A Texas Roadhouse on the Sunset Strip? Not Quite. But About That Empty Lot…

Word travels pretty fast on the Boulevard. Seth, from @SethontheScene, one of our friends and favorite tipsters who keeps a close eye on all things WeHo, had people doing a double take, and this guy here doubled over in laughter after seeing one of his IG stories yesterday.

Seth dropped an April Fool’s “exclusive” that an immersive Texas Roadhouse was coming to the long-empty lot at Sunset and Crescent Heights. Not just any Texas Roadhouse. A full, immersive experience. Peanuts you grow yourself. Talk about sustainability. Seriously, the lot’s been sitting there so long it seemed like it could totally be happening. At this point, we’ve given up on predicting what comes next, so why not a fully immersive Texas Roadhouse! Seth said he was inspired by seeing so many pits and empty lots across town that he couldn’t resist. 

So Seth got us thinking – what about that empty lot? What happened and what’s going? By the way, it’s not just another empty lot. It’s 8150 Sunset. Though technically inside LA, it’s the first thing you see coming into WeHo from the east. It feels like it’s in our town. 

The Garden

Before Gehry was ever attached, before the lawsuits and the eventual pit, there was the Garden of Allah. An iconic bungalow complex that spread across a couple of acres where the lot now sits. It was known as a rite of passage in Hollywood, if not to live there, then to know someone who did. F. Scott Fitzgerald stayed there. Humphrey Bogart. Lauren Bacall. Orson Welles. It wasn’t exactly a hotel, and it wasn’t exactly not one. Old Hollywood came and went for decades, some of them renting bungalows for months at a stretch. The place had a pool shaped like the Black Sea. It hosted parties the gossip wags talked about endlessly. Then in 1959 it was torn down for a freakin parking lot. Yeah, you read that right. A parking lot.

There’s a version of this story where Joni Mitchell was driving past the Garden of Allah site on her way to and from Laurel Canyon and wrote Big Yellow Taxi about it — “they paved paradise, put up a parking lot.” She’s since said she was thinking about a hotel in Hawaii. But she was living up the hill during those years, and it’s hard to entirely let go of the idea.

The parking lot eventually gave way to the Lytton Savings bank building, a Googie-style bank with a dramatic folded-plate concrete roof designed by Kurt Meyer. It opened in 1960. It wasn’t the kind of place talked about the way they did the Mondrian up the street, but the building developed its own following and had its fans. It would eventually become more than a bank. It was a Mid-century landmark. It was the kind of structure that gets noticed more once someone threatens to tear it down. Someone threatened to tear it down.

The fight

Townscape Partners picked up the site in 2012. Paid $14 million for it. For the next four years they worked through approvals, brought Frank Gehry in at some point, and his name did exactly what they needed it to do with the City. LA signed off in 2016. The final project had more than 200 units, 57,000 square feet of retail, several buildings stepping up the hillside. West Hollywood got a height reduction out of the deal. Everyone moved on to the next fight.

The LA Conservancy sued to save the Lytton building. Twice, basically. It was appealed all the way to the California Supreme Court. They lost. Townscape knocked the bank down in April 2021. The strip mall next door came down the same year. Construction was supposed to start. Then it didn’t.

The pit

They excavated the site into a massive pit. If you were driving that stretch of Sunset in 2021 or 2022, you know exactly which one. It was hard to miss and easy to resent. At some point in 2022 it got filled back in, the lot got graded, and that was basically it. Clean and flat and empty. January 2023, it went back on the market.

Follow the money

Back in 2021, the same year the Lytton building came down, Bank OZK lent Townscape $63.5 million against the project. The asking price when the lot listed was $100 million. That dropped to the mid-$60s. Then it went to unpriced bids. Then the LoopNet listing disappeared. Nobody’s announced a sale or said it was pulled. It’s just gone.

Gehry’s name is nowhere to be found in any marketing plans. The 52-page offer memo didn’t mention him, didn’t include his renderings, didn’t reference the approved entitlements at all. It listed the site as a TOC Tier II parcel and left it at that.

There’s a lawsuit in there too. A 2023 LA Superior Court case, number 23STCV21644, produced subpoenas as recently as February 2024 — Bank OZK, Gehry Partners, Cushman & Wakefield, and OKO Group, a Miami-based luxury developer, all got served with document requests about the potential sale or acquisition of the property. What OKO’s involvement was, and what the fight’s actually about, hasn’t been reported anywhere.

The last building permit activity on record is mid-2022. That’s it. Nobody’s bought it publicly, there’s no indication of what could be next that we could find.

A Texas Roadhouse on the Sunset Strip isn’t happening. But Seth’s joke got you because nobody who drives past that corner regularly would have been completely shocked. It’s been long enough that sadly anything feels possible. Even an immersive Texas Roadhouse where you grow your own peanuts.🤦🏻‍♂️