An Occupied Building Burns on Hope Street
1225 South Hope Street, home to a Bluebird Office Supplies store, wasn’t vacant. On Sunday morning, it burned anyway. (Need office supplies? Bluebird’s Westside and online storefronts are open.)
While any building fire is bad, a fire in an office supply store can easily reignite due to the high amount of paper and cardboard. This fire did indeed re-ignite, causing the roof to collapse. A firefighter was injured, and the fire rained ash down on Hope Street for hours.
The cause of the fire is, as always, under investigation. But it might be prudent for investigators to look at the building next door, if for no other reason than to rule it out.
1219-1221 South Hope Street doesn’t have any permits on file or any ZIMAS complaints within the past decade. However, it is boarded up and, curiously, labeled as “Cbre Prime Development Opportunity” on Google Maps. I’m posting a screenshot below in case this gets edited later.
(CBRE, which is based in Dallas and New York but has several offices in LA, is the world’s largest commercial real estate investment and service company.)
What I suspect, since it happens with alarming frequency in Los Angeles (although we’ll have to wait for LAFD’s investigators to do their thing), is that squatters, vandals, or other troublemakers got into the vacant building and caused the fire. Graffiti-tagged plywood boards scream “this building is unoccupied”.
If you’ve been paying attention, you may recall that this is the same block of Hope Street where Relevant Group illegally (and savagely) gutted the Morrison Hotel, which contributed to the severity of the damage when it caught on fire on 12/26/24.
The unfinished, notoriously vandalized Oceanwide Plaza towers are also visible from the site.
Angelenos deserve better than this.