The building once known as the Hotel Cecil and that inspired a season of American Horror Story is now a Los Angeles landmark.
The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to approve the landmark status for the building in the Historic Core. Developer Matthew Baron of Simon Baron development—which is converting the Cecil into a boutique hotel and micro-unit apartment complex—applied for the designation.
The city determined that the hotel, which opened in 1924, represents the early 20th Century lodging industry in the U.S., a time when guests started turning away from rural retreats and toward urban hotels.
The Cecil’s location near Seventh and Main streets made it popular with business travelers who wanted to be close to Spring Street, then a major financial hub nicknamed the “Wall Street of the West.” It was also popular with theater-goers heading to Broadway’s glamorous venues.
Built in the Beaux Arts style, the building has been altered over the years, but a city report says the building “continues to maintain a high level of integrity” in terms of its design, materials, and feeling.
The Cecil is on an upswing, and that’s quite a change of pace for a place with such a long history of being down on its luck.
When the Cecil opened in 1924