COLUMN ONE : Erasing the Grimy Side of Motel Life : Weary of the magnets for urban blight, neighbors are telling owners to clean up their act. A mixture of sadness and seediness permeates the walls.

With a thousand-yard stare, Diane Haywood gazes past the rusty marquee of the Cloud 9 Motel in Cypress, scoffing at the sign’s metallic, cartoon-like cloud turned neon nest for a family of pigeons.

“Ha! This joint ain’t no Cloud Nine, that’s for sure,” she says ruefully. “Cloud Nine means being on Easy Street, someplace like heaven. This place is more Motel Hell.”

For years, Haywood, her husband and two children have lived in places like the Cloud 9, paying $25 a night for run-down little rooms where the curtains smell of mildew and old cigarettes--where four people crowd into one bumpy-mattressed bed and meals are cooked in a Crockpot perched on a rickety three-legged chair.

A scowling Haywood talks of the foulest part of paying by the night for the roof over her head: The nasty girls--the hookers who even proposition 10-year-old boys and whose theatrical moans can sometimes be heard at night, providing a perverse soundtrack to the staccato blink of the red-and-white neon on the Cloud 9 marquee.

“Ahhh,” Haywood says scornfully, “the motel life.”

Once considered as American as jazz, many motels have fallen on hard times.

Although many clean, comfortable motels still line America’s roadways, more and more of their big-city cousins are magnets for crime and for the down and out, including some immigrant families and others like Haywood, who cannot scrape up enough money for a permanent place to live.

So on boulevards and back streets throughout Southern California, newly arrived families from Iowa and Guatemala City rub elbows with chronic petty criminals.

Weary of such crime and urban blight, cities throughout the Southland are getting tough with motel owners who have allowed their properties to run rampant with drugs and prostitution. Threatening to go after motel business licenses, neighborhood leaders, politicians and police have joined the crackdown, stressing that if the owners cannot clean up their act, they may soon be out of business.

In the San Fernando Valley along Sepulveda Boulevard, on a stretch of South Figueroa Street near Downtown Los Angeles, in pockets of the Inland Empire and in Orange County cities such as Cypress and Anaheim, officials are keeping an eye on the goings-on at a nether world of tacky motels. In some cases, the owners are fighting back, threatening to take city officials to court.

* Los Angeles has recently stepped up its revocation process--a strategy requiring owners of businesses deemed “public nuisances” to prevent illegal activities on their properties.

That could mean hiring security guards, installing better lighting, walls and fences or even closing the business during certain hours.

The revocation process is prompted by citizen complaints or action by police or local politicians. Officials call a community hearing where residents voice their complaints. The number of such citations has increased dramatically, city zoning officials say--from perhaps one or two in 1989 to more than 50 motels last year.

* In response to complaints from residents, Anaheim has contacted a half-dozen owners of problem motels along Beach Boulevard, suggesting ways they can stop an ongoing crime problem.

The program includes offering motels security lighting at no cost and a tip sheet on how to drive away drug dealers and prostitutes. “If they don’t work with us, we’re going to bring them before the City Council to terminate their land-use permits,” said John Pool, manager of Anaheim’s code enforcement office.

* In March, in a move that has become a routine volley in the new war against problem motels, Los Angeles zoning officials cited 27 code violations at five Van Nuys motels deemed magnets for prostitution and other crimes.

At least two of the motels have filed appeals that eventually could reach the City Council.

* Last year, even tiny San Clemente required that all adult entertainment businesses, including motels, be specifically zoned in an industrial park at least 1,000 feet from residential areas.

The city is considering a non-fee permit system for motels. “It would give us leverage if they get out of line--we can revoke their permit,” said City Manager Mike Parness.

*

For many communities, motels are the very symbol of cities crumbling at their core.

Activists in poorer areas claim the motels persist because city governments do not care enough to see that they are renovated or torn down--as they have been in wealthier beach areas where vocal homeowners’ groups watch questionable activity with vigilance.

“Cities themselves are part of the problem,” said Tom Henry, land-use deputy for Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs. “We’ve got to help provide these places with an alternative client, perhaps by encouraging industrial business to return to these areas, blue-collar people who might use motels. In the meantime, the message is clear: We will not tolerate anyone renting to known prostitutes, pimps and druggies.”

Don Schultz, president of the Van Nuys Homeowners Assn., said residents are tired of motel-related crime flaunted in their face.

“I’m outraged by what I see,” he said. “Motel drug deals in broad daylight, prostitutes soliciting men at stoplights just like they owned the neighborhood.”

This obviously wasn’t what Pasadena architect Arthur Heineman had in mind when he opened the nation’s first motel in San Luis Obispo in 1924--paving the way for an army of independent motels catering to the travel-bound whims of a post-World War II America on wheels.

