last year. He says the hotel’s plight is “like another cancer.”
He has his own ideas for developing the property — perhaps an apartment building, or an open-air market — and doesn’t have much nostalgia for the hotel’s historic past. His land use advisor, Athena Novak, puts their position bluntly. “It has a very satanic history,” she says. “It wasn’t a friendly little engine [hotel] …It’s like the saddest story in Hollywood.
Of course, when a property owner fights its historic status and the building catches fire, skepticism is an understandable reaction. But what happened here is not that simple.
Novak says they’ve worked to secure the site — fences, daily visits by a maintenance worker — but there are limits. “Do you want them to go into an abandoned building where people are armed and using meth and kick them off your property?” Novak says.
Ed Nordskog, who spent decades as an arson investigator for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, says the indicators point to a homeless-related fire, which is consistent with a Los Angeles Fire Department report showing that between 2018 and 2024, people experiencing homelessness made up a third of all fires the department responded to. But the building was demolished within a day of the fire, making it impossible to confirm.
“We’ll never know, no matter what happens,” Nordskog says. “They bulldozed it within a day, and that makes any investigation completely impossible.” As of early May, an LAFD spokesperson said the arson investigation was ongoing.
Preservationists call what happened “demolition by neglect” — allowing a potentially protected building to deteriorate until demolition becomes unavoidable. Soghoyan and Novak dispute this characterization.
What was left after the fire was the neon sign and the wall made of breeze. In February, the Cultural Heritage Committee amended the historical nomination to include these elements; The full City Council approved the appointment on May 1, within seconds. But Kim Cooper, a conservationist who with her husband runs the historic tour company Esotouric – which included the area around the hotel on its sightseeing route – fell short of victory.
“It wasn’t about a cool, Instagrammable sign,” she says. “This is the soul of the city being ripped out inch by inch.”
What will eventually become of the property is still up in the air. However, it’s fitting that the mid-century metal letters that once spelled “Hollywood Center Motel” atop that brick wall have recently disappeared. You can now see them only on the screen.
This story appeared in the June 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
