Behind the Door: The Dark Truths and Untold Stories of the Cecil Hotel
by Amy Price
I picked this up at the
L.A. Times Festival of Books last month after seeing Price on a historic L.A. panel. Price was the general manager of the
notorious Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles near Skid Row for ten years. In spite of the hotel's depressing location and often tragic history, she fell in love with the place, hoping that the gentrification of DTLA would reach it and restore it to its former glory.
When Price arrived at the Cecil in 2007 it already had a checkered past. Built as a luxury hotel, its fortunes had fallen decades earlier as it deteriorated along with the area. Numerous deaths - both suicides and homicides - occurred at the Cecil. At least two serial killers (
Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker - and
Jack Unterweger) had called the Cecil home during the commission of their crimes.
Price - then a jewelry designer and aspiring interior decorator - was originally hired by a friend to help give the Cecil a hipster update to bring the hotel back to life. This was complicated by a number of long-term residents who were more reflective of the Skid Row neighborhood than the Cecil's former glory. Other issues had to do with the hotel's design - many rooms did not have their own bathrooms or showers, requiring the use of communal facilities, and the Cecil also had neither heat nor air conditioning. The residents had been relocated to just a couple of lower floors, while Stay on Main, as the hotel aspect was dubbed, utilized non-resident floors. And for a while, Stay worked as a popular, dirt-cheap, hipster hostel. However, when summer arrived the lack of AC became a major issue, and Stay's reviews began to reflect the disenchanted guests.
Then came the
Elisa Lam case. When LAPD failed to locate the missing young woman, they released security video of Elisa behaving oddly in a Cecil elevator and the case became an internet sensation. Several weeks later Elisa was found on the premises, and the Cecil became world-infamous as the hotel where the missing girl turned up in its water tank after guests complained about issues with water, including low pressure, filth, and a weird taste.
After ten years at the Cecil, attempting to restore the hotel and manage its colorful residents, Price was relieved of her duties by new ownership. She embarked on a successful interior decorating career and an unsuccessful marriage. Then Netflix came calling about a planned documentary about the Cecil Hotel, and Price, led to believe that Elisa Lam wouldn't be the focus and eager to let the world know there was more to the hotel than the girl in the water tank, signed up to participate.
One thing I remember about the resulting docuseries
Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, is that I thought it was a major cheat that Lam's mental illness and her issues with her medications weren't brought up until late in the story, instead suggesting several theories of who murdered Lam when it turned out she wasn't really a murder victim. And not only did the show focus on the Lam case, it also gave some viewers the impression that Price was possibly suspect in Lam's death, or that she may have tampered with the infamous elevator video footage. When the show debuted, Price's life was turned upside down. She received vicious and even threatening messages online by people obsessed with the Lam case.
Fortunately, Price came through the ordeal a self-described stronger person. She showed a great deal of compassion toward the Cecil's unfortunate residents during her tenure, but seems to have made her peace with the whole experience. Today, the Cecil Hotel has been repurposed as a low-income housing facility.
From the book (discussing the "tragedy tourism" triggered by the Elisa Lam case:
But booking a stay to be closer to tragedy paled in comparison to the weird performances spawned by Elisa's death. Once, I got a call from someone at the Pacific Electric Building telling me there was a man playing the guitar on top of one of the water tanks. It was ten o'clock at night. The man had risked his life to put on this show. He'd had to climb the fire escape up to the top of a 150-foot building, just as Elisa had most likely done.
