Venice Beach Hostel Offers Cheap Sleep, a Place to Call Home

Seventeen bucks don’t buy much for overnight lodging on L.A.’s swanky Westside, and they buy even less along its palm-fringed beaches.

But that’s not to say you can’t find a surfside room for less cash than it takes to rent a pair of in-line skates. The only catch is, you have to share that room with nine strangers.

At least that’s the current communal arrangement at Venice Beach Hostel, where cut-rate rooms just a block off the beach draw a steady clientele of European tourists, domestic drifters and wannabe stars, many of whom share a taste for Venice’s world-famous funkiness. Most of all, they are attracted to the hostel’s policy of allowing guests to stay for longer than a month, perhaps indefinitely, unlike other beach-area hostels.

Having recently bunked for one night at this weathered roadhouse in the service of this story, I can attest that it will never win four stars in a Triple A guidebook, what with its flophouse-cum-frat house charm and shared closets and bathrooms. But typical patrons say that staying at the barracks-like quarters at the corner of Pacific and Windward avenues is better than bedding down in a sandy foxhole on Venice Beach.

Take the case of Doris Schaffrath, a 34-year-old German who chucked her career as a human resources executive to travel the globe. When Schaffrath rolled into Venice four months ago, she soon abandoned her plans to venture on to the Far East. She says she felt a jolt somewhere inside that told her she needed to stick to Venice and the cozy confines of this hostel.

“It was like a kick, you know. It’s hard to describe, but I still feel it,” Schaffrath said recently over a late dinner of cold cereal in the hostel’s kitchen. “I want to go to Asia someday, but right now I want to stay right here.”

Much of Schaffrath’s decision has to do with her life in Germany and its hard-edge focus on work. She said she’s now content to spend her days skating along the Pacific’s edge.

Another hosteler, Angelo Vermeulen, a 25-year-old from the Netherlands, said he too grew restless; he abandoned a good job as an auto mechanic. “I got a bit tired of my own country,” Vermeulen said. “Man, it was boring.”

While the journey made perfect sense to Schaffrath and Vermeulen, their families were another matter. “They bet I wouldn’t stay longer than six or eight weeks,” Schaffrath said. “They couldn’t believe I’d give up my job, my friends, my motorbike. I gave up my whole life.”

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Mark Wurm, 55, has owned and operated this independent hostel for the last four years, but the three-story stucco building has boarded lodgers for 90 years. Built originally as a hotel and apartment building, it stands at what used to be the terminus of the Pacific Electric Railway. It occupies a corner of what may very well be Venice’s most famous intersection, by the colonnaded backdrop for the Orson Welles film “Touch of Evil.”

The 70-bed hostel, which also offers some private rooms and apartments for $40 a night and up, occupies the top two stories of the building, while colorful businesses have taken up residence on the street level. Inside, the lobby and hallways are covered with paintings of jungle scenes, posters and countless fliers that advertise Los Angeles tourist activities.

Key amenities for long-term boarders at the Venice Beach Hostel are a large kitchen--whose refrigerator is locked to avoid pillaging--a game room with a pool table and a living area with a computer. The living room, with its collection of mismatched furniture and blanket-covered couches could best be described as dorm room chic.

A self-described child of the 1960s, Wurm spent much of his childhood in Germany and has traveled widely. While the benefits of travel have largely remained the same, Wurm says he sees big differences between hostelers of today and his era. Most notably, he says, commercial and global homogenization mean that all nationalities dress similarly and are familiar with the same music and movies. Wurm says that hostelers of today are also more passive and, well, less intellectual than in years past.

“In the ‘60s, kids would sing songs at the drop of a hat,” Wurm said. “They’d pass around some wine or whatever, and that’s what they’d do, especially if you were traveling. But these kids won’t sing anything. We had a guy who played piano on a cruise ship, and he literally jumped ship one day and stayed here. He’d play piano on Sunday nights and always try to get them to sing along, and they never would. I think they’re just conditioned to being passive viewers; it’s couch potato syndrome.”

And while quick romances between hostelers always have been considered a rite of international travel, Wurm says he’s appalled at what passes for pickup talk. “It’s pathetic, it’s so . . . boring. It has everything to do with what’s on the surface. When I was younger at least we’d talk about ideas or politics. That’s not the case now.”

However, Wurm said the main benefits of staying in a hostel have not changed--the ability to mix with others.

“If you stay at a hostel, it’s a given that you will find someone to travel with, or rent a car with or go to a club in Hollywood with. Those are givens. But you’d be damned if you thought you could go to any hotel on Century Boulevard and have that happen.”

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For my own part, it wasn’t long after I signed for my shared room at the Venice Beach Hostel that I realized my first experience with international living might well be a disaster. I feared that I would be cursed in tongues I did not understand before the night was through. I might be despised.

This idea took seed as I collected my hostel-issued pillow, linens and tattered blanket and trudged up two flights of stairs to my room. My dread blossomed fully, though, when I pushed open the door, peered into the darkness and observed five rough-hammered, closely spaced bunk beds, almost all of which cradled a collection of human forms, bulging rucksacks, shoes, laundry, crumpled sheets and other items.

Mind you, I wasn’t bothered at all by the temperature of the room. All that humanity had boosted it to near tropical levels. And I paid little mind to the weathered old man who wore a knit cap and briefs and shuttled dolorously from bed to bathroom repeatedly. After all, what can a guy expect for $17?

But I was profoundly shaken by the sight of all those bunk beds and their peacefully sleeping cargo. I instantly recalled a conversation I had earlier in the day with a student from Finland. Communal living was quite comfortable and no problem at all, he told me--that is unless somebody in your room snored. “Snoring is a problem,” he said gravely. “Snoring is very bad.”

Since I am prone to snoring, I took these words to heart. Indeed, the volume of my nocturnal exsufflations has, in the past, driven college roommates to chuck hard-bound textbooks at my head. At Army basic training, I was nearly smothered in my sleep by an enraged squad leader. What, I wondered, would they do to me here? Did other cultures permit even greater violence in response to snoring? I wondered.

When it came time finally to sleep, I climbed into my bunk, placed a pillow over my head and prepared to meet my fate. At about 6 feet, I wasn’t too uncomfortable within the bunk bed’s boxed frame. But since the nearest window was directly at my head, I felt as if I could carry on a conversation with people at the bus stop below.

To my surprise, I slept quite soundly that evening. The rain of tennis shoes and obscenities never came.

Maybe my snoring days were over, or maybe these were all heavy sleepers. Whichever reason it was, I decided not to push my luck and stay another night. I checked out in a hurry.