[Album cover via It Will Pass]
The Lido Apartments building is known both for its lobby's appearance on the back cover of the Eagles' Hotel California album, and for the building's fall from glamour to neglect, a path that is typically Hollywoodian. Now, the apartment building at Yucca and Wilcox has sold to Lowe Enterprises for $9.4 million. In a press release, Lowe says it plans to "modernize all units in the building," and that it will immediately make improvements to the lobby, common areas, mechanical systems, and courtyard.
In a 2004 article in Los Angeles magazine, Jesse Katz called the Lido "a property itching to gentrify," and traces the building's history from its opening in 1928 as an apartment hotel to its long slide downhill (with the rest of Hollywood).
The Lido was the site of actor Victor Kilian's 1979 murder--he's said to be the nearby Chinese Theatre's ghost. In the nineties, according to Katz's article, the Housing Department loaned the Lido millions for a major renovation (including the restoration of the big green sign), and under a deal with the Housing Authority took on many Section 8 tenants. But mismanagement took the building into bankruptcy in the late nineties and it came out controlled by notorious slumlord Lance Jay Robbins. As Hollywood swung back up and old tenants moved out, the Lido's operators fixed up its apartments and remarketed itself as "1920s, New York-style."
Lowe Enterprises Real Estate Group's president says in the press release that Lowe plans to invest "in renovations to reposition the building in the Hollywood market," but that the building's "character and vintage qualities" set it apart from other recent entrants into the Hollywood apartment game. Virtu Property Management will take care of leasing and manage the renovations. The building currently has 100 apartments, studios up to three bedrooms, and a 50 space surface parking lot.
· Welcome to the Hotel California [Los Angeles]
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