It was built to be smart. The Cecil opened on 20 December 1924 at 640 South Main Street, designed by Loy Lester Smith with 700 rooms, a marble lobby and Beaux Arts detailing, and it was advertised on the quality of its furniture. The intention was a business travellers' hotel in a downtown that was still the centre of Los Angeles.
The Depression arrived five years later and never really left this block. Downtown emptied westward through the middle of the century, the surrounding streets became what is now called Skid Row, and the Cecil went with them. It stopped being a hotel for people passing through and became long term housing for people with very few other options, which is what it substantially remained for decades.
That is the real history of the building, and it is more useful than the reputation attached to it. A large cheap residential hotel on Skid Row, holding hundreds of people living close to the edge, accumulated a great many deaths over ninety years. Several notorious crimes are connected to it as well. The building did not cause any of that; the housing economics around it did.
It was renamed Stay On Main in 2011, an attempt to separate part of the operation from the name. In 2016 the City of Los Angeles designated the Cecil a Historic-Cultural Monument, which protects the fabric of it.
It has been closed to guests and worked on for years, with plans centred on affordable and supportive housing. Look at it from the street rather than treating a place people still live near as an attraction.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
