The Home for Hollywood Dreamers and Dropouts

From hypodermic needles to hallway ghosts, plus-size models to rockstar hopefuls, every room and resident in one Tinseltown tenement is almost famous.

Illustrations by Nicole Daddona

We were The Ropers once. Like Stanley and Helen of the seventies sitcom “Three’s Company,” my partner and I were live-in managers of a building in Los Angeles, only instead of Jack, Chrissy and Janet we were in charge of thirty units full of artists and dreamers from everywhere else.

The building had no name when we found it. The ad in the paper just read “Charming 1920s Hollywood Hills-adjacent building. Fully renovated. Studios and one bedrooms starting at four hundred dollars.” I came from a family that lived in trailers, apartments and relatives’ houses between Maryland and New York until my parents bought a fixer-upper of their own when I was twelve. Between that and being a restless adolescent who left home at seventeen, I’d lived in thirty-seven different places up and down the east coast by the time I was twenty-six (thirty-eight if you count the few days I lived in my car). So by the time I got to Hollywood, I recognized “adjacent” as marketing s…