Alta Cienega Motel — West Hollywood (Room 32)

The Alta Cienega Motel at 1005 North La Cienega Boulevard in West Hollywood was one of Jim Morrison's primary residences during the later years of his life in Los Angeles — a no-frills motel less than 500 feet from the Doors' workshop on Santa Monica Boulevard. Room 32 became the most celebrated of his rooms there, its walls and ceiling covered in murals, drawings, poetry, and scrawled text accumulated over the months he lived in it. The room has been preserved as something close to a shrine and remains one of the most specific physical traces of Morrison's presence anywhere in the city.

The motel's proximity to the workshop made it the logical base for the period in which Morrison's world had contracted to a small triangle of West Hollywood — the workshop, the motel, and Barney's Beanery a short walk up La Cienega. He was drinking heavily, rarely leaving on foot to anywhere further than this tight circuit. The Alta Cienega was cheap, anonymous, and close enough to where he needed to be. It suited the persona he had adopted by the end: not the leather-clad prophet of the early Doors but something more dishevelled and more honest.

The Alta Cienega still operates as a budget motel and Room 32 is available to book. Fan pilgrims stay there regularly, adding to the layered accumulation of writing and drawing on the walls. It is one of the few Morrison sites in Los Angeles where the physical space he actually inhabited has been preserved in recognisable form. A short walk from the room across Santa Monica Boulevard brings you to the Doors workshop; another few minutes up La Cienega brings you to Barney's Beanery.