Cecil Hotel

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The Cecil Hotel in 2005

The Cecil Hotel (also: Hotel Cecil , meanwhile: Stay on Main ) in Downtown Los Angeles (640 South Main Street ) was a hotel opened in 1924 by Robert H. Schops with initially 700, later 600 guest rooms and 14 floors. The furnishing company Barker Brothers took over the furnishing at the time . Although it was initially built as a hotel for business travelers, it gained a reputation in the 1950s as an overnight accommodation option for travelers, and over the following decades the Cecil Hotel was increasingly used as a cheap long-term rental option. In 2007, after the takeover by new owners, the hotel was to be converted into a tourist hotel, for which the Stay Hotel was opened within the same building. A subsequent long-term legal dispute with the city of Los Angeles, which did not want to accept the conversion of affordable living space into regular hotel rooms, finally ended in 2011 with a settlement that should leave 300 of the hotel rooms as affordable living space and enable the remaining rooms to be converted . In the meantime, the Stay on Main, which emerged from the Stay Hotel that was built during the renovation work in 2007, is located in the Cecil's premises.

Murder cases

The Hotel Cecil was at least temporarily the accommodation of the two serial killers Richard Ramírez and Jack Unterweger . Ramirez, also known as the "Night Stalker", lived on the 14th floor of the Cecil in 1984/85 and was responsible for 14 murders and eleven rapes during this time. In 1991 the Austrian Jack Unterweger stayed at the hotel, where he murdered three women.

In February 2013, the body of Elisa Lam , a 21-year-old Canadian student, was discovered in the water supply tanks on the hotel's roof after hotel guests complained about the low water pressure. The police eventually assumed "accidental drowning" as the cause of death and announced that Lam's previously diagnosed bipolar personality disorder may have contributed to the death. The release of a surveillance video of Lam, in which she behaved strangely in the hotel elevator on January 31, 2013 (three weeks before her body was found), eventually sparked further speculation about the cause of her death.

The Cecil is also said to have been one of the last places Elizabeth Short (also known as the "Black Dahlia") stayed before she was murdered in 1947.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Ruth Wallach, Linda McCann, Dace Taube, Claude Zachary, Curtis C. Roseman: Historic Hotels of Los Angeles and Hollywood . Arcadia Publishing, Charleston 2008, ISBN 978-0-7385-5906-3 , pp. 66 f . (American English, usc.edu [PDF; accessed May 15, 2014]). Historic Hotels of Los Angeles and Hollywood ( Memento of the original from July 18, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.usc.edu
  2. ^ A b Eric Richardson: Boutique Stay Hotel Soft-Launches in the Cecil. (No longer available online.) In: blogdowntown. July 15, 2008, archived from the original on April 7, 2014 ; Retrieved May 15, 2014 (American English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / blogdowntown.com
  3. ^ A b Eric Richardson: Cecil Hotel to Stay Residential Under Terms of Settlement to Long-Running Lawsuits. (No longer available online.) In: blogdowntown. November 11, 2011, archived from the original on April 7, 2014 ; Retrieved May 15, 2014 (American English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / blogdowntown.com
  4. ↑ a b c Christiane Heil: Dead in the water tank. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. March 6, 2013, accessed July 31, 2014 .
  5. ↑ Melissa Palmer, Lolita Lopez: Body Found in Water Tank at Hotel is Missing Canadian Tourist: LAPD. In: NBC Los Angeles. February 20, 2013, accessed July 31, 2014 .
  6. ↑ Drishya Nair: Elisa Lam's death ruled accidental. In: International Business Times. June 21, 2013, accessed July 31, 2014 .
  7. ^ A b William M. Welch: Elisa Lam's death ruled accidental. In: USA Today. June 21, 2013, accessed July 31, 2014 .
  8. ↑ Denise Hamilton: Serial Killer Central. In: LA Observed. December 10, 2007, accessed July 31, 2014 .

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