Change checks in at a skid row hotel

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Maniscalco and other longtime residents of the Cecil say the hotel and surrounding blocks are safer. But Maniscalco doesn't kid himself; he knows the improvements were not devised with him in mind.

Management has moved him twice in recent months, but so far he hasn't taken the hint. "Where else am I going to go?" he said.

He arrived on skid row in the 1970s after working odd jobs around the country and falling into alcoholism. He says he's been sober for years -- and feels that the stability of the Cecil has helped keep him on the straight and narrow.

He collects about $900 a month from Social Security, paying $471 for rent.

"This is my last stop," he said. "I don't have anywhere else. No family or nothing."

Maniscalco knows that tourists are paying higher rates and said that in recent months airport shuttles and charter buses have been dropping off dozens of travelers at the hotel.

Cecil employees say that over a month, a tourist may pay about twice as much as a low-income resident.

Alvin Taylor has lived at the Cecil for 25 years. Unlike Maniscalco, Taylor said he refused managers' requests to move out of his room on the 10th floor.

His room, which in a typical house would be about the size of the dining room, is packed with belongings, including three 27-inch televisions, each hooked to a VCR. "I watch everything," Taylor said.

Last Christmas, Taylor went back to Texas -- "I gotta see my momma," he said -- one of the few times in the last decade that he has stayed overnight anywhere other than the Cecil. Taylor moved to Los Angeles from Houston in the 1970s when he was diagnosed with leukemia, and thought the weather and doctors would be better in Southern California.

He's been downtown since, mostly unemployed and on disability.

He said that soon after new owners took over the hotel, maintenance crews came to work on some pipes in his room. As they began, Taylor said cockroaches flooded out of a hole in the wall. "Oh yeah," he said, "I've got roaches."

Maniscalco and Taylor are among 90 to 110 long-term residents -- depending on who is counting -- and both said they are worried about rising rates and eviction.

Last fall, the two men walked a few blocks down Main Street to tell Pete White and Becky Dennison of the Los Angeles Community Action Network about their problems with the Cecil's new owners.

"I think they want us to move for one reason," Taylor told White. "Because they don't want us to be residents. They're trying to turn it into a tourist attraction."

Cordova said he is staying within the law and paying little attention to complaints from the community group.

He said his ambitions are reasonable and that he has no illusions about the neighborhood.

Still, he promises that the Cecil's makeover will continue and said he is seriously considering renaming the venerable hotel "the Pearl."

"Because the world is your oyster," he said, showing sketches of what the new name would look like on the side of the building. "Maybe we'll get a third star."

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ari.bloomekatz@latimes.com