If you want to buy a bit of Hollywood real estate history, this three-story Hollywood building constructed in 1925 is up for grabs. It's at 5628½ Santa Monica Boulevard.

Not only did the property house pulp director Ed Wood's studio, but it's also said to have been rehearsal space for the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and Guns N' Roses.

The sale includes 21 vacant bachelor-sized units (part of a onetime hotel), a bar in front that today serves as a go-go venue with Thai bikini dancers, and an added bow-truss building that housed Wood's Quality Studios and, today, Vicious Reasoning Rehearsal Studios.

The listing agency, Silver Commercial Inc. of Beverly Hills, says the '50s Ed Wood classics Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda were filmed there.

A secret room between the ground and second floors was found recently, Kay Sasatomi, associate vice president of Silver Commercial, told us. The room has “no stairs going up or down into it” and appears to have once been used as a barbecue restaurant, she said.

The neighborhood around the building is one of Hollywood's funkiest, and it's ripe for redevelopment. Around the corner, one of the seediest bars in town, the Blacklite, was transformed a few years ago into a mixologist's mecca called La Descarga. Even the porn shop on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard at Western Avenue has been remixed and renamed.

The hotel next door appears to enjoy some colorful characters, and it was the location of the 2010 suicide of a man suspected in the Beverly Hills murder of Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen.


Because of the  building's connection to famed director Ed Wood, it has become a staple of Hollywood historical tours, Sasatomi said.

The listing made the 10-most-popular list on commercial real estate site LoopNet.com, she said.

The watering hole in front, “one of the last quintessential Hollywood dive bars left in the area,” Sasatomi said, has been there for 29 years and has two years left on its lease.

Buyers will get more than 14,000 square feet of space to play around with, so it'll be interesting to see who bites. Silver Commercial lists the property as being in East Hollywood, but we're calling it Hollywood because it's west of Western Avenue.

LoopNet calls it “a blank canvas for anyone that is looking for an all-inclusive site that could house retail/restaurant, rentals and a meeting hall.”

Interested? Call Kay Sasatomi at (310) 553-3030.

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