The Jim Morrison Room (Alta Cienega Hotel)

Between 1968 and 1970, Jim Morrison lived on and off in Room 32 of the Alta Cienega Motel at 1005 North La Cienega Boulevard in West Hollywood — a 23-room motor lodge built in 1948, about ten blocks from the Sunset Strip. He paid $10 a night. The room became his refuge whenever his girlfriend Pamela Courson kicked him out of their apartment on nearby Norton Avenue, and a place to collapse after long nights at Barney's Beanery down the road.

The motel sat just a few blocks from the Doors' office and recording studio at 8512 Santa Monica Boulevard, where much of L.A. Woman was recorded in late 1970 and early 1971. Morrison could walk between the two. The proximity suited his increasingly erratic lifestyle — by the late '60s he was drinking heavily, showing up to sessions unpredictably, and drifting between addresses across West Hollywood with no fixed home to speak of.

Morrison left Los Angeles for Paris in March 1971 and died there on 3 July, aged 27. After his death, Room 32 became an unofficial shrine. Over the decades, fans covered every surface — walls, ceiling, furniture, bathroom mirror — with Doors lyrics, lines of Morrison's poetry, personal messages, and drawings. The motel management left it largely untouched, recognising what the room meant to the people who came to stay in it.

The Alta Cienega still operates as a motel, and Room 32 can be booked by guests. It remains covered in decades of fan graffiti — a palimpsest of devotion written directly onto the walls. The building itself is a relic of mid-century Los Angeles, unremarkable from the outside, which is part of its charm. Morrison's ghost is not in some grand hotel suite — it's in a cheap room on a busy boulevard, exactly where you'd expect to find it.