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Los Angeles Hotels
HotelChatter Hollywood Star Map Stop #15: The Culver Hotel
August 3, 2006 at 10:22 AM | 0 Comments
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Anytime we find something historic in Los Angeles (historic=before 1970s) we get real excited. The Culver Hotel has been on our list of things to do for quite some time and the other month we finally got a chance to look around.
What makes the Culver Hotel genuinely historic is a) it was built in 1924; b) it's currently a registered local landmark and on the state and national list of registered historical places and c) all of Hollywood's golden era stars spent their nights here, most notably Clarke Gable and Judy Garland.
The hotel was the vision of real estate developer Harry Culver who thought the land he would later name after himself, Culver City, was the perfect stopping place for those passing through from Hollywood to the beaches of Santa Monica. The first thing he did was attract the movie studios to film their movies and build their offices in Culver City. Once he had an influx of glamorous movie stars and film crews, he needed a place for them to stay.
Thus the birth of the Culver Hotel, a "wedged-shape Renaissance revival-style beauty, fashioned with sculpted stone, brick, ornate overhanging eaves and 200 magnificent windows." Indeed it is one of the most authentic looking things in Los Angeles, which is saying a lot. Inside the hotel has a wide open lobbyand a winding staircase that leads to the second-floor offices where Harry Culver had his personal office and where many folks today use as their own offices.
More on the hotel's then and now after the jump
