Standing tall in Hollywood since 1931, this art deco high-rise once housed Gene Hackman, Montgomery Clift, Mickey Rooney and Ronald Reagan

Added to the National Register of Historic Places on July 18, 1985

One of my favorite sections of any LA freeway is the 101 south between the Highland and Hollywood Blvd. exits. As you emerge from the Cahuenga Pass and head through Hollywood, a vast panorama opens up, with a sea of classic Hollywood high-rises in the foreground, many with their original roof signs intact. The Knickerbocker. The Capitol Records building. The Broadway Hollywood Building. Standing tall among them is the Montecito Apartments, a colossal 1931 art deco building with a celebrity history as long as its elevator shaft. 

Rising 10 stories above Franklin Ave. (not counting the two “basement” floors that peek out from the steep hillside on Cherokee Ave.), Montecito announces itself from blocks away through its sheer height. Head closer and the impeccable detailing on this building becomes clearer. Architect Marcus P. Miller designed the building in high zig-zag moderne art deco style, and he gave it a decorative flair that both amps up the building’s extravagance and, somehow, softens its monumentality. 

There’s an ornamental concrete frieze between the second and third story that wraps around the building like a fancy belt, accented on each pier by a Mayan-style concrete pendant. The glorious entryway reminds me of one of those luxury hotels on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, its bronze doors surrounded by marble and black glass, and topped with a cast iron canopy and some truly inspired art deco lamps. Look up: just below its copper roof is a giant neon “MONTECITO” sign, looming above the top floor. Classic. I want one of those at the top of my house, neighbor complaints be damned. 

The main reason this thing was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985 was as one of the finest examples of art deco architecture in Hollywood. The Montecito’s nomination form also cites it as one of the best extant works by Marcus P. Miller, who also gave us the programmatic building for The Darkroom). 

To my mind, the Montecito is equally important for exemplifying a Hollywood in transition from an LA suburb into an urban center. According to this map from the Sanborn Map Company, the lots at the corner of Franklin & Cherokee were all taken up with single family homes in 1919. The property that would eventually become the Montecito’s surface parking lot hadn’t been developed, and within a few years had become another single-family home. But that would all change soon, as an influx of people attracted to Hollywood’s burgeoning film industry helped LA’s population more than double to 1.2 million in the decade between 1920 and 1930. The Montecito Apartments were just one of the many multi-story apartment buildings (e.g. Hollywood Argyle Apartments, visit #66 & Colonial Building, visit #33), courtyard apartments (see the Andalusia, Ronda Apartments & Patio del Moro, visits #30-32) and duplexes sprouting up to accommodate all the newcomers in the ‘20s and ‘30s.

So who lived at the Montecito Apartments?

The past resident list runs deep on this one. James Cagney, Julie Harris, Montgomery Clift, George C. Scott, Rip Torn, Gene Hackman, Don Johnson, Sal Mineo and Ben Vereen all stayed here. A 1987 LA Times article by Patt Morrison mentions that Mickey Rooney used to take care of sick animals in his room at the Montecito. It was also the first place that Ronald Regan stayed when he moved to Hollywood in 1937 to shoot his first movie, Love Is on the Air. The Morrison piece quotes Gene Hinson, former manager of the Montecito, who explains that actors liked the Montecito partly for the friendly staff, and partly because “we gave them credit.”

The Montecito declined in the ‘70s, as did much of Hollywood. In 1985, its owners applied for grants from the LA Community Redevelopment Agency and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to convert it into 180 apartments for low-income senior citizens. And that’s how it still operates now. For a 90-year-old high rise, the Montecito has retained remarkable integrity – aside from a pool added in 1956 (and later removed), a parking lot added and some interior rehab done in 1985 during the conversion to senior housing, very little has changed about the physical space. Its current occupants may not be the movie stars and future presidents that lived there in its heyday, but the Montecito of today appears much as it did when it opened in the ‘30s.

Recommended Reading

+Montecito II Historic Resources Technical Report (PDF) (2017)

+Montecito Apartments NRHP nomination form (1985) 

+Hollywood Haunt Makes a Comeback (LA Times, 1987)