Walking around downtown Los Angeles means seeing ghosts. Even on a clear, bright Sunday morning, you can’t miss them. The spirit of a thriving financial district once synchronized “The Wall Street of the West” leave now. The ghost of a beloved tram system that was ripped out in the 1960s and made LA dependent on congested freeways. And if you believe in something like that, there are also the ghosts of all those who suffered and died at Hotel Cecil, whose checkered history is the subject of the new Netflix documentary Crime Scene: Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.

The Cecil has seen more than her share of violence over the years: at least 16 people have died there and countless other brutal crimes have been committed. Serial killer Richard Ramirez even called it home during much of his 1985 murder attack. Most recently, 21-year-old Canadian student Elisa Lam died under mysterious and worrying circumstances during her stay. The hotel closed four years ago after an eventful decade of reinvention attempts. The new owners were aware of the Cecil’s reputation and had tried to rename it into a hip, low-budget hostel called Stay On Main. That effort stumbled in 2013 when Lam’s body was found in a water tank on the roof.

Today the place has an eerie and mismatched atmosphere. The modern “Stay On Main” logo sits awkwardly next to the building’s ornate architecture from the 1920s. Vibrant orange and gold decorations. But if you look through the glass you can still see the opulent lobby, all marble and terrazzo floors and wrought iron lamps. How did this elegantly designed hotel go from a bustling, desirable travel destination to what a detective in Netflix’s documentary described as “Hell on Earth”?

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To understand what happened to the Cecil, one must first understand what happened to Los Angeles. Although LA is now known as a place where you can’t survive without a car, there was once an extensive public transportation system that ran throughout the city. It was in the early 20th century the largest electric railway system in the world. Proximity to rail lines was central to the Cecil’s appeal when it opened its doors in 1927 – its Main Street destination at the time was in the beating heart of the city, surrounded by theaters, restaurants, shopping, and the Spring Street financial district. The Cecil was designed by local architect Loy Lester Smith and named after the hotel of the same name in London. It is aimed at business travelers and tourists who wanted to be where the action was.

Soon, however, action took a turn in the city center. The Great Depression hit the area hard, as did the rise of the suburbs and the birth of the LA freeway system. “After World War II, people wanted more space, they wanted a suburban environment,” explains historian Kim Cooper. When the highways were built in the early 1950s, people settled further away from the city center, leaving the city center increasingly unoccupied. Entire buildings were empty, restaurants, bars or jewelry stores were doing business on the first floor, and six floors were empty above.

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By 1960, LA’s tram system was ripped out and the downtown coffin, like any city center, was given a final nail. As you walk around the neighborhood, you’ll see the anchor hooks on the corners of buildings where the tram cables were attached, the scars of a wound the neighborhood never recovered from. When the population of Los Angeles soared in the 1960s, downtown was trapped in Amber, an increasingly nervous ghost town.

“It became a lawless place and a place for people who couldn’t or wouldn’t live in any other environment,” continues Cooper. And even in the city center their opportunities dwindled. According to the LA Chamber of CommerceAbout half of the small hotels in downtown LA were demolished in the 1960s (an unintended consequence of stricter building codes), which “contributed to the displacement of significant numbers of extremely low-income, substance-dependent and / or mentally unstable people”.

Many of these people ended up on Skid Row, a few yards from the Cecil. There was crime in and around the hotel. Netflix series detectives found that the LAPD routinely responds to multiple calls a day from the hotel. Hotels like the Cecil, which were no longer able to attract business travelers or tourists, offered single-occupancy accommodation, in which unlucky tenants often rented single rooms with shared bathrooms on a long-term basis.

