Still Standing is a chronicle of Hollywood’s survivors—the buildings and homes that remain, often quietly, amid a city better known for erasure than preservation. Long after studios relocated, stars moved on, and wrecking balls reshaped entire neighborhoods, these structures endure as physical witnesses to Hollywood’s layered past. Some were once private sanctuaries of famous names; others were workaday apartments, storefronts, or offices that brushed against history without fanfare. What unites them is continuity—and responsibility. Alongside documenting their histories, Still Standing also engages with the ongoing effort to protect them, highlighting preservation campaigns, local advocacy groups, and the fragile balance between development and memory. In a town obsessed with what’s new, this series looks instead at what remained, what is at risk, and why safeguarding Hollywood’s surviving architecture matters now more than ever.

The Château Élysée: Hollywood’s French Fantasy on Franklin

Nov 25, 2025 2:11 PM

On a quiet rise at Franklin and Bronson, just below the Hollywood Hills, stands a building that looks as if it drifted in from the banks of the Seine: steep slate roofs, tall chimneys, dormer windows, and stone tracery that suggest a transplanted French château. For nearly a century, the Château Élysée at 5930 Franklin Avenue has watched Hollywood change around it—first as an elite residence for movie royalty, later as a faded landmark, and today as one of the city’s most controversial and carefully preserved monuments.

Read more »

Editor’s Note

Hollywood history survives not because it is glamorous, but because someone chooses to protect it before it disappears. Preservationists matter because they recognize that memory requires more than stories—it requires physical evidence, places that can still be touched, entered, and understood. In a city built on reinvention and erasure, Adkins and others like him intervened at the precise moment when Hollywood’s origins were in danger of being paved over, arguing—often against indifference—that buildings, artifacts, and landscapes are not obstacles to progress but foundations of identity. Without their work, Hollywood’s past would exist only as myth and secondhand narrative. Because of them, it remains grounded, visible, and real.