Building From The Doors Morrison Hotel Album Cover Destroyed in Fire

A building well-known to fans of classic rock was destroyed Thursday, when a massive fire tore through the downtown Los Angeles building made famous by The Doors album Morrison Hotel. The four-story structure at South Hope Street had been vacant for 15 years, the Los Angeles Fire Department said in a written statement, but had been used as a shelter by people experiencing homelessness. It remains unclear if all occupants were safely evacuated during the blaze.

The structure, built in 1914, bore a front window that read “Morrison Hotel” in the late 1960s and beyond, making it an obvious draw for the Jim Morrison-fronted band. In his 1991 memoir Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and The Doors, Doors drummer John Paul Densmore wrote that photographer Henry Diltz stood with the band—which was already internationally famous following the release of hits such as “Light My Fire,” “Strange Days,” and “The End”—outside the structure on a 1969 afternoon until the front desk clerk was called away from the desk. At that point, the band hopped into the window and struck a pose behind a sign that read “Rooms from $2.50.”

The photo was used on the eponymous record’s cover the following year. The lauded 1970 release contained well-known songs such as “Roadhouse Blues” and “Peace Frog.” Morrison died the following year, on July 3, 1971.

Even in the Morrison Hotel era, the building’s best days were behind it. “It was a great old wooden building with many small rooms upstairs where transients and drinkers used to sleep it off on a cot,” Diltz wrote in a Facebook post on Friday. In the decades since, the building had been red-tagged (that is, marked as too dangerous to inhabit) by the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety.

In recent years, it has been used mainly as a training building for the LAFD. It was purchased in 2022 by Los Angeles nonprofit the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which had intended to convert the building into affordable housing. Mark Dyer, the Foundation’s vice president of operations, tells the New York Times that about 25 people had taken shelter in the building at the time of the fire. “It’s probably a complete loss,” he said.

According to the LAFD, reports of the blaze were called in mid-morning on December 26, prompting over 100 firefighters to respond to the scene. It took 90 minutes to get the blaze under control. Video from the location shows flames shooting from several windows, as well as heavy, dark smoke.

It’s hoped that most of the folks who had gathered in the building escaped safely, and LAFD says they rescued three from the blaze. The fire was already too advanced for firefighters “to confirm the fourth floor was evacuated prior to arrival,” a spokesperson says, so “Human Remains Detection K9s will be used, once safe, to search the structure” to determine if there were any casualties.

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