A raging fire destroyed a 120-year-old Hollywood motel featured in the movie “LA Confidential” early Sunday – as a man trapped inside daringly escaped the inferno by breaking a window, officials said.
The blaze broke out on the first and second floors around 4:30 a.m. and gutted the once-iconic but now abandoned Hollywood Center Motel, formerly a favorite stop for rock stars like Neil Young that gained notoriety as the scene of a 1986 murder, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
A 42-year-old man trapped inside screamed for help as firefighters arrived, daringly escaping by smashing a window and climbing down a ladder to safety, the department said in a news release.
The man, who may have been homeless, was hospitalized with a minor arm injury and did not suffer any burns, reports KTLA.
It took firefighters roughly an hour and 12 minutes to extinguish the flames on the boarded-up building, which had previously survived earthquakes, flooding and riots. What remained of the motel was then demolished, LAFD officials said.
The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
The Sunset Boulevard motel was built in 1905 and described by the Hollywood Heritage Museum as “one of the last remaining pre-consolidated Hollywood estates with frontage on a major thoroughfare.” The building predated the neighborhood’s incorporation into Los Angeles in 1910.
The motel fell into disrepair and gained a seedy reputation in its later decades, with a dead body found stuffed in a trunk in one of its 23 rooms in 1986, according to an SFGate profile on the spot.
The museum called the loss of the building, which has been closed since 2018, a tragic loss.
The fire came just weeks after the Cultural Heritage Commission voted to consider the site as a possible landmark.