For generations, motels epitomized the wanderlust of a country aching for wide-open spaces. With their funky roadside attractions and comfortable rooms, Mom-and-Pop motels allowed America to feel at home away from home.

Slowly, the roof caved in.

Major freeways were built, bypassing many old motel-lined roads. Chains nearly drove others to extinction, sending them to the shady edge of town to scrounge for a new breed of customer.

*

Over the years, motels have become the road’s version of legitimate pop art, a lure to photographers, artists, writers and filmmakers.

And with Alfred Hitchcock’s horrific image of the Bates Motel in “Psycho,” motels soon came to represent an American pop culture icon gone bad.

In a 1940s magazine article, J. Edgar Hoover charged that motels were haunted by “nomadic prostitutes, hardened criminals, white slavers and promiscuous college students.”

Fifty years later, officials say, the taint remains. In Los Angeles, even the motel names can be suggestive: The Trojan. The Nity Night. And The Rendezvous.

Los Angeles Police Sgt. John Girard has made a career out of keeping tabs on such trouble spots. For 13 years, until a recent transfer, he tracked crime rates at a string of independent motels along Sepulveda Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley.

“It’s not uncommon for one of these motels to have 200 or more police calls for service in a single year,” he said. “For people who live there, it’s a sad life.”

Take the 19-year-old woman arrested for prostitution. “Her own stepfather was her pimp,” Gerard said. “The tale got sadder. Two months later they found her body dumped in Santa Clarita.”

Like J. Edgar Hoover, Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude has strong words for the most troublesome urban motels.

“They’re a cancer,” he said. “And when you’ve got a cancer, you’ve got to cut it out. We’ve got to close them down. Why? To save a life, to save the life of the community. Our community has a cancer sore and we’ve got to do something to correct it.”

In Cypress, Police Sgt. Gordon Re said some motels along a ramshackle stretch of Lincoln Boulevard are repeat offenders.

During a recent Fire Department inspection at one motel, nearly all its 40 rooms failed. “The only one that passed was the manager’s,” said Re, who heads the narcotics unit for the Cypress Police Department. “He wasn’t stupid.”

Unwary tourists from attractions such as Knotts Berry Farm have accidentally stumbled onto spots like the Cloud 9.

“It takes them 24 hours to realize they’ve wandered into one of the most Godforsaken places on Earth,” Re said. “They don’t have places like this back in Iowa.”

Cloud 9 co-owner Sam Bhakta denied that his motel is a trouble spot.

“They’re liars,” he said of police and customers. “There are no prostitutes at my motel. One time I see cops take somebody away. How can we stop these things? We never know what people do inside their rooms. We don’t have movie cameras to watch them.”

Meanwhile, Diane Haywood feels like a customer at the Motel California: She’s checked in. But will she ever leave?

“It’s our dream,” she said, “to put this place behind us.”

*

With a broom and a frown, Rocky Patel sweeps the last greasy remnants of the french fries and Big Mac from the entrance to his Naseeb Motel on South Figueroa.

In his native Hindi, Naseeb means “good luck.” But Patel and his parents have had little of that in the 14 years they have operated a motel in the southern shadow of Downtown Los Angeles, along what some consider to be the shadiest urban motel strip on the West Coast.

Between the Ash Motel at 45th and South Figueroa and The Satellite at 120th lies a wasteland of flophouses that police say are havens for prostitution.

There is precious little of the charm these motels boasted during the heyday of the 1940s and ‘50s: Paint jobs and new roofs are 20 years overdue. Customers are greeted through a bulletproof window, through which proprietors squint like that gruff gatekeeper at the Emerald City.

But this is no Oz. The previous night, Patel said, two prostitutes fought over a client, pummeling one another with fast food. A dispirited Patel was left to clean up the mess.

At 31, Rocky Patel is already an urban realist.

“All these places run on prostitution--every last one of them,” he said. “Nobody will tell you that, but it’s a fact of life on this motel drag. It’s the nature of the place: You’ve got a bed, television, privacy. In this area, that means prostitution.”

He flicks a french fry with his broom and offers a tour of the place he was once proud to promote. The 1992 riots reduced the number of long-term residents--working people who brought stability to the place.

Time and again, Patel has repaired vandalism in the rooms: Holes punched in the walls, burned-up bedspreads and roach clips left on the floor. Then there was the shattered chair in the shower: “Why drag a chair into the shower?” he asked. “Why?”

In Room No. 3, he points to bullet holes in the curtains. Gang members recently peppered the place in a new kind of urban crime: The motel drive-by.

One customer died. “It was bloody,” Patel said. “We had to close down the room for a month.”

For Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), the South Figueroa drag will always be remembered as the place rock ‘n’ roll great Sam Cooke died.

In 1964, Cooke--who sold more than 10 million records, including his hit “You Send Me,”--was shot and killed by a motel manager after he burst into her office-apartment, searching for a woman he had met at a Hollywood party.

“Whenever I pass that South Figueroa strip,” Waters said, “I always think about it--Sam Cooke died there.”

The congresswoman, who represents Hawthorne, Inglewood, Gardena and segments of South-Central Los Angeles, said the area still represents trouble.

The glut of problem motels, she said, grows out of the fact that many residents of poor neighborhoods are unaware of their civic power to do anything about them.

“Unlike their beach neighbors, residents in poor neighborhoods just don’t question the right of these motels to be there in the first place,” she said. “In richer communities, people just say, ‘No way, we won’t stand for this.’

“But poor people don’t always recognize that power. They say, ‘Well, you’ve got the land. You must have a right to be there.’ If these people started bugging City Hall, maybe elected officials would be more willing to take a look at the problem.”

LAPD Detective Rick McElroy has a few weapons against motels: “Red-light” abatement laws and court injunctions. But McElroy, who works in the Administrative Vice unit, said the jury is out on whether law enforcement can have any effect on troublesome motels.

Take the case of the Nity Nite.

For years, the South Figueroa motel was a hotbed of prostitution, police say. Then, last November, a court injunction closed the place for several months. When it reopened, there was new management and refurbished rooms. And, in an attempt to clean up its image, a new name: The Ding Dong.

“It was something I wanted to try,” McElroy said of the closure. “There were just so many prostitute arrests there last year. So far, since the injunction, there haven’t been any. But we’re keeping our eyes peeled.”

Many inner-city motels have gotten the message. Like the Ding Dong, they post signs warning against bad behavior.

“Welcome,” the sign reads. “No guests. No drugs. No hourly rates. No prostitutes. No refunds.”

Part of the motel problem, officials say, is cultural. Many are run by immigrant families whose struggle to survive causes them to look the other way rather than make trouble for customers, even though they’re breaking the law.

Maoson Young, president of the 1,200-member Greater Los Angeles Motel Assn. and owner of the Ash Motel on South Figueroa, said his members--many from Taiwan and India--see their motels as clean businesses.

“The motel business is good for families. We can all live in there and take care of our kids. It’s why you have so many foreigners running these places.”

Bad neighborhoods, he said, bring prostitution:

“You can’t blame motels. You chase prostitutes from one place, they go to another. Like cockroaches.”

Although they thrived in the same era as jazz, representing some of the same alternative freedom of expression, aging motels--unlike the music--remain out of step with the present day.

“Jazz music today is still a thrill,” said Chester Liebs, a University of Vermont sociology professor and author of “Mainstreet to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture.”

“But motels, especially the ones in large urban areas, are like jet travel--a onetime thrill that now can be quite a bore.

“The irony is these places once represented a sense of freedom for Americans. Now it’s another kind of life--one of being trapped.”

No need to tell that to Mike and Sandy Ross. The pair live at the Gates Motel on South Figueroa. While working sporadically at blue-collar jobs, they can’t afford an apartment.

So they rent by the day. Mike knocks a few bucks off the $35 fee by providing impromptu security at the motel, breaking up fights among street wanderers, giving the strong-arm to thugs who try to levy “taxes” on motel guests.

They’re tired of eating Big Macs and drinking 7-Eleven coffee. “For us, a night on the town is two chili-cheese dogs for $1.29,” Mike said. “That’s why I stay drunk. It makes motel life easier.”

Meanwhile, a film crew has moved into the Hiway Host in North Hills to shoot scenes for “Number One Fan,” a film in which a Midwestern woman stalks her favorite movie star.

“A rundown motel,” said film location manager Dominick Clark, “is the perfect place for a fringe character like this to stay.”

Back at the Cloud 9, Connie Moreno knows the real fringe means struggling to rear her four children in a small two-room unit.

Across the parking lot at the Peacock Motel, 40-year-old Greg Reyna, a recent prison parolee, worries about how to keep his 10-year-old son, Russell, from repeating the crimes of the father.

For the youngest generation of motel dwellers, this is an unkind childhood: Growing up in parking lots, playing on rusty swing sets that have gone mostly unused since their parents were their age, trying to stay away from trouble.

Gazing across a litter-strewn lot, watching his son play games with Moreno’s boys, Reyna knows rearing a child here will be tough. Sometimes, from the windows of their respective motel rooms, the two parents catch each others’ eyes and shake their heads in sadness.

Common Ground is a new feature spotlighting the issues that connect Southern Californians to each other.