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But in 2007, as downtown LA was developing rapidly, new owners set out to flip the Cecil. “It didn’t take long to realize the place was different,” said Amy Price, who joined the hotel’s general manager in 2007. Price had never worked in the hospitality industry before his job and only had what you can do. Imagine it was a baptism of fire. “When I spoke to the hotel staff, many of whom had been there for years, I quickly realized that there were some things going on that were completely new to me. We were faced with a lot, no question about it. But we were running a legitimate business, and the people who worked there looked after it. We showed up every day to do a job and to survive, and we did our best. “

A major challenge for the hotel’s new owners was that it was a protected, low-income building, with a number of long-term residents who couldn’t easily be evicted to make room for more guest rooms. “Nobody told them that,” says Cooper in disbelief. “Nobody in town said, ‘Hey guys, this is a protected, low income building. Everyone who lives here has rights and you can’t just throw them on the street and rent the rooms out at night. “The rebranding of Stay On Main was their solution to this problem by allocating certain floors of the building to long-term residents and others to hip hostel-style accommodation aimed at young tourists on a budget.

“It was nice branding,” says Cooper with a shrug. “If you don’t know Skid Row, you probably think you want to stay on the Main!” She and her husband who run historical tours of the neighborhood through their company Esotouricwere amazed when they noticed the new clientele. “We started seeing all these young people, mostly girls, with their trolleys and we thought what was going on? You are not used to seeing tourists in this part of Main Street. “

One of these girls was Elisa Lam, who booked a few nights at Cecil in 2013 as part of a solo vacation on the west coast. Given the high crime rate in the area, a foul was initially suspected after Lam’s body was found in the water tank a few weeks after it disappeared. But ultimately, as the Netflix documentary examines, Lam’s death appears to have been a tragic accident caused by a psychotic episode. Still, there are many conspiracy theories and ghost stories.

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“I believe in ghosts,” Price says when I ask about the mythology surrounding the hotel. “But I definitely don’t think ghosts and goblins ran the show at the Cecil in any way. I really think it’s awkward. It is the area. Things happen there that make it easier for people to wrap it up and say, “Oh, well, it’s just a dark place.” I do not believe that. ”

Cooper has now spent enough time studying history to develop a keen awareness of how the past can manifest itself in physical spaces – it’s not necessarily ghosts, but rather a shift in energy. “I really feel like older places have this almost subsonic vibration when you are calm and sensitive to it. You can only feel the presence of those who came before, and it’s not scary and it’s not particularly dark. “The Cecil, like much of downtown Los Angeles, is a place where many people have suffered a lot, and that carries a weight that cannot be fully explained. “You have to respect it,” she continues. “You have to take it up and say, ‘This place saw things and it can’t tell us what it saw, but the least we can do is acknowledge it.'” This severity shows in the reviews from people who stayed in the hotel while it was still in operation –read a representative Yelp review: “Dreams die in the Cecil Hotel.”

The Cecil is unlikely to be haunted, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any modern horror stories to be told about it. Here’s one: Almost all 600 rooms are currently empty, at a time when People die in record numbers on the streets of LA A new homeless camp has sprung up on the sidewalk directly across from Main Street in recent months, a sign of how hard the pandemic has hit an already challenged neighborhood.

In 2014, Cecil was bought by Richard Born, whose portfolio of New York hotels includes the Bowery and Greenwich. In 2016, operator Simon Baron Development announced plans for a major renovation that would transform the Cecil into a mix of boutique hotel rooms and affordable housing. From 2019 Curbed LA reported that the renovation should be completed by October 2021 but no work has started yet. It’s unclear what the schedule for a reopening is, and only a handful of long-term renters remain.

“The idea of ​​dividing the building in half doesn’t seem like an urgency,” says Cooper with palpable frustration. “You could possibly take all of the hotel rooms as they are right now and accommodate people who live on the street Project room key. And FEMA has announced that they will return 100% of that money to the city of LA. So it’s not even like the city has to pay for it. ”

Once you discover this, you will no longer be able to see it. When you walk through downtown LA, looking at the tent cities and the numerous empty windows, it all feels like a grim joke. The Cecil isn’t the only building that’s empty in this area, and the streets are getting crowded. “The city doesn’t really care about protecting Angelenos,” Cooper concludes. “It’s very, very difficult to see.” Crime Scene is like that, but sometimes it’s almost impossible to look away.

Check out the trailer:

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Contributor
Emma Dibdin writes on television, films, and podcasts. Coverage includes opinion pieces, news items, episodic reviews and in-depth interviews with creative people.

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