The Tropicana Motor Hotel (site) — Tom Waits's LA years

The Tropicana Motor Hotel at 8585 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood was a two-storey motel that, in the 1970s, served as both budget accommodation and informal artistic community for the musicians, writers, and performers who were making careers in Los Angeles without the resources to live anywhere more expensive. Tom Waits rented a room there for several years — exactly how many varies in his accounts, which are characteristically more interested in atmosphere than chronology — and used it as the base from which he built his early career at the Troubadour and in the recording studios of the city.

The Tropicana had a pool, a diner (Duke's Coffee Shop) on the ground floor, and the particular quality of a place where everyone was in transit even when they had been there for years. Chuck E. Weiss lived there — the Denver-born musician who is the subject of Rickie Lee Jones's "Chuck E.'s in Love," and a close friend of Waits who appears in the social universe of his early records. The Ramones stayed at the Tropicana when they played LA. Tom Petty. The New York Dolls. The manager Dee Anthony lived there. It was a specific Los Angeles institution — cheap, tolerant, creative — that the 1980s real estate market could not accommodate.

The Tropicana was demolished in 1988 and replaced by a Ramada Inn, which has itself been renovated and rebranded several times since. The corner of Santa Monica Boulevard where it stood is now a hotel that gives no indication of its predecessor. Duke's Coffee Shop, which had been a genuinely beloved institution, closed with the motel. The years Waits spent in that room produced the albums that made his reputation — Closing Time, The Heart of Saturday Night, Nighthawks at the Diner — records that sound exactly like a man who has been living in a motel on Santa Monica Boulevard for longer than he planned.