Staying Put : Money Won’t Budge Last 3 Tenants of 550-Room Downtown Hotel
Over the years, the once-bustling Clark Hotel had become a shadow of itself, its frayed carpets and cracked walls signaling another decline in downtown Los Angeles. But Clarke Cothran, John Duffy and Ted Stathakis stayed on.
They remained as permanent tenants when owner May Wah International Enterprise boarded up the Hill Street entrance and announced plans to turn the place into a higher-priced hotel--without its longtime, lower-income patrons. They even hung on when 20 other residents departed with $86,000 payments to settle a lawsuit over living conditions, and another 17 took $9,000 relocation payments.
“We’re the three men in a tub,” Duffy said of the final occupants of the 550-room hotel.
But they won’t be there long if the owners have their way. Stathakis, 74, faces eviction proceedings in Municipal Court today. Cothran, 67, and Duffy, 61, will be in court in April.
“I don’t care if I lose the case. I’m going to go fighting,” said Stathakis, a retired printer. “I’m from Brooklyn and I don’t like to be pushed around.”
“This is a step we have to take in order to get the hotel vacant,” said Curtis Westfall, attorney for May Wah.
Cothran, Duffy and Stathakis are an unlikely trio of fighters. They are still no more than passing acquaintances, even though two of them have lived in the hotel for more than two decades, and the third for nearly that long. Their possible evictions could be the last chapter in the stormy relationship between tenants of the 11-story structure at 426 S. Hill St. and its owners.
In 1988, May Wah backed away from attempts to evict the tenants when Mayor Tom Bradley’s office interceded. In 1989, 20 tenants charged in a lawsuit that conditions had been allowed to deteriorate and that they were being harassed. Last fall, the owners agreed to a $1.7-million settlement in which those tenants agreed to leave.
Westfall said the current eviction proceedings follow months of relocation efforts on behalf of the final 20 who were not involved in the lawsuit. The company also paid 17 of them relocation fees that averaged $9,000, far more than city ordinances require, he added. City regulations mandate that owners who evict for redevelopment pay $2,000 to single tenants and $5,000 to those who are disabled, have children or are over age 62.
Ralph Esparza, director of the city’s rent stabilization division, said May Wah “has followed the procedures.”
“We’ve certainly tried to do everything we can to make it as easy as possible for these people to relocate,” Westfall said.
Legal Aid Foundation attorney Cesar Noriega, who is defending Cothran and Duffy, does not believe they can be forced to leave. “In 1988 they (May Wah) promised not to evict” those who did not want to leave, Noriega said.
As part of the lawsuit, he cited a written declaration made by Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani last year saying, “I was personally assured by the owner’s representatives that the tenants would be allowed to remain . . . for as long as they chose.”
Westfall said his clients never promised lifetime residency for any tenant. “There was no such agreement,” he said.
The three holdouts believe that such a promise was made and that they should be allowed to stay, but emphasize different reasons for taking their stand.
Cothran, a hotel resident for 21 years, is a self-educated man with a courtly manner who likes to pass his days in the public library, reading up on law, classical literature or history. He said he is fighting to stay in his 10-by-12-foot room because “It is my legal right.”
Duffy, a resident for 16 years, is a loner who likes hotel life because “you can go your own way” and still observe “all the different people.”
A clerk for a downtown financial concern, Duffy is the only one of the three who still works. He doesn’t want to give up his $230-a-month rent, explaining that for him, “That’s the whole thing.” The company stopped accepting rent payments from the three a month ago.
Stathakis, a hotel resident for 22 years, has stayed partly because of the gambler in him, to beat corporate owners who are backed by government-supported business entities from China’s Guangdong province. While the others will go into court represented by Legal Aid, Stathakis will defend himself.
“We’re like the young man in Tian An Men Square, facing the tanks,” the husky, gray-haired Stathakis said, referring to the 1989 people’s rebellion in Beijing. “But May Wah is holding all the aces.”
The hotel will be closed for about two years as it is transformed into a tourist facility, the owner says.
Stathakis also wants to stay because he loves the 78-year-old hotel. After walking down long, lonely corridors one morning last week, he proudly displayed his tiny room, packed with old newspapers and books, ignoring the cracks in one wall, the running toilet, the leaking faucet. “I don’t want to give this up,” he said.
Cothran, who lives on $733-per-month disability payments, said leaving the Clark, where his rent is $161, would be an economic disaster. “I can eat but not sleep, or vice versa,” he said. “The current rental market is prohibitive.”
The relocation payment eventually will run out for those who accepted it, he reasoned, “leaving them hostage to a new landlord whose rents they are unable to pay.” So he decided to try his luck in court.
If he loses, Westfall said, Cothran and the others will get only the relocation money mandated by the city, and are no longer entitled to the extra $4,000 given the tenants who left voluntarily.
Stathakis has not looked for another place to live. “We have our own little homes here,” he said. “I don’t think it’s fair to punish the few because they want to renovate and make a profit.”
