the chateau marmont--8/16/24

16 Aug 2024

the chateau marmont--8/16/24

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Today's selection -- from The Castle on Sunset by Shawn Levy. On the legendary Sunset Boulevard, in 1929, Fred Horowitz would open the equally legendary hotel Chateau Marmont:

“The Sunset Strip: The very name hints of color, ease, spectacle, titillation, destiny, speed, a narrow specificity, a transition, an in-between, a climax, a rending, the end.

“For more than eighty years, the phrase ‘Sunset Strip’ has been a global shorthand for a certain blend of decadence, fashion, music, sex, secrecy, and freedom. The swank supper clubs of the thirties and forties; the coffeehouses and drive-ins of the fifties; the overheated discotheques of the sixties; the hedonistic VIP rooms of the eighties, nineties, and first two decades of the twenty-first century: Our popular ideals of courtship, indulgence, glamour, and cool have been informed, in no small part, by the way people have comported themselves in the hotels, nightspots, eateries, boutiques, and showbiz offices lining those famed not-quite-two sinuous miles of West Hollywood.

“At times, the Strip has been the bull's-eye dead center of the pop world; at others, it's been a minor but unignorable element of the cultural conversation. And always, just when it seems to have fallen off the map altogether, when it has been declared dead and abandoned for newer, shinier locales, some novelty emerges—folk rock, or hair metal, or a hot restaurant, or a revitalized hotel, or a tabloid-fueling tragedy—and the Sunset Strip is back on everyone's radar.

“But before it was the center of the world, it seemed more like the end of it.

“You didn't always need a satellite to see the edges of Los Angeles. In the mid-twenties, you could get in a car downtown and within half an hour find yourself at a spot where the paved road ended and bridle trails began.

“Such a place was the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and the road that led north into Laurel Canyon. At that corner, Los Angeles's bus and trolley lines made their last stops before turning back toward town. To the west, a cow path led through farmland—onion fields, poinsettia farms, and avocado groves-to the suburban city of Beverly Hills, some two miles farther along on the way to the sea.

“At the time, L.A. was beginning the upsurge that would eventually make it a world-class metropolis. Between 1920 and 1930, the city would more than double in population; new houses were being built so rapidly that as many as seventy-five ships a day from Oregon and Washington arrived in port with loads of lumber for home building. But looking past where Sunset Boulevard ended, there was little sign of a land rush.

“The road between Los Angeles and Beverly Hills was unimproved because it belonged to neither city. It lay in an unincorporated chunk of Los Angeles County known originally as Sherman or Shermantown, named for the railroad baron General Moses Sherman, who had helped create the Los Angeles trolley car system and built a massive rail yard outside the city limits. In the previous year, local business interests had christened their little patch ‘West Hollywood,’ hoping to accrue some of the stardust associated with the name of the Los Angeles neighborhood nearest to them, which had become world famous as the home of the movies.

“In the fall of 1926, Fred Horowitz, a downtown Los Angeles lawyer who had begun to speculate in property and construction, came to visit a hillside west of the Laurel Canyon road. Eastward lay the burgeoning movie town, Hollywood, where the twelve-story Roosevelt Hotel, still under construction, stood out boldly, and, beyond that, the skyline of downtown L.A., where a majestic new thirty-two-floor city hall was rising. To the west were Beverly Hills and Westwood, where a new campus for the University of California was being built, and beyond that the blue surge of the Pacific and, like dark clouds on its surface, the Channel Islands. To the south spread the chessboard of small communities that would eventually make up greater Los Angeles: Culver City, Venice, Inglewood, Crenshaw, Compton, dotted with cottages, businesses, and farms, crisscrossed by Wilshire, Olympic, Beverly, Pico, and Santa Monica Boulevards. It was, as Horowitz had hoped, a stupendous panorama.

View of the Chateau from Sunset Boulevard

“And visible only to him was a castle, a French chateau of classic stature, elegance, and nobility, a monumental edifice designed to import some savor of the very old world into this very, very new one. He planned to build the most luxurious apartment house in all of Southern California on the spot where he stood: in a pitch of scrub alongside an unpaved road.

