‘Dangerous’ Skid Row Hotel Emptied, Its Fate Up in Air

On the last day the Olympia Hotel was open, some things were different and some things seemed just the same.

Los Angeles police officers, who call the Skid Row establishment a drug-infested place, were there, which was not unusual. There just seemed to be more of them walking the halls Tuesday, telling people they would have to leave.

As city officials took the unusual step of shutting down a slum building as being too dangerous for habitation, one man packed up a few belongings--and then walked outside in a black miniskirt, high-heeled shoes and net stockings.

The hotel at 1203 E. 7th St. is in a pocket of Skid Row known for male transvestites and prostitution as well as drug trafficking.

The squat three-story brick building looks like a slum--with broken windows, holes in the ceilings, leaky plumbing. Grime cakes the long, dark halls. Human waste is on the floor of one common bathroom. People paid about $65 a week to live there.

Police say there have been three murders there since January, two in the last two weeks.

“It has been a thorn in our side for some time,” said Central Division Police Lt. Lyman Doster.

The combination of conditions and violence led City Atty. James K. Hahn to order the evacuation, instead of waiting for the hotel’s owners, Schlomo Bina of San Marino and Daryoush Daian of Beverly Hills, to complete their sale of the building to the nonprofit Skid Row Housing Trust.

On Thursday, commissioners for the city Community Redevelopment Agency will vote whether to authorize $1.1 million to assist the housing trust to buy and remake the hotel into 48 low-income housing units.

“I would hate to wait another couple of weeks and have more murders, more violence,” Hahn said, standing outside the Olympia.

Inside, a busty “woman,” wearing heavy makeup, objected to the action in a deep, masculine voice.

“This building’s not that bad. I don’t have any problems here,” he said, giving his name as Cindy Olivares.

Anna Dominguez, a heavyset woman with short hair and glasses, bustled up and down the worn wooden stairs, carrying boxes of clothing belonging to a niece whom she described as “a drug addict, a walking dead person.”

Dominguez, of Montebello, said she had come to take her niece to a drug treatment program. The 31-year-old had agreed to go, but now she was nowhere to be found.

As Dominguez struggled with her niece’s belongings, she added: “I’ve got to go look for her.”

Meanwhile, several people struggled to help Dianne Apt move herself, three children--aged 11, 2 and 6 months--a cat and a turtle out of Room 103. They seemed to be the only family in the building.

“We like to collect things,” Apt, a 39-year-old with scraggly dark hair, said somewhat apologetically as she stuffed mounds of clothing and other items into plastic bags.

Her cubicle, typical for the building, was about 12 feet square, lit by bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Above the one bed, two windows had no glass in them--and no protective boards to keep the babies from falling out.

Alice Callaghan of Las Familias del Pueblo, a family service agency, said she would help the family, which lives on $1,200 monthly welfare benefits, relocate. Apt’s husband is hospitalized.

Deputy City Atty. Stephanie Sautner said the family would also be entitled to $5,000 in relocation benefits from the landlords.

The rest of the residents, under city law, will be entitled to $2,000 per unit, provided they lived there more than 60 days.

Bina said he would pay the money. The landlord also said he had mixed feelings about the city’s action to close the Olympia. He said that since he and Daian bought the hotel in 1987, attempts to upgrade the building had been frustrated.

“The tenants keep destroying the place,” he said.

Bina was not sorry to see the tenants go.

“In a way it’s a lot better for us,” he said of the city’s action. “We could not have done this on 24-hours’ notice.”