Inside the Rudolph Valentino suite, Room 1202 of the Alexandria Hotel, flies swarm near red velvet wallpaper and dilapidated furnishings, a dusty chandelier dangles from the ceiling, and the only sign of the silent film star is an old picture screwed to the wall.
But the view from this room is nothing if not optimistic. Nearly every building in every direction is under construction as formerly vacant or derelict properties are converted to high-end condos and loft apartments -- glamorous units that are so hot, buyers are reselling them before they're ever occupied. Photographers, architects, designers and filmmakers are moving in from Los Feliz and Silver Lake, even the Westside. Down at street level, sidewalk cafes and art galleries are cropping up on every block.
"In six months, it's going to be a dramatically different sidewalk scene," says Brady Westwater, who heads downtown Los Angeles' neighborhood council. "In 18 months, you won't recognize it."
Yet right in the heart of this boom, the Alexandria stands at 5th and Spring streets, a monument to the past, the same rundown weekly rate hotel it has been for decades. Elderly tenants still amble through its marble lobby to the local drugstore while others pass their days on shredded red leather benches. And the hotel is still rich with eccentrics: the voodoo woman who curses passersby; Dr. Smellgood, who sprays everyone who gets near him with air freshener; and the Preacher, whose sidewalk "sermons" can be heard for blocks.
The Alexandria's star attractions, the Valentino suite and grand ballrooms, serve almost exclusively as sets for film crews. Beefy security guards, braced for occasional violence, still patrol the entrances while outside, glassy-eyed peddlers work pedestrians, selling heroin and Vicodin, and single cigarettes for a quarter.
"It is what it is," says Martin Yacoobian Jr., whose family has owned the hotel since 1979. The Alexandria, he says, will never be anything more than a home to downtown's downtrodden class, the elderly and the disabled, folks priced out of housing just about everywhere else.
It's too complicated and too costly to convert the rent-controlled building to luxury condos, and any developer considering it "is kidding themselves," says Yacoobian. Evicting the hotel's 350 or so tenants to make room for a more affluent clientele would ensnare developers in a legal and political quagmire for years.
"There's only so much you can get out of a building like that," he says.
But these warnings can't cool the fever that drives this real estate frenzy. Here, every building owner who hasn't already sold his property is shopping it. Even Yacoobian, who says he has no plans to sell, has set a "bottom line": $30 million cash and the buyer takes full responsibility for the tenants. Rumors of an impending sale have been floating for months among downtown's real estate community -- an exciting and daunting prospect for developers, a terrifying one for the Alexandria's tenants.
Transforming the hotel could dramatically alter this area of downtown Los Angeles by virtue of its size -- the 477-room hotel features a restaurant, a bar, a coffee shop, two ballrooms, three service kitchens, underground parking, 11 street-level stores -- and a central location.
Then there are the Alexandria's architectural gems -- the magnificent Palm Court ballroom with its stained-glass Tiffany skylight, for example -- that made it the most luxurious hotel of its era. It was the film industry's first home in the early 1900s, a place where dozens of studios maintained offices, where Charlie Chaplin and friends formed United Artists, where the lobby bustled with so many deal makers that a Persian rug there was deemed the "million-dollar carpet."
Today, the Alexandria represents the mixed blessing of redevelopment. Tenant rights activists call the hotel "a line in the sand" in the battle to save downtown's affordable housing. Business owners and developers consider it a hurdle to "uplifting the neighborhood," a haven for crime, the last domino that needs to fall to make the area's gentrification complete.
Meanwhile, the older tenants, some of whom have watched this corner for decades, bide their time as always, keeping an eye on the shifting tides outside their door.
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IT'S HIS NEIGHBORHOOD
BRADY WESTWATER'S speech takes on a kind of stream-of-consciousness flow as he walks along Spring Street, rattling off the neighborhood's newcomers, cafes and art galleries and identifying nearby buildings as "lofts, condos, lofts, condos."
An L.A. native, Westwater spent his childhood downtown in the 1950s and 1960s. "I got blood splattered on me at the Main Street Gym," he says. "And I saw my first naked woman backstage at the Burbank Theater, which was by then a burlesque house....Downtown was my playground."
