There’s not going to be a Jim Morrison landmark in West Hollywood any time soon now that the building where the Doors rocker lived has been dismantled, with parts sold off to collectors. The owner of 8214 Norton Avenue, the site where Morrison lived from 1969 to 1971, decided to withdraw a petition that was pending before the Historic Preservation Commission and, instead, take to Craigslist to start hawking everything from the broken shower heads to the literal dirt ground he may have walked on ($10 per bag).
It’s just as well she withdrew the petition because, as Wehoville reports, the designation was unlikely to be given once some architecturally significant Spanish Colonial-style tiles and wooden balcony details were yanked off the building to go up for sale.
The building’s owner, Cheri Woods, has a history of some colorful behavior. Before buying Morrison’s former home in 2003, she was best-known for running Cheri’s Angels, an escort service ring with at least 185 prostitutes working in the 1970s and 1980s, and for authoring the memoir Death Row Madam: Exposing Sex and Drugs in the Entertainment Industry. Woods also claims on a site for filming location scouts that she conducted a séance in the apartment in 2004 with three “world-renowned psychics” in order to contact Morrison’s restless spirit.
It appears that Woods initially sought the historic designation for the Sunset Strip-adjacent property because it would have entitled her to certain financial incentives to remodel the building to its historic design and then operate it as a bed and breakfast. Instead of waiting for that process, however, a lawsuit filed by the City of West Hollywood alleges that, in 2014, she illegally evicted the residential tenants of the building’s five rent-controlled apartments, and then proceeded to run it as an Airbnb.
While the lawsuit over the evictions is ongoing, there really isn’t any recourse West Hollywood can take against an owner selling off the house for parts. Maybe she hopes to use any proceeds to cover her other legal bills.
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