[Flyingwedge]

Originally Posted by tovangar2

The Belmont Hotel (built 1884; destroyed by fire in 1887), current site of Belmont HS, and the Ellis College for girls (built in 1886, burnt down 1888) are on the left.

Pls see Flyingwedge's excellent post here for the newspaper accounts.

LA Fire has a post on the Belmont Hotel fire, but they mis-locate it on Bunker Hill (they've promised to correct it, but haven't yet)

Thanks, t2.

GW posted photos of the Ellis Villa College/Belmont Hotel and the fire photo: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...postcount=5408

And e_r posted an amazing photo looking west from that building: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...ostcount=19458

Here's a little more background on Ellis Villa College. Its finances were apparently shaky from the start.
The college was supposed to be financed from the sale of donated lots, but the lots were not donated
(in the italicized text below, I believe "and lots" should be "land lots"):



Nov 4 1884 LA Times @ ProQuest via LAPL


If Rev. Ellis could find someone to lease Ellis Villa College as a hotel, he would build a smaller, cheaper
building next door and move his college there:



Apr 9 1886 LA Times @ ProQuest via LAPL


More on the conversion of the original college building into a hotel:




Apr 17 1886 LA Herald @ LOC -- http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lc...17/ed-1/seq-6/


Architects William Boring and Sidney Haas designed the original Ellis Villa College, the expansion and conversion
of the building into the Belmont Hotel, and also the second smaller, cheaper Ellis College building:



Apr 21 1886 LA Times @ ProQuest via LAPL


Here's Rev. Ellis' second, smaller college building. I believe a sign on the front between the second and third
floors says "The Ellis College." As t2 noted, it opened in September 1886 and burned down in July 1888:



Los Angeles, Illustrated (1889) @ HathiTrust -- http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?i...iew=1up;seq=13