The clock is ticking for Sunset Strip’s landmarked Lytton Savings

The Cultural Heritage Commission’s 180-day hold on demolition of the Sunset Strip’s landmarked Lytton Savings and Loan will expire at the end of this month.

When the clock runs out on April 30, there’s nothing more the commission can do to keep the building from being razed and construction beginning on a Frank Gehry designed mixed-use complex.

The delay was granted in November to give developer Townscape Partners more time to “thoroughly investigate” potentially relocating the landmark, now home to a Chase bank.

Since then, preservationists have tried to find a suitable relocation site for the building, but to no avail. The commission is unable to put off the demolition any longer.

But the bank’s doom likely won’t be imminent.

A Townscape Partners spokesperson says Gehry is still working on construction drawings for the project. “Our hope is to commence site preparation sometime soon,” the rep says.

The city’s building department won’t issue a demolition permit until Chase has moved out of the building, but there’s no public timeline for when that will happen.

Townscape plans to raze the Lytton Savings and a strip mall on the corner of Crescent Heights and Sunset boulevards to build a five-building, 2.5-acre project called 8150 Sunset that would hold 65,000 square feet of commercial space, pedestrian plazas, and 229 housing units, 38 of which are affordable.

Gehry has referred to the project as an eastern gateway to West Hollywood’s famed Sunset Strip.

The Lytton Savings building was completed in 1960. The Los Angeles Conservancy has called the bank building one of the “earliest remaining examples” of the “transformative shift” in postwar-era bank design. It was designed by architect Kurt Werner Meyer, who went on to design more than 50 projects.