Bowl High-Rollers Find There’s Room at Low-Rent Inns

Jose Lopez sauntered into the seventh-floor room. The radiator in the corner belched and spat. The faded flowers on the curtains seemed to offer a wan smile.

The picture on the television was that of sports announcers broadcasting Super Bowl news from San Diego.

“This is it,” Lopez said of one of the Pickwick Hotel’s Super Bowl rooms. “Thirty-four dollars a night--our top-of-the-line single. Color television . . . a bath . . . what more could you want?”

Lopez, the Pickwick manager, wasn’t joking.

But the joke may be on scores of high-rollers who decided better late than never to come to Super Bowl XXII. Many, it seems, have been booked into hotels that are not on the AAA, Mobil Tour Guide or any other list of tourist-preferred quarters.

Take the Pickwick. It’s in the same building as the busy Greyhound bus terminal on Broadway. And along with the Hotel Churchill, at 827 C St. near the trolley tracks, it almost always rents to “transients,” in the words of the hotel manager.

Rates at the two establishments normally fit more into the budgets of welfare recipients and Social Security disability cases than those of corporate executives breezing in for Super Bowl XXII, set for Sunday in San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium.

These are not normal times.

During Super Bowl weekend, the Pickwick and Churchill, as well as other hotels, will be as packed as overstuffed suitcases. For once in their checkered lives, such old joints will share something in common with the Omni, the U.S. Grant, the Westgate and all the other “luxury” hotels teeming with Super Bowl visitors.

The Pickwick and Churchill will have high-rollers and fat cats camped under their roofs, too. They’ll have the ones who got started late on making reservations.

Do such folks know what they’re in for? Such spots are hardly the best money can buy.

“My client is a deluxe client,” said Judy Walker, executive vice president of W.V. Travel in New York. “He really wants a deluxe hotel, and this (the Churchill) sounds a little undeluxe. They’re charging $46 a night, and he’s used to paying--and preferring--$400 a night.”

Walker said her client is the president of a major corporation based in Manhattan, kind of a “junior Donald Trump.”

“He’s a big shot,” she said. “A very big shot. He just decided (Monday) to do this. We have a first-class airline ticket for him. I called the (Super Bowl) hotel hot line in San Diego, 232-2112, and they suggested ‘economy’ places in Carlsbad and Encinitas. I didn’t think he would want that.

Hot Line Suggested Churchill

“All the luxury hotels had rooms but only for four-night minimums. He only wants to stay two nights. The hot line then suggested the Churchill, but it doesn’t sound like his kind of place . . . I can’t decide what to do.”

Jim Gilson, who manages the front desk at the Churchill, is a part-time cab driver. Cab drivers are among the monthly tenants at the Churchill, Gilson said, as are security guards, secretaries, retirees and welfare cases. Gilson gets behind a wheel as soon as he leaves the counter.

“After the game, I’m gonna quit the cab job,” he said. “Hey, man, working 16 hours a day is killin’ me.”

Gilson said that Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) is booked into the Churchill for the weekend. Gilson said Young would get the “Cloud 9” suite. C.J. Zane, Young’s administrative assistant, said late Tuesday, however, that he’d decided to pull Young out of the Churchill.

“Uh, we found out what kind of hotel it is, and he ain’t gonna stay there ,” Zane said.

Zane said Young was a fan of the Washington Redskins and wanted to come to the game as soon as the Redskins beat the Minnesota Vikings to qualify. The congressman’s travel agent booked him into the Churchill, the only place she could find on short notice.

Zane contacted a couple of San Diego friends active in the commercial fishing lobby. As locals, they strongly advised against the Churchill.

“I admit I was suspicious from the start,” Zane said. “They wanted $70 a night for a suite. A suite for $70 a night is pretty incredible. That was the first red flare.

“Then one of my friends went over and checked out the room where Don would be staying. He called back and said, ‘No way, man. No way is Don gonna stay there.’ So, he’ll stay with friends. It worked out for the best all around.”

