The Villa Carlotta, four stories and 50 units of embattled and endangered Old Hollywood noir that has for generations housed all manner of strivers and connivers on their ways either up or down the precipitous Tinseltown social ladder, was seedy from the moment the mortar set. The developer Luther T. Mayo built the Italianate villa at the corner of Franklin and Tamarind Avenues in 1926 from a design by architect Arthur E. Harvey, with rumored financing from William Randolph Hearst. Upon completion, it belonged to Eleanor Ince, widow of silent-film magnate Thomas Ince. According to legend, Hearst gave her the building as a gift after accidentally killing her husband on his yacht in 1924. The bullet, so the story goes, was intended for Charlie Chaplin, whom Hearst suspected was having an affair with his mistress, Marion Davies (Rosebud herself). Supposedly, Ince’s wife received the luxury residence hotel for her grief. Edward G. Robinson, George Cukor, and Marion Davies were among its early celebrity tenants. Louella Parsons, the most famous gossip writer of the era, penned her column from a two-story apartment on the courtyard. A personal favorite of Hearst’s, Parsons was on the yacht the night of Thomas’s alleged shooting, and is said to have received The Carlotta’s finest apartment for her silence.

Known to its inhabitants as either “The Villa” or “The Carlotta,” the building has since teetered between glory and ruin. A neighbor might vanish and reappear as the opening act at the MTV awards. Another might drop out of sight only to have the manager find his body when rent went unpaid. Its builder called it “the last word in luxury,” but over the years it grew into a West Coast Chelsea Hotel, bedraggled and bohemian and all the cooler for it. Jim Morrison is said to have crashed there in the 60s. Singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones was a longtime resident. It was a way station on the road to making it, or not. Neil Patrick Harris lived here, post–Doogie Howser; so did Michael Biehn, post The Terminator. Quentin Tarantino tried to rent the apartment across the hall from me as a writer’s retreat few years back. The manager turned him down.

But just like the Chelsea Hotel before it, and so many other historic residences in once marginal neighborhoods from Manhattan to the Mission, the Villa Carlotta has come under threat as of late. Inevitably, the developers are here to trade The Villa’s 20th-century cool for that most 21st-century fate: luxury hotel rooms. These past few months, I’ve had a top-floor view of the protracted path from threadbare to 10,000-thread count.

The fourth-floor studio in which I’ve lived since 2001 faces the “Hollywood” sign, and a slope of hills between Bronson and Beachwood Canyons of fine Spanish and mid-century modern houses. I first laid eyes on the Villa Carlotta in the summer of 2000. I took a road trip after college graduation from Poughkeepsie, New York, to Los Angeles, where I intended to make my life as a writer. From the sidewalk patio at Birds, an unpretentious chicken joint and bar in adjacent Franklin Village, I was seduced by the grand and crumbling building across the street. I knew immediately that whatever ambitions I had for Hollywood, The Carlotta would be the place where they began. West Hollywood was too Ken and Barbie, Hollywood was too dirty, but this place––neither Hollywood nor Los Feliz, but a little of both––this was just right.

The Carlotta stands catty-corner from the Scientology Celebrity Centre, and the two buildings, designed by the same architect, resemble long-lost siblings who made very different choices in life. I marched into the lobby, swooned over the painted vaulting on the ceiling, the green velvet curtains framing the courtyard window, the old marble reception desk and a fireplace nearly large enough to stand in. I knocked firmly on the manager’s door with a knuckle pressure and cadence conveying every watt of enthusiasm of a 22-year-old who’d been in L.A. a week and was eager to beat the odds. The man on the other side of the door was well familiar with that knock.

“Who is it!?” yelled a gruff voice in a thick Brooklyn accent.

“Hi, I’d like to rent an apartment here.”

I heard a loud laugh, then footsteps, and the door cracked open to reveal a bantamweight gray-haired, genuine New York Italian in an Acapulco shirt unbuttoned to the navel.

“Everybody wants to live here, kid,” said Rizzo, whom I came to know as a crazy uncle of sorts. “But nobody ever leaves The Carlotta. They stay here 30 or 40 years. Water’s shut off half the time, elevator never works, but they never leave.”

His warning only heightened the allure. A few weeks later, fate intervened: the words “historic Villa Carlotta” appeared with a new batch o f properties on Westside Rentals. I called five minutes after the ad was posted and was already the tenth caller. People had offered triple the $740-a-month rent. But I hit it off with the voice on the line, and as luck would have it, we had both gone to Vassar. He gave me the apartment with a warning: “The Carlotta is great for a year or two, but don’t get stuck here.”

