Nazimova's Garden

At 8152 Sunset Boulevard, on the Los Angeles side of the old county line, there stood for thirty two years the Garden of Allah: a main house and about two dozen villas around a pool on two and a half acres, and by most accounts the most storied address in Hollywood's golden age. The house came first, built in 1913, and the silent film star Alla Nazimova acquired it in 1919, at the height of a career that had briefly made her one of the highest paid women in pictures. When the career cooled she converted the property into a residential hotel, added the villas, and opened it in January 1927 under a version of her own name. It became the industry's village, and F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in Villa 1. The decline was the ordinary Hollywood kind. The stars bought houses in Beverly Hills, the clientele slid towards tourists and hustlers, and in 1959 the owner of Lytton Savings and Loan bought the property, threw a farewell party, and demolished the Garden for a bank branch. Nazimova had ended her days in Villa 24, a tenant in what she once owned. The bank itself was pulled down in 2021 for a Frank Gehry tower that was never begun; the site was dug out, backfilled, offered at a hundred million dollars, and quietly withdrawn from the market. Two and a half of the most written about acres in Los Angeles are a fenced dirt lot.