A colorful bastion of L.A.’s lore

When it opened in 1906, the Alexandria was heralded as one of America’s grandest hotels, built for $2 million in the Beaux Arts revival style, with a 60-foot-high lobby of Italian and Egyptian marble and extravagant gold leaf ceilings.

Record-breaking crowds welcomed it. Soon the hotel was catering to presidents and celebrities. Within a few years, builders added a $2.5-million, 12-story annex and a second annex of about 60 rooms.

But the Alexandria’s heyday was short-lived. By the early 1920s, other more luxurious hotels around downtown had usurped its status. Then the Depression hit, forcing its closure for four years.

Since then, the hotel has changed owners more than a dozen times, undergone several renovations and lost a little prestige with each one. But the Alexandria’s legends have grown rich with time.

Ghost hunters say the basement tunnels are haunted by the Mafioso who used them to transport liquor to speak-easies during Prohibition. Dancers haunt the ballrooms, they say, and Rudolph Valentino’s spirit surfaces when mediums visit his bedroom.

The 60-room annex has been vacant since the 1940s when then-owner film producer Phil Goldstone sealed its adjoining hallways after the annex owners crashed his party and refused to leave. With no independent entrance or elevator, that section serves mainly as a pigeon roost; it’s known today as the “ghost hotel.”

During World War II, the Palm Court’s Tiffany skylight was painted black and the lobby was divided into two floors to house U.S. soldiers in case of a Japanese attack. Now known as the Mezzanine, that second floor is beloved by film crews for its ornate ceiling and the ghostly cherubic faces -- said to be modeled on the death mask of the architect’s young daughter -- that line its walls. Location scouts call it the “Lenny Kravitz Room” because the rock singer filmed a famous music video there.

Boxing fans took over the Alexandria in the late 1950s and 1960s when promoter George Parnassus staged bantamweight fights in the second-floor ballroom -- now known as the “Paula Abdul Room,” thanks to a memorable 1980s shoot.

In 1969, banker and real estate developer S. John Kreedman spent $2 million renovating and redecorating the Alexandria in Victorian decor, 1970s style -- the hotel’s last major overhaul.

Kreedman hoped to attract an affluent clientele but within a couple of years the economy tanked, the banks left the area and the heroin trade took over the neighborhood. By the time the Yacoobian family bought the hotel in 1979 for about $4.25 million, the place was overrun with crime. Punk rockers shared the space with drug dealers and prostitutes. The Alexandria, says Martin Yacoobian Jr., “just got beat to death.”

At the time, Yacoobian envisioned restoring the Alexandria’s glamour, even the gold leaf on the ceiling. But, he says, he couldn’t fight the crack epidemic that came to 5th and Spring streets in the mid-1980s. In 1988, then-City Attorney James Hahn sued the Yacoobians for fostering criminal activity and then-Mayor Tom Bradley called it “a magnet for parasites of this society.”

The hotel improved after Yacoobian increased security and, with the help of police and city officials, evicted troublesome tenants.

Today the hotel is home to the elderly, the disabled and the working poor. And most observers say it’s just a matter of months before the Alexandria’s fortunes shift once again.