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Geography Main: Los Angeles

 

 

Hotel Washington > West End Hotel > Palihotel

3927 Van Buren Place, Culver City

 

Home for the holidays in Kansas City, Joan received a Christmas 1924 telegram from MGM offering her a contract for $75 per week. Joan boarded the Sunset Limited train at Kansas City's Union Station for Los Angeles on January 1, 1925. She arrived in LA two days later, on January 3, and was driven to Culver City's Hotel Washington, which would be her home for the next 6+ months.

Said Joan later: "I was happy at the Hotel Washington. I didn't really want to go to sleep at night, and I was anxious to wake up early every morning because every new day held promise. It wasn't until months later that I noticed that Hotel Washington was, you might say, sort of a dump. It hadn't changed, so I guess I had." (Not the Girl Next Door, 2008)

At an unknown date, Hotel Washington was renamed "West End Hotel."

From the 2011 Chimaeras blogspot entry re the hotel:

Hotel Washington was constructed just two years earlier [before Joan's arrival], in 1923. It has three stories and 53 rooms, and is in the Zigzag Moderne style - which means the plain E-shaped building boasts a jagged, angular false front....

Now, 86 years later, the Washington Hotel is still a dump. The streets around it have been rerouted, and the building was renamed the West End Hotel at some point. The structure has been deemed historic and therefore of value and it thus survived, though hemmed in all sides by Linwood Elementary School. The plainest side of the building is now prominent, and is bordered by the school's parking lot.

From the 2010 Dear Old Hollywood blogspot entry:

The modest hotel is only a few blocks from the former MGM lot (now Sony) so Crawford's commute to the studio would have been an easy walk. The hotel is a three story building with fifty-three rooms and is an architectural example of the Zigzag moderne style. It was built by R.P. Davidson in 1923, only a couple years before Crawford arrived, for Jessee M. Lewis, the original owner of the hotel.

In 2017, investors bought the property and began renovations. As of 2019, the hotel is part of a conglomerate and known as "Palihotel Culver City."

 

Below: Aerial 1920s view of the Hotel Washington.

 

Below: West End Hotel

Below: Present-day Palihotel Culver City

 

 

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