At the time of its opening, the hotel was one of the most luxurious in Los Angeles and was the first in the city to have electricity and a telephone in every room.

[1] In 1909, Ada Tilt Otis, an heiress from Chicago, killed herself by ingesting poison in her Van Nuys hotel room following a divorce from her husband.

W. Arthur Phipps, a Canadian millionaire, died of cirrhosis at the Van Nuys in 1911 after secluding himself in a suite for eight years in paranoia that the Black Hand extortion racket was targeting him.

In 1924, William Edward Collier killed himself by swallowing a cyanide pill in front of a hotel employee who was helping him pack his belongings.

Wilson, described as a sadist with prior fantasies of violence and cannibalism, used a butcher knife he had purchased earlier in the day to stab and mutilate Griffin's body.

Wilson murdered another woman at a different Los Angeles hotel the next day and was ultimately sentenced to death in 1946.

[6] On January 25, 1975, a vagrant named Samuel Suarez was murdered by serial killer Vaughn Greenwood, initially known as the Skid Row Slasher, at the Barclay Hotel.

Greenwood targeted drifters in the Los Angeles area and was ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment for 11 murders.

[7] On June 3, 2017, Los Angeles Fire Department firefighter Kelly Wong fell from a ladder while ascending to the sixth floor of the Barclay Hotel during a training exercise.

The conversion was part of an initiative to turn 11 hotels in the Los Angeles area into affordable housing.

Stained glass transom windows on the first floor depict Victorian era banquet scenes and one features a pair of seahorses flanking a Van Nuys crest.