Kiosk - The City within the City (page 3)

The City within the City
(continued)

Dennis has become the type of person he once was paid to hassle. The cart he sometimes pushes is the same sort of debris he would have moved off the streets in his former job. Moving from one role to the other was a humbling experience, he tells me. He’s wearing a “Los Angeles” tee shirt, with stars and stripes painted across it.

Along the streets many people wear similar “California,” “Los Angeles” and even “Beverly Hills” tee shirts, because of some lingering notion of pride, as some kind of ironic gesture, or—most likely—because you can get three for $5 just down the street. The homeless often look like haggard tourists who missed a connection somewhere along the way. They wheel luggage along Skid Row’s corridors, cheap knock-off bags that they buy for as little as $10 from the tangle of wholesalers in the Fashion District. The Cecil Hotel even claims to be a tourist hotel, and from the front, with its gold trim, fake Doric columns, and long marble corridor, this seems plausible enough, though not many tourist hotels have residents living in them for years at a time, or Meals-on-Wheels deliveries instead of lobby restaurants.

The Cecil Hotel, like many others in the area, shuffles residents from room to room every twenty-eight days, or may even evict them for a day, to deny them the rights that they would be entitled to after a month’s stay. Legally, a tenant is anyone who rents the same room for thirty consecutive days. Tourist status is a class of housing that gives a hotel the ability to avoid granting some of these rights. According to UC Berkeley professor Paul Groth’s research on residential hotels, a net loss often helps a hotel owner’s tax accounting, and long periods of neglect often make repairs to the buildings more costly than potential earnings. Due to these circumstances, many property owners neglect even small repairs and find low-cost solutions to major problems, such as plastering over large holes in the wall, or ignoring lead and infestation problems. I met one woman in the Huntington Hotel who claimed she wasn’t going to pay rent again until the rats started paying half.

The hotels face human problems as well. On the side of the Frontier Hotel, sunk back into the masonry, is a black door made by slotting together sheets of plywood. Above the wood, dirty windows display seven red-and-black warning signs. “Private property,” they read. “No loitering. No entry with out permission. Closed to the public. No drugs. No drug dealers. No weapons. No drinking of alcoholic beverages. The Los Angeles police department makes regular and frequent patrols of these premises.” As I stood admiring the signs one day, the middle sheet of plywood on the black door swung open to reveal a long corridor at the other end of which was a wrought-iron gate with security guards in front of it. The signs and the guards are a part of a settlement from a 2003 lawsuit requiring the hotel to curb the drug dealing and other illegal activities going on in the hotel. But, of course, not every hotel provides such safety features, and even when they do, the residents have to put up with living in a place that feels like county jail.

For two hundred years, people of all social classes have lived in hotels. Up until the 1950s, most hotels still offered a daily and a monthly rate. In the past, it was the hotel owners who wanted to hold onto their buildings and the city officials who wanted to tear them down. But now, with many officials recognizing the benefits of affordable single-room housing and with the rise of property values, these roles have been reversed. Many owners these days want to sell their properties or convert them into more fashionable and valuable forms of housing.

The residents of the Frontier Hotel are being asked to move out, to make way for more profitable lofts. Already the top floor has been converted. Around the corner from the black plywood door and wrought-iron gate— but in the same building— a clean, Art Deco hallway leads past plastic plants into a lobby where an elevator goes only to the top floor. It moves twelve stories up, an express coach that bypasses those few remaining residents who return home via the black plywood door. These two ways of life, hotel and loft living, are stacked upon each other, like strata in the earth, the new atop the old.

Rent control ordinances, local legislation, and tenants’ rights lawsuits keep all of the old hotels from disappearing. Then there are the civic-minded hotel owners. Many of them speak about wanting to rent housing to low-income residents as part of a social obligation, and more and more non-profit organizations are buying, refurbishing, and managing old hotels to maintain the housing stock. But the sad fact remains that there are not enough rooms at affordable prices, and each time a property switches hands the hotel’s status, and therefore its tenants’ well-being, is at risk.

The type of community formed in hotels was once dubbed the “intangible republic” by early New York journalists. In the 1800s, citizens rented on the “American Plan,” where they paid for lodging and meals in one lump sum. Hotels were grand affairs, pillars of social life. They were the place where many newlyweds settled down to get their first leg up in the world. In fact, the hotels were where members of all social classes made their homes. In 1844, when a hotel in the New York area offered private dining instead of communal meals, an editor for New York’s Weekly Mirror declared such antisocial behavior “directly opposed to American ideals of democracy.”

This social cohesiveness is still prevalent in the hotels of Skid Row and out on its streets. Real human interaction is hard to avoid when residents walk everywhere they go, and the walls in some hotels seem about as thick as a slice of bread. On the roof of the Alexandria Hotel, residents hold barbeques from time to time; on the Fourth of July they stand on the roof together, watching fireworks splash against the night sky, the silhouette of the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance.

(conclusion on page 4)