Garden of Allah Hotel

The Garden of Allah was a famous hotel in Hollywood, California, at 8152 Sunset Boulevard between Crescent Heights and Havenhurst, at the east end of the Sunset Strip. It was originally a 2.5 acre estate called Hayvenhurst that was built in 1913 by real estate developer William H. Hay as his private residence. Alla Nazimova acquired the property in 1918 and then, in 1926, converted it into a residential hotel by adding 25 villas around the residence. The hotel opened in January 1927 as the Garden of Alla Hotel (no final "h" on Alla). By 1930, new owners had changed the name to the Garden of Allah Hotel. Over the next two decades, the property went through a succession of owners, the last of whom was Bart Lytton, owner of Lytton Savings & Loan, who demolished the hotel in 1959 and replaced it with his bank's main branch.

History

Hayvenhurst

Hayvenhurst, an estate built by William H. Hay in 1913 and later purchased by Alla Nazimova who converted it into a hotel in 1927

The estate that later became the Garden of Allah Hotel was built in 1913 by real estate developer William H. Hay in the northwest corner of the Crescent Heights neighborhood, a 160-acre tract bounded by Sunset Blvd. at the north, Santa Monica Blvd. at the south and Crescent Avenue (later changed to Fairfax Avenue) to the east and Sweetzer Ave. to the west, which Hay had subdivided and developed starting in 1905.^[1]

The estate's original address was 8080 Sunset Blvd., which was later changed to 8152 Sunset. It occupied a 2.5 acre lot that fronted Sunset Blvd. and was bounded by Crescent Heights Blvd. to the east and Hayvenhurst Dr. (now spelled Havenhurst) to the west. The property's southern boundary was also the border between the Hollywood District of the city of Los Angeles and the then-unincorporated area that later became the city of West Hollywood.

Hay and his wife Katherine personally supervised construction of the estate. The house had 12 rooms and four bathrooms. The finishes were all in Circassian walnut that the Hays had collected on a trip to the Philippines in 1912.^[2] The interior walls were covered in canvas and hand painted. The garage had bays for two cars—a rarity in those days—with rooms upstairs for live-in servants. Construction and landscaping cost an estimated $30,000.^[3]

The Hays' stay at Hayvenhurst was short-lived. Within a few years they had built and moved into a new house a few blocks east, at 7920 Sunset Blvd., the site today of the Directors Guild of America headquarters. William Hay also purchased Encino Ranch, a large tract of land in the San Fernando Valley that he would later develop into the upscale Encino District of Los Angeles.^[4] Hayvenhurst reportedly stood unoccupied for several years.

Garden of Alla

Stage and screen actress Alla Nazimova leased Hayvenhurst from William Hay not long after she moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1918; she purchased it outright a year later.^[5] Nazimova jokingly called her new home, "The Garden of Alla," which was a reference to her own name and the best-selling 1905 novel, The Garden of Allah, by British author Robert S. Hichens.

As her acting career declined, Nazimova built a complex of 25 villas around the main building in 1927.^[6]

Garden of Allah Hotel

The Garden of Allah became home to many celebrities and literary figures. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived there for several months in 1937–38 at the beginning of his final sojourn in Hollywood. (He wrote himself a postcard while there: "Dear Scott — How are you? Have been meaning to come in and see you. I have living [sic] at the Garden of Allah. Yours, Scott Fitzgerald.")^[7] Humorist/actor Robert Benchley was a frequent resident. Fitzgerald's biographer and lover Sheilah Graham later wrote a book about the place called The Garden of Allah (New York: Crown, 1969).

Purchase by Lytton Savings

On April 11, 1959, Bart Lytton, president of Lytton Savings and Loan, announced that he had purchased the Garden of Allah Hotel from Beatrice Rosenus and Morris Markowitz for $755,000. Lytton's plans for the property included razing the hotel to make way for a new main branch for his bank, which had formerly been headquartered in the Canoga Park District of the San Fernando Valley.^[8]

In August, Bart Lytton hosted a farewell party on the grounds of the hotel. Among the attendees were silent film star Francis X. Bushman and his wife, who had been at the opening party in January 1927. The bulldozers arrived within days, and by the end of October, all traces of the hotel were gone and work had begun on the Lytton Center.

