Welcome to Exotic, Foreign Los Angeles

So the holidays left you broke and in need of a break. Well, for about $80 a night you can unwind in any of half a dozen swank digs--all within walking distance of City Hall and Skid Row.

L.A.’s downtown hotels, once desolate between sunset Friday and sunrise Monday, are now bustling on weekends, thanks to heavily advertised packages that combine bargain rates with a new tourist lure: metropolitan life.

Nightclubs like the Stock Exchange, designer clothing sales at the California Mart, exhibits at the Museum of Contemporary Art and other urban attractions are changing downtown’s seedy image, and local hotels are aggressively cashing in.

“We all recognize that weekend travelers are excellent business,” says Cathy Boire of the Westin Bonaventure, where the 1987 tourist trade doubled projections, “and our weekend numbers are definitely becoming much stronger.”

The space-age Bonaventure’s “Weekend Under Glass,” offering $129 deluxe room and board for two, is one of numerous downtown hotel packages that set weekend prices at a fraction of peak lodging rates and throw in such freebies as indoor parking and continental breakfast.

At the opulent Biltmore, the “Escape to Europe” weekend offers double occupancy, parking and use of the health spa for $65 a night. The New Otani’s “Japanese weekend” reduces a $120 room to $74 and includes a 10% discount on food.

Weekends at the Hilton Midtown find $122 rooms with continental breakfast for $59. The Hyatt Regency offers $166 rooms for a weekend rate of $79 and the Sheraton Grand has $200 rooms for $95.

Hotel managers say the packages are bringing in a whole new clientele: young professionals who want to escape the mundane suburbs and sample the city’s cultural smorgasbord.

“One of the things we’ve done successfully is promote the idea of ‘downtown as destination,’ ” says Vicky King of the Biltmore. “We’re seeing a lot of working couples who check in for the weekend to spend time at MOCA, eat in Little Tokyo, take in the theater and go out dancing.”

And with hotels advertising heavily along the southern Interstate 5 corridor, “we’ve even got people coming up from Orange County,” she reports.

The thought of an Orange County couple wandering along Broadway on a Saturday night is a tad unsettling--glitz aside, crime after dark is still a downtown reality. Hotels are quietly emphatic about security measures; indoor overnight parking is a must and some guests are carted to and from nightspots in courtesy vans.

But as more tourists grow bolder and take to the mean streets, the downtown weekend scene is changing. “The pendulum has swung,” says Chris Stewart of the Central City Assn.

“Where people used to be frightened by the urbanization of Los Angeles, they’re now finding it attractive. Instead of the traditional suburban shopping mall experience, you have a microcosm of very diverse ethnic cultures, and people like that.

“The so-called ‘baby boomers,’ which now constitute our most significant economic force, are not intimidated by an urban environment,” Stewart said. “They thrive on it because it’s very dynamic.”

Stewart and other tourist officials believe three factors will bring in more weekend tourists: improved mass transit with the scheduled opening of Metro Rail in 1992, higher numbers of downtown white-collar residents (housing units are projected to rise from 6,000 to 20,000 by the year 2010) and an influx of emigres from cities like New York and Chicago, where night life percolates.

“In the next five years,” Stewart said, “you’ll come down here and you’ll think you’re in Manhattan.”

The hotel industry is literally banking on that. Jack Kyser of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce reports that several new deluxe hotels are planned for the central city, including one by the Ayala Group, parent of San Francisco’s Campton Place, and another by the Embassy Suites chain, noted for its elegant Westside inns.

Tourists and hotel executives alike “are now aware that downtown L.A. has gotten some bad raps,” Kyser said, “and that there’s more to this city than the beaches and Disneyland.”