LA Weekly

Photo by Kevin Scanlon

Downtown Los Angeles has been calling my name for years. Shooting me up with lofty Architectural Digest interior imagery — from a dirty syringe.

I dismissed her call and moved to the Westside, but when my landlord doubled the rent on my canyon cabin, the siren call of downtown was as piercing as Whitney Houston on a three-day crack run. When I tracked the voice to its sordid source, the stench of human suffering in the homeless zoo on San Julian Street between Sixth and Seventh, right around the corner from the loft I was considering, nearly made me turn back.

Nearly, but not quite, and my new Skid Row digs are a score at a thousand bucks a month — a big open raw space on the sixth floor with a great view. The only problem, besides the sometimes-malodorous breeze coming in off San Julian Street, was the 30 days I had to kill before I could occupy my new arty loft in the Toy District. I needed to find a temporary squat to fill the void until the previous tenant vacated.

I wanted to stay downtown and settle into the neighborhood, so I went online and checked out Hotels.com. They gave the Checkers Hilton on Grand a four-star rating, and both of the 907-square-foot penthouse suites have amenities like entertainment center with 27-inch remote-controlled flat-screen TV, VCR, surround-sound stereo with CD player, fireplace, separate bathtub, marble shower and a dramatic view of downtown. Perfect! But at $1,500 a night (depending on total hotel occupancy and availability), it was out of my reach. The New Otani Hotel on the corner of Los Angeles Street and Second got three and a half stars, and it was right near my new Skid Row–adjacent digs, but again, the 1,836-square-foot Royal Suite at $1,800 a night was just out of my range. A month in that little palace would set me back more than 50 grand (depending on total hotel occupancy and availability)!

To read Sam Slovick's User Guide to the New Urban Frontier, click here.

I wasn’t finding the kind of thing I was looking for at Hotels.com or in the Zagat hotel guide (i.e., affordable), but I had a loose grip on the compact and ultradiverse downtown landscape, with its myriad housing options. Since I’d be out looking, I decided to put together a little guide of my own, starting out just a stone’s throw away from the Bonaventure Hotel on Figueroa, where the 720-square-foot Huntington Suite rents out for $2,189 a night.

Jack Richards, the senior vice president of marketing at Hotels.com, told me a guide is only as good as its field research is current. So I went far and wide, investigating cost-effective living situations ranging from The Cecil Hotel on Main Street, an SRO (single-room-occupancy) hotel called The Simone and the flashy L.A. Mission on Fifth Street as well as the swanky Little Tokyo lofts on San Pedro Street, the historic Orpheum lofts on Broadway and the sophisticated San Fernando lofts on Fourth and Main. (See accompanying ratings guide for the lowdown and upswing on addresses in bold on page 56.)



I wanted to get a feel for the area, so I took a stroll down the block to the Volunteers of America Drop-In Center between Sixth and Seventh. This is Skid Row ground zero, lots of squats here for the low-to-no-income crowd.

Shopping carts pushed against the buildings border the sidewalk on either side of the block. Wheelchairs. Crutches. A discarded walker lies toppled in the gutter. A shirtless, skeletal 20-something man in filthy, low-hanging jeans is crawling on his hands and knees, taste-testing white specks from the street till he finds a keeper and scampers into a cardboard-box-and-blanket tent to smoke it up. Two older black men with blood clotting through last week’s gauzed abscessed wounds watch from the next box as they smoke crack from a glass stem.

A disheveled and despondent 14-year-old Mexican boy with a harelip and a black crack-pipe smudge on his face leans against the cinderblock wall separating God and the Devil in front of the VoA. At the south end of the block on the corner of Seventh Street and San Julian, a fat black man in his 50s steps out of a portable toilet zipping up his pants. The door opens again, and a teenage girl hands a few bucks to a dealer waiting just outside to supply her between tricks. She cops and disappears back inside alone.

I ask a nearly 7-foot-tall, rail-thin man with a misshapen nappy gray Afro in a wrinkled, bright-red ’70s pimp suit where the cops are. “Sometimes the cops come down here, but not on foot and definitely not alone,” he says, his face frozen in a permanent mask of surprise. “They don’t stop anybody from doing what they’re doing.”

A shirtless woman in her 30s puts a Bic lighter to a 2-inch broken crack-pipe stem, but another woman snatches it from her fingers and dashes down the block before she can get a proper pull. “I kill you cunt!” she screams as she hobbles on shaky legs down the block after the thief. Her breasts sag in the way that makes me think she’s probably nursed two or three children. She sits down next to a man squatting on a piece of cardboard picking at an ulcerated wound on his shin. The woman next to him shoots herself up with a fresh set of works from the needle exchange on Fifth Street. Old and ugly. Young and skinny. Dark and lovely. The VoA Drop-In Center is triage in browntown.

Fully committed, I venture on through the twisted, tent-lined byways between Los Angeles and San Pedro streets, scrutinizing smelly shelters and drug-infested hotels, finally making my