Jim Morrison's Last West Hollywood Apartment — Norton Avenue

The apartment at 8216 Norton Avenue in West Hollywood was Jim Morrison's last Los Angeles address before he left for Paris in March 1971, never to return. He shared it with his companion Pamela Courson, and it was the final node in the tight triangle of West Hollywood locations — the Doors workshop on Santa Monica Boulevard, the Alta Cienega Motel, Barney's Beanery — that constituted his world in his final months in the city. A plaque on the building acknowledges his residence there, making it one of a handful of Los Angeles addresses formally marked in connection with him.

By the time Morrison left Norton Avenue for Paris, he was physically transformed from the leather-clad figure of the Doors' early years — heavier, bearded, legally embattled following his Miami indecent exposure arrest, and exhausted by the version of himself he had created and could no longer sustain. The move to Paris was partly an escape from the legal proceedings and partly an attempt to reinvent himself as a poet rather than a rock star. He had been recording poetry and had spoken about leaving the music industry entirely. He died in a Paris bathtub on July 3, 1971, seventy-five days after L.A. Woman was released.

The Norton Avenue apartment is in a quiet residential block in West Hollywood, the kind of unremarkable building that surrounds the Strip without being part of it. The plaque is modest. For fans who know the geography of Morrison's final Los Angeles months — the contracted world of the half-mile WeHo triangle described by Eve Babitz — the Norton Avenue address closes the loop on a story that began on a Venice Beach rooftop six years earlier.