The Villa Carlotta, four stories and 50 units of embattled and endangered Old Hollywood noir that has for generations housed all manner of strivers and connivers on their ways either up or down the precipitous Tinseltown social ladder, was seedy from the moment the mortar set. The developer Luther T. Mayo built the Italianate villa at the corner of Franklin and Tamarind Avenues in 1926 from a design by architect Arthur E. Harvey, with rumored financing from William Randolph Hearst. Upon completion, it belonged to Eleanor Ince, widow of silent-film magnate Thomas Ince. According to legend, Hearst gave her the building as a gift after accidentally killing her husband on his yacht in 1924. The bullet, so the story goes, was intended for Charlie Chaplin, whom Hearst suspected was having an affair with his mistress, Marion Davies (Rosebud herself). Supposedly, Ince’s wife received the luxury residence hotel for her grief. Edward G. Robinson, George Cukor, and Marion Davies were among its early celebrity tenants. Louella Parsons, the most famous gossip writer of the era, penned her column from a two-story apartment on the courtyard. A personal favorite of Hearst’s, Parsons was on the yacht the night of Thomas’s alleged shooting, and is said to have received The Carlotta’s finest apartment for her silence.

Known to its inhabitants as either “The Villa” or “The Carlotta,” the building has since teetered between glory and ruin. A neighbor might vanish and reappear as the opening act at the MTV awards. Another might drop out of sight only to have the manager find his body when rent went unpaid. Its builder called it “the last word in luxury,” but over the years it grew into a West Coast Chelsea Hotel, bedraggled and bohemian and all the cooler for it. Jim Morrison is said to have crashed there in the 60s. Singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones was a longtime resident. It was a way station on the road to making it, or not. Neil Patrick Harris lived here, post–Doogie Howser; so did Michael Biehn, post The Terminator. Quentin Tarantino tried to rent the apartment across the hall from me as a writer’s retreat few years back. The manager turned him down.

The building today. By Stinson Carter.

But just like the Chelsea Hotel before it, and so many other historic residences in once marginal neighborhoods from Manhattan to the Mission, the Villa Carlotta has come under threat as of late. Inevitably, the developers are here to trade The Villa’s 20th-century cool for that most 21st-century fate: luxury hotel rooms. These past few months, I’ve had a top-floor view of the protracted path from threadbare to 10,000-thread count.

The fourth-floor studio in which I’ve lived since 2001 faces the “Hollywood” sign, and a slope of hills between Bronson and Beachwood Canyons of fine Spanish and mid-century modern houses. I first laid eyes on the Villa Carlotta in the summer of 2000. I took a road trip after college graduation from Poughkeepsie, New York, to Los Angeles, where I intended to make my life as a writer. From the sidewalk patio at Birds, an unpretentious chicken joint and bar in adjacent Franklin Village, I was seduced by the grand and crumbling building across the street. I knew immediately that whatever ambitions I had for Hollywood, The Carlotta would be the place where they began. West Hollywood was too Ken and Barbie, Hollywood was too dirty, but this place––neither Hollywood nor Los Feliz, but a little of both––this was just right.