House rules seemed to be as follows: pay your rent at some point during the month in which it is due; the roof, courtyard, and lobby are open for any parties, so long as everyone is invited; anyone can play the grand piano in the lobby, if you don’t mind it being a little out of tune. The lobby was decorated largely with movie furniture, all bought by a tenant named Sam Fuller: an 83-year-old waiter at Sheraton Universal who has lived here for more than 40 years. He’d proudly tell you the tapestries were from a Henry Fonda Western, or the pleated-silk couches from a Lana Turner picture.

The courtyard could have been hidden within a block of the New Orleans’ French Quarter––shaded with palms and tinkling with a tiered fountain and a koi pond. At night, the backlit interiors on view there presented a visual cross-section of Hollywood aspirations and casualties: an expressionist painter hunched over an easel, an actor reading sides in a mirror, a writer’s face in the blue light of a computer monitor. Music and occasional coital sounds spilled from open French doors. The apartments’ décor was as diverse as the residents––from French Empire to Danish Modern; from black-leather bachelor pad to Moroccan riad.

Residents shared everything from eggs and flour, to cigarettes and beds. My downstairs neighbor married the girl across the hall. We had potluck Thanksgiving dinners. Tim on the first floor played piano every Sunday in the lobby for anyone who cared to listen. Rizzo would belt out opera in the lobby with wine-stained teeth late at night. (He was a Teamster in another life, with a passion for piano bars and psychic powers.) There were Saturday night concerts and barbecues on the roof, photo shoots in the lobby, and music video and student film crews in the courtyard almost every week. Apartments were sublet for years at a time, because even those who left The Villa could never let it go.

When the economy bounced back from the 2008 recession, it brought with it a new real-estate development boom in Hollywood and throughout the country, and developers have a special appetite for diamonds-in-the-rough like The Carlotta. The Lesser family, who had owned the building since the 1950s, brought in a new management company, Tanner & White Properties, which hung bags of bottled water on our doors like bad wedding favors, along with letters informing us of “exciting times ahead.”

Within a month, they changed the lock on the front door. Long-time sub-leasers showed up at the new manager’s office to get a working key and were served eviction letters. Free rent was offered to those willing to rat out their neighbors. Then, they went after everyone with pets and roommates. Rent checks mysteriously got lost in the mail. They closed the roof, and strung up security cameras with signs threatening prosecution to anyone who dared set foot in the space where we threw birthday parties, watched meteor showers, and grew tomatoes. Within a year, half of the 50 apartments were empty. (Tanner & White did not respond to* Vanity Fair*’s requests for comment.)

Then the family trust sold the building to a new developer, C.G.I., and a new wave of eviction notices started appearing on our doors. Sam was told to clear all the plants from the courtyard and empty out the lobby––erasing 40 years of love, labor, and personal expense. They’re offering to negotiate lease buyouts to the remaining tenants, myself included. But they have made it clear that we’ll be out by next year.

There are 16 occupied apartments left, out of 50, and the last holdouts have forged a ragtag alliance. We have appealed renovation plans; we have spoken at hearings downtown; we have fought the good fight. But the owners have a trump card in the Ellis Act––something I’ve learned quite a bit about lately. Passed in 1985, in California, as a way to help retiring property owners get out of the rental business, the Ellis Act is now used as a way for developers to take rent-control units out of circulation by shutting down the building. Loopholes like this are being exploited all around the country. If you live in a rent-control building in New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, chances are you have a similar story to tell.

The Carlotta was a culture, and now it’s a quaint arrangement of brick, plaster, and wood. The courtyard is barren, the lobby is empty, and the hallways are dead quiet. The smells of rooftop barbecue, Nag Champa incense, and Humboldt Fog have been replaced by smells of old paint, crumbling drywall and dusty carpet. I could point a finger at the new owners, but that seems too easy. Artists make a place cool, and eventually “cool” acquires a dollar value. So money replaces it and the cool either moves on or dies off. Multiply that a thousand times, and across the 3,000 miles from coast to coast, and you understand why the most interesting urban neighborhoods in the country are becoming so beautifully bland.

The owners say the new Villa Carlotta will be a “long-term rental property” and “extended-stay inn.” It will reopen its doors after a renovation, but for whom? I think the term is “professionals.” Whoever they are, they won’t have to worry about watering their tomatoes on the roof. They won’t be bothered by Rizzo’s cigars or Tim’s piano, and they’ll never be awakened by an 83-year-old waiter chasing an intruder from the building. The Carlotta will have “amenities.” And a rooftop lounge, of course. It will have an elevator that doesn’t stop between floors, water than never cuts off, and lights that never flicker. It will be very nice. But as I box up my closets and empty my drawers, I will remember it as it was, when nice was not the point.

Related: An Oral History of the Chelsea Hotel