Source of the name

The hotel's name was not a direct reference to Islam but rather to Nazimova's first name and the title of a 1905 novel, The Garden of Allah, by British writer Robert S. Hichens. The novel was adapted into a play first produced in London in 1909. Mary Mannering acted in the play in 1910. The novel also served as the basis for three movies, the final one of which starred Marlene Dietrich, who was once a resident of the hotel.

Quotes about the Garden of Allah

It reminds me of Hollywood.

— George S. Kaufman, on why he liked living at the Garden of Allah.^[9]

I'll be damned if I'll believe anyone lives in a place called the Garden of Allah.

— Thomas Wolfe, a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, July 26, 1937^[10]

Nothing interrupted the continual tumult that was life at the Garden of Allah. Now and then the men in white came with a van and took somebody away, or bankruptcy or divorce or even jail claimed a participant in its strictly unstately sarabands. Nobody paid any mind.

— columnist Lucius Beebe, a frequent Garden resident^[10]

A light-hearted, unrealistic place.

— Sheilah Graham, The Garden of Allah

There is no place for a Garden of Allah that, for one brief moment, was Camelot. It was inevitable that Hollywood as we knew it, and its satellite, Alla's garden, should disappear together.

— Sheilah Graham, The Garden of Allah

Hollywood's and thus America's most unconventional hotel, actually "notorious" would be a more descriptive word.

— David Wallace, Lost Hollywood

Famous residents and guests

A representative list of the Garden of Allah Hotel's famous guests:

In popular culture

Garden of Allah villas at Universal Studios Florida inspired by the hotel.

• In 1956, just a few years before its demise, the Garden of Allah was one of the settings for Pamela Moore's novel Chocolates for Breakfast, the story of an teenage girl growing up with an actress mother.
• The Garden of Allah Hotel is mentioned in chapter 2 of the Ronald Reagan biography Killing Reagan by Bill O'Reilly. In the late 1940s it was where "Reagan reaches bottom when he wakes up one morning at the Garden of Allah Hotel on Sunset Boulevard and does not know the name of the woman lying next to him".
• Herman Wouk called the Garden "Rainbow's End" in Youngblood Hawke, his novel about a successful writer who goes to Hollywood.
• It is a persistent urban legend that the bulldozing of the Garden of Allah in 1959 inspired the line in Joni Mitchell's song "Big Yellow Taxi," "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." Indeed, Mitchell later lived in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood in the hills north of the site. However, Mitchell herself told journalist Alan McDougall in the early 1970s that the lyrics were inspired by her first trip to Hawaii in 1970 where she was struck by the jarring juxtaposition of nature and modern civilization.^[33] Also, the next line after "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot" is "With a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot," which does not reflect what happened to the Garden of Allah site, which was replaced with a branch bank building.
• Don Henley sang about it in his song "The Garden of Allah."
• The hotel is the setting for a series of historical novels by Martin Turnbull: The Garden on Sunset (2012), The Trouble with Scarlett (2013), Citizen Hollywood (2014) and Searchlights and Shadows (2015).^[34]
• In the 2013 film Gangster Squad, a signboard reading "Garden of Allah" is seen outside the apartment in which Ryan Gosling's character resides, just before the scene in which he wakes up with Emma Stone.
• The location of the Garden of Allah, which is now a bank building, is prominently displayed in a comical scene from the 1987 movie Barfly starring Mickey Rourke.^[35]

References

External links

• History of the Garden of Allah with photos
• The Vanished Garden of Carnal Abandon
• Time Magazine article on closing of Garden of Allah in 1959
• TCM Movie Morlocks article on the Garden of Allah

Coordinates: 34°5′52.77″N 118°21′59.65″W / 34.0979917°N 118.3665694°W / 34.0979917; -118.3665694