“The Sunset Boulevard upon which Horowitz gazed wasn't entirely bare. There were a few farmhouses, not on the road, but visible from it, some of which had been occupied by the same families for nearly seventy years. Just below him stood a general store that sold groceries and gasoline and whatnot. A bit west, an enterprising family had recently opened a clutch of commercial buildings they were calling, with great optimism, Sunset Plaza; a pair of restaurants, the Russian Eagle and La Boheme, had opened there, and movie stars had started to pop in for meals. Another group of investors were building the Hacienda Arms, an imposing five-story apartment building with a Mediterranean facade. And there were—again, set back from the road—a handful of mansions built by members of the nouveau riche movie crowd, which had practically minted its own money in the past few years and had splashed it on absurdly oversized and architecturally fanciful homes.

“But none of those would remotely rival what Horowitz had in mind. Horowitz was scouting locations for an audacious folly he had conceived while traveling in the Loire valley of France. There he came upon the Chateau d'Amboise, a Gothic castle that had dominated the landscape in ever-grander form dating back to when a stronghold was first built on the site in the eleventh century. The massive building had significant claims to history: Starting in the fifteenth century, it was one of the favored homes of the kings of France, including Charles VIII, who died there after hitting his head on a door lintel; Henry II, who, along with his wife, Catherine de' Medici, raised his family on the grounds, including his ward, Mary Stuart of Scotland; and Francis I, who invited the great artists and architects of his time to live and work there, including Leonardo da Vinci, who died during his stay and was buried in a chapel on the chateau grounds.

“Horowitz was less taken with the history of the chateau than with the imposing spectacle of it: a formidable stone fortress capped with conical towers perched on a bluff overlooking the river Loire. He had a mind to build a fortress of his own, and he envisioned it as inhabiting its own commanding vista, not of the Loire and the great vineyards and orchards that lined it, but of the burgeoning communities of Los Angeles. Like the Chateau d'Amboise, it would be built of pale stone, slate-gray gables, balconies, Gothic archways, and turrets. It would be solid—earthquake proof, even. And it would be not a castle but a luxury apartment building, and—at seven stories high—the tallest and most impressive edifice for miles and perhaps, given its elevated setting, in the whole area.

“Los Angeles in the mid- to late twenties was a kind of haven for such audacious conceits. Not far from where Horowitz envisioned his demi-castle, other landmark apartment houses stood or were being planned along French lines, such as the La Fontaine (built in 1928), the Granville Towers (1930), and the Voltaire (1930), or with Spanish-Mexican influences, such as the Andalusia (1926), the Villa Carlotta (1926), and the El Mirador (1929), or in the Italianate style, such as the Villa d'Este (1927). Just as Hollywood had made a specialty of imitating the whole world in its film studios, so the community around it seemed eager to imitate the whole world's architecture in its homes and offices, generally with no expense or gaucherie spared. The city was like a movie set and its architects and builders production designers.

“But even in an environment where excess was a minimal standard, Horowitz's plan seemed, to put it politely, daft. A man who had been gaining a reputation as a fierce defense attorney and was said to have eyes on public office, he had never built or even managed an apartment house, much less a grand tower like the one he had in mind. What's more, he didn't have enough money for both the land and the construction project. And the site he had chosen was absurdly remote and desolate.

“Actually, that latter might well have been a selling point. Land in undeveloped locations was generally cheaper than that in the heart of a bustling metropolis after all. Additionally, by crossing the line out of Los Angeles into West Hollywood, which hadn't yet been incorporated as a city, Horowitz was standing in a portion of Los Angeles County that wasn't subject to municipal taxes or building codes or other forms of regulation. If he were to build on the land that he was examining that day, he could legitimately claim his apartment house was within walking distance of the trolley line-not to mention a drive of approximately equal duration to downtown, the ocean, the San Fernando Valley, and the movie studios of Hollywood and the surrounding areas. ‘Fifteen minutes to everywhere,’ as he liked to say. It might have been along a stretch of dirt road and the edge of the city, but it was a spot that he believed would be the center of the region: a canny discovery.”