Western Town, a faux Wild West village, is located on Paramount Ranch. Paramount Pictures bought the property in 1927 and built the frontier to serve as a filming location for its Westerns. The set had been actively used for decades, serving as the backdrop for Hollywood classics like Bob Hope’s Caught in the Draft (1941) and more recent television hits like the HBO drama Westworld.

The old Wild West movie set was also home to a short-lived alternative art fair, Paramount Ranch, which ran from 2014 to 2016. The art fair was conceived by Venice’s Paradise Garage and Los Angeles’s Freedman Fitzpatrick Gallery (which now has an additional outpost in Paris). According to Paradise Garage cofounder Pentti Monkkonen, Paramount Ranch started as a lighthearted foil to more esteemed, serious art fairs like Art Los Angeles Contemporary.

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As reported by Curbed, the fire encompassed an area teeming with historic architecture. The cities affected by the fire, including Agoura Hills, Calabasas, and Malibu, have many homes designed by architects Frank Gehry and Frank Lloyd Wright, iconic restaurants like Neptune’s Net, and museum institutions like the Getty Villa, most of which survived the blaze. The Villa, for instance, was built to withstand the frequent wildfires in this region. Should fire touch the property, a robust network of sprinklers pumps water from a one million-gallon water tank located below the Villa’s parking garage to extinguish the flames. Though the museum is unharmed, it is closed until Friday, November 23 to accommodate traffic along the evacuation routes and disaster relief efforts.

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