Marilyn Monroe’s Final Home Is Temporarily Saved From Demolition
Los Angeles preservation aficionados flew into action when news of an impending demo permit hit last week.
Los Angeles preservation aficionados flew into action when news of an impending demo permit hit last week.
When news of a recently issued demolition permit for Marilyn Monroe’s one time Los Angeles home hit the web late last week, fans and preservation aficionados alike immediately got up in arms. Monroe’s home, a 1929 Spanish hacienda style home at 21305 West 5th Helena Drive in the tony Brentwood neighborhood, was the apple of the Hollywood legend’s eye for the last year or so of her life. It was the only home she ever owned independently, having purchased it for $75,000 after the end of her third marriage, to playwright Arthur Miller, and she doted over it, picking out wooden beams and tile for the interior and posing for pictures all around the home. It’s also where Monroe was discovered after her fatal overdose in 1962 at age 36, further cementing the home’s place in Hollywood lore.
While the house has undergone some kitchen and bathroom renovations in the 60-odd years since Monroe lived there, some of the details she picked seem to have been kept intact, like the aforementioned beams, terra cotta tile floors, and charming casement windows. Much of the sweeping exterior also looks as it did when she lived there, with lush greenery and crisp white paint. The house was most recently occupied by hedge fund hotshot Dan Lukas and wife Anne Jarmain but had, earlier this summer, been sold off market for an estimated $8.35 million to some mysterious trust. The details get even more hazy from there because the owner still hasn’t come forward to make any sort of statement about the home, but one thing is clear: At some point, the new owners applied for and received a demolition permit allowing them to tear down not just the house but also adjacent garages and other buildings.
News of that permit made its way to the New York Post, who posted a story about the potential loss of the home. That quickly yielded outraged cries from Monroe’s diehard fans, as well as L.A. preservationists like Nathan Marsak, who wrote about the permit on his blog R.I.P. Los Angeles, which attempts to document the city’s disappearing landmarks "one demolition permit at a time."
"If you’re reading this blog then I’d wager you are suitably fed up with those who would destroy our shared history," Marsak wote. "You look on in horror as local government gives handouts to developers who run roughshod over our communities, while we stand by feeling helpless. It’s very important to advocate for threatened structures in your community, and if you’ve never done so, here’s a good chance to start the practice."
Marsak encouraged his readers to call Traci Park, the L.A. City Councilperson for the district in which the house sits, saying, "L.A. doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to retaining and maintaining our heritage, so, how about we not embarrass ourselves on the world stage again, ok?" His call for action was then picked up by other preservation folks across Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, with Vintage L.A.’s Alison Martino writing, "My goodness, will this poor woman ever find peace in the afterlife?," before quipping, "Unfortunately respect for history is not a prerequisite for the nouveau riche." The Los Angeles Conservancy also started to drum up some noise around the home on Instagram, urging people to call Park as quickly as possible, saying that while the house had been recognized as potentially historic in 2013’s Survey L.A., the city’s first program aimed at identifying important buildings, it had never been officially named to the historic register or protected by some other act of city government. If the city didn’t act ASAP, the Conservancy warned, the house could be immediately demolished.
The pool and backyard as it was when she owned the Brentwood home, part of the collection of fan Greg Schreiner.
Photo by Anne Cusack/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Park, who says her office received "hundreds if not thousands" of emails and "nonstop" calls in the day or so that followed those posts, knew the second she saw the news that she had to act. Normally when a homeowner is applying for a demolition permit, they have to post an intent to apply for 30 days before it’s actually issued. They also have to consult all neighbors within 500 feet and inform the neighborhood council. As far as Park and all the internet sleuths could determine, none of this had been done, making the permit’s sudden appearance feel a little suspect.
"There was no question in my mind, from the moment I learned about this issue that an urgent intervention by the city to prevent this demolition and to further assess this building and property was going to be absolutely necessary," Park says. On Friday, she put a motion before L.A. City Council asking that the demolition of the house be halted until the planning department could initiate an application for historic and cultural designation. From there, the application would go to the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission and Office of Historic Resources, where an analysis would be performed as to the home’s cultural and architectural value, meaning they’d be asking questions like "has the house already been renovated beyond recognition" and "does a private home that sits behind a big wall where no one can see it still qualify as an important piece of history?" They’d have 75 days to complete their work and decide whether or not to name the house a landmark.
Park’s motion was unanimously passed, halting demolition—for now, at least. The L.A. Board of Building and Safety Commissioners issued a letter to the home’s owners pausing all work on the site and saying that the demolition permit was "issued in error." Unfortunately, according to some preservationists, that’s an error that seems to happen quite often, as the city’s system hasn’t been synched with the Survey L.A. report of what’s historically significant, meaning that permits are frequently issued for homes and buildings that should merit at least a preliminary status review.
"People really need to start to prioritize preservation," says Jaime Rummerfield, co-founder of the non-profit Save Iconic Architecture. "In L.A., we don’t have a city chief of preservation and we don’t have a preservation department that proactively flags these type of properties." That’s potentially why so many classic Hollywood residences and buildings have either been torn down in recent years or are currently facing demolition—and why so many online resources and advocates have sprung up aimed at protecting these properties.
"We were very early nationally getting a preservation ordinance and our ordinance is strong, but even so, we have a lot of very high profile, interesting structures that have been lost," says Kim Cooper, co-founder of Esotouric, a hyper-specific, hyper-interesting tour service that offers hours-long deep dive adventures all over town. "A lot of our structures are famous because they’ve appeared in movies and celebrities have been photographed there and so people all know them and care about them, but sometimes that’s still not enough."
Monroe chats with photographer Earl Leaf during a press party held at her home in 1956.
Photo by Earl Leaf/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
"It’s very symptomatic of L.A. where a lot of people look at sites just from the perspective of ‘it’s a good lot and it’s in a good location,’" says Adrian Scott Fine, the Senior Director of Advocacy at the Los Angeles Conservancy. "They don’t think about what’s on the site right now. It’s all about the numbers and the money, and we get that, but this is the only house that really tells this particular story about Marilyn Monroe, and it’s a very interesting slice of her life. And it’s also a very nice 1920s Spanish Hacienda style house as well."
"As far as I’m concerned," Park says, "there is no conceivable argument that could be made by a property owner that they did not understand what this home was and what it represented at the time it was purchased." "It’s not like this is Mamie Van Doren’s house or even Jayne Mansfield’s," adds Marsak.
There’s something particular about these battles over preserving LA’s residences. "People come to LA and this is one of the places they want to see," Fine explains. "Even though they can’t see the house, they go to see that gate before they go to see her burial plot, among other places. It’s a pilgrimage for a lot of people, and it means something to have that physical connection to a person. We work really hard when we have enough notice to really advocate for preservation and reuse in these places because of the story they tell. When you don’t have the physical place to point to, it’s less real, less tangible, and much harder for an average person to understand that person and that point in time."
Top Photo: an aerial view of the house in 2002, by Mel Bouzad/Getty Images.
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A Home Tied to L.A. History Could Be Demolished—and People Are Upset
