24H Mold Inspection of West Hollywood

The Strip grew up outside any city's jurisdiction, on unincorporated county land, which is why the Trocadero, Ciro's, and the Mocambo opened along this mile and a half between 1934 and 1941 rather than east of Crescent Heights. What survives from that era, including the 1931 Sunset Tower, is cast concrete stepping down the toe of the hills, with parking cut into the slope underneath. Water on this stretch rarely starts at the roof. It arrives sideways off the canyons above, pressing against below-grade walls, elevator pits, and garage ramps. Add pool terraces and planted podium decks built over occupied rooms, and a waterproofing membrane nobody can see is the only thing separating the two.

Pacific Electric cars ran down the median of this boulevard until the 1950s, and the city rebuilt the whole corridor around the turn of the 2000s after acquiring that abandoned right-of-way. What lines it is two- and three-story mixed-use from the 1920s through the 1960s: retail or a restaurant at grade, apartments above, party walls shared with the building next door, and a low-slope roof drained by two or three interior drains. That stacking is the problem. A commercial kitchen's exhaust, dishwashing humidity, and floor drains sit directly beneath somebody's bedroom, separated by a wood-framed floor assembly built long before anyone detailed a vapor barrier between uses.

Norma Place takes its name from Norma Talmadge, and the small triangle of streets around it was built out in the 1920s as cottages and bungalows for people working in the studios. The lots are narrow, and that is what drives the moisture here. Additions pushed out toward both side property lines over the decades, leaving gaps of a few feet where two roofs drain into a strip of ground with nowhere to go and no slope to take it. Underneath, these houses sit on raised wood foundations with crawl space vents now buried behind hedges, and the original clay sewer laterals run under ficus roots that have been working on them for eighty years.

César Pelli's blue Pacific Design Center opened in 1975, joined by the green building in 1988 and the red in 2011, and the showrooms spreading out from it along Melrose, Beverly, and Robertson occupy converted commercial buildings from the 1920s through the 1940s. Those conversions run on skylights and low-slope roofs, where the curb flashing around each skylight is the first thing to fail. The inventory is what makes it urgent: textiles, rugs, upholstered goods, and veneered casework absorb moisture and show damage long before a ceiling stains. Showrooms also run cold for comfort, so warm outside air condenses on glass, in ducts, and behind display walls.

Rudolph Schindler built his own house at 835 North Kings Road in 1922 out of concrete panels cast flat on the ground and tilted up into place, with flat roofs and open sleeping porches on top. The roofs leaked almost immediately, and the panel joints were always the weak line, which is the useful lesson for the street around it: concrete and flat roofs over habitable space leave no attic, no slope, and no second chance. The blocks nearby filled in later with courtyard apartments and 1960s buildings over tuck-under parking, most of them predating July 1979 and therefore rent stabilized, with original cast-iron drain lines still in the walls.