Zane said the Churchill’s population of transients would “not have turned Don off, since Don is a pretty tough customer. He’s stayed in native hotels in Nome and Tok (Alaskan towns). He stayed in this one place in Bethel (Alaska) where you have a 50-50 chance of drunks leaving you alone or beating your door down in the middle of the night. Don would have handled himself just fine.”

Gilson said he expects six Super Bowl guests on Thursday, 15 to 20 more on Friday and five to six on Saturday. He said the Churchill was built 70 years ago but remodeled in 1983 under an “English castle motif.” Paintings, even replicas of knights in shining armor, are as omnipresent as stuffed ashtrays. Drawings of castles await visitors at the end of every hallway.

Rates are $42 a night for one person, $46 a night for two. Fifty rooms, none of which have baths, go to the more indigent clientele at a cost of $295 a month. When the Hotel Sandford closed recently, threatening to send a multitude of the elderly and disabled into the streets, social workers reassigned many to the Churchill.

‘Could Be Interesting Weekend’

Gilson was asked how he thought the Churchill’s tenant population would respond to a lobby of high-rollers and millionaires. Would the groups be compatible?

“It’s gonna be very interesting,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s hard to tell what’s gonna happen. The crowd coming in versus the crowd that lives here--wow! Could be an interesting weekend. Thank God I’m off on weekends.”

Gilson was asked how he’d react if some of the high-rollers insulted regular tenants or got hostile when conditions didn’t measure up to a millionaire’s standards.

“That’s something those people would have to work out in their own minds,” he said. “Personally, I’d say those people are lucky to even be getting rooms-- anywhere in San Diego. The ones who live here on a permanent basis are the ones who give us our bread and butter. If somebody doesn’t want to stay here, let ‘em go elsewhere. They have to live with their own conscience.”

Paul Hayden is a $295-a-month tenant at the Churchill, a retired painter from Las Vegas.

“Rich people coming in don’t bother me,” he said. “They leave me alone, I’ll leave them alone.”

‘Gets Kind of Wild’

Hayden said he thought “it could get strange” having millionaires mingle with “vagrants.”

“We have a lot of retards and street people in here,” he said. “At times, it gets kind of wild around here.”

Several blocks away on Broadway, in the shadow of shoeshine stands and hot pretzel racks, is the Pickwick, a 63-year-old hotel once owned by Bing Crosby. The sign out front reads: “Picadilly Club: Everyday drinks at everyday prices.”

Joe Morales rents a room at the Pickwick for $360 a month.

“I would say rich people are not in any kind of position to complain about the rooms they’ll get (at the Pickwick),” Morales said. “They got to be happy to find any place at all at this point. If it were me, I’d be happy just to find some place to shave.”

Morales said he would be “upset” if the Pickwick’s regular tenants were insulted or inconvenienced, or if hotel management were embarrassed.

“You know what I like about this place,” he said with misty eyes. “I’m an old man, and the folks here are friendly. You can always find a smile, or a nice conversation.”

Manager Jose Lopez has worked at the Pickwick since 1950. Lopez expects 15 rooms to be occupied by Super Bowl ticket-holders, most of whom were booked by High Miles Tours of Denver.

He said the bulk of the Pickwick clientele is sailors and Marines, who with their families arrive “on the bus and need a place to sleep.”

He listed other residents as a combination of elderly and retired, with some disability and welfare cases.

The Pickwick price range is $30 to $34 a night for singles, $40 to $46 a night for doubles, with monthly rates of $360.

Lopez said “it isn’t strange at all” to have millionaires camping above a Greyhound bus station.

“A couple of fat cats from Chicago stay here all the time,” he said. “And why wouldn’t they? The beds are warm, the water works, and they don’t lose a fortune.

“They can spend their millions on something besides sleep. As far as sleep goes, we can match any hotel in town. Just try us. Guarantee you, you’ll be glad.”