Tucked into the narrow slope of West Hollywood’s Norma Place stands a building that has long traded in rumor, memory, and the durable afterglow of silent Hollywood. Today it reads as an apartment house, its clapboard and porch details evoking the early 1920s domestic optimism that once defined the Sherman district. But in the earliest days of the movie colony, locals claimed that it sat at the westernmost boundary of the Norma Talmadge studio lot, located at 812 North Robertson Boulevard. In the years since, the cottage has been rumored to house Hollywood's residual ghost population both figuratively and literally.

At the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in Brentwood, on 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, sits a modest Spanish Colonial-style hacienda that has become the improbable epicenter of a bitter legal battle over heritage, ownership, and the culture of preservation in Los Angeles. Built in 1929, the 2,900-square-foot adobe-style home entered Hollywood lore when Marilyn Monroe bought it in February 1962 — the only residence the actress ever owned — a purchase she financed after her third marriage and where, six months later, she was discovered dead of a barbiturate overdose in her bedroom at age 36. Around the doorstep sits a tile reading “Cursum Perficio” — “The journey ends here” — a poignant message that has become eerily resonant through decades of debate over the house’s fate.

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.