What is Skid row? Here's how it made LA's Cecil Hotel a dangerous and shady place to live in
“Bless the internet, the internet doesn’t really have consequences,” these were the words of 21-year-old Elisa Lam who was found dead mysteriously inside the water tank of a Los Angeles hotel — The Cecil hotel. At the beginning of 2013, the young university student was on the search for a peaceful escape. The place where she can be herself, the place where she can see the world from her own eyes without any help. Lam took the help of the internet to look for her perfect holiday destination on which she embarked all alone without knowing that it would end tragically — in her own death.
The internet suggested her to go to the West Coast. Lam — one of the two daughters of an immigrant family from Hong Kong settled in Canada — who spent a few days in San Diego, later came to Los Angeles ‘the City of Dreams’ in late January 2013. There she chose to stay in Stay on Main, a refurbished part of the infamous Cecil hotel. It has been said the cool and trendy interiors of the place attracted the “naive” Lam a lot. Though the young woman thought she knew enough about the place where she was staying, the truth was different. Also, the area where the hotel was located has no good reputation, but Lam didn't know anything about it.
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Netflix’s new crime series — ‘Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel’ — releasing on February 10 is about the bizarre case of Lam, who mysteriously disappeared and days later her body was found inside the water tank on the roof of the hotel. The series has also featured a couple from the UK, who were in the Cecil when the student went missing. In their words, they were very happy when they got a very cheap deal on the internet for their LA trip, which included their hotel stay also. But when they finally reached there, the place was “just opposite to our expectation.” “The area around the hotel is called Skid Row, which has the reputation of being dangerous. It is a 54 block area in downtown LA. One of the poorest areas in the entire world, which existed for over 100 years,” Mike and Sabina Baugh, former guests of Cecil said.
What is Skid row?
In the series, it was mentioned that Skid Row is a dumping ground for people released from jail and mental facilities because the city wants these people to remain there, separated from the rest of LA. Also, the Cecil and other hotels in the area are part of the program on Skid Row that allows homeless and lower-income to have a home for a couple of weeks or a month, and in some cases even years. In the area, it’s very common to see intoxicated, high on crystal meth, naked people, roaming in public. The sale of drugs is illegal, but in Skid Row “everything is legal”. Skid Row is not a place, it has a character on its own, which is very much responsible for the dark persona of Cecil.
A report by The Sun in January 2020 quoted a homeless man from Skid Row, who said, “This is the Wild West. We have everything crazy going on here; drugs, alcohol, prostitution, fighting, violence. It's a society within a society, the homeless people sell drugs and alcohol to other homeless people. But there's no love for anybody, there'll be someone who is passed out drunk getting robbed and everyone will just stand there and say 'Ah look they're robbing Jimmy'. This place is just crazy. I grew up in the city in Philadelphia, but even I was shocked when I first came here."
Till 2007, Cecil was majorly occupied by the people released from jail, homeless, and drug-addicts, who couldn’t afford to go anywhere. The hotel was so comfortable for twisted people that it even hosted serial killers, like The Night Stalker Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger, who used to come there to let their hair down. It was very common for guests there to have an encounter with one of the most dangerous criminals inside the premises.
One of the most shocking cases that happened in the hotel was of ‘Pigeon Goldie’ Osgood, a retired telephone operator, who was found dead in her room on June 4, 1964. Though the case remains unsolved to date, many believed that she was killed by one of the people from Skid Row, who beat, stabbed, raped, and choked her with a rag. Over the years, several crimes happened at the hotel.
But when in 2007, new owners took over the hotel, they decided to refurbish it. At that point, it was the worst hotel in the area. The process involved a lot of issues because they cannot renovate the whole place. It was a residential hotel, so only some of the rooms could be rented as a hotel and all the other rooms remain to be monthly rentals for homeless people. “So many shady residents. Bad things just kept happening. After a series of bad reviews, we came up with ‘Stay on Main’. The new would be a youth hostel for the modern travelers while Cecil for its tenants and other guests,” Amy Price, former GM at the hotel, says in the Netflix series.
“Same building with two parts. Stay on Main was a clean slate. Even a separate front door for Stay on Main. Two different lobbies in one building. People liked the concept, we got positive reviews. We were getting praise and were able to succeed because Stay on Main was a different property altogether,” Price added. However, there was an exception with the newly renovated place, it shared elevators with Cecil. So, when Lam was looking for a place to stay in LA, she ended up in Stay on Main, thinking it’s cool. Lam was almost like an “insect caught in a trap”.
She was last seen in an elevator inside the hotel acting erratically, which included pressing its buttons, walking in and out of the elevator, and apparently trying to hide from someone or something. Though there is no evidence if Lam was actually hiding from someone, many have claimed that she was trying to escape from someone — may be a creep, a homeless man who was residing there or someone from Skid Row who came there to prey on just another guest.
The strange case of Lam is the subject of ‘Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel', which also covers other aspects that possibly led to her death. To know more, watch it on Netflix on Wednesday, February 10, at 12 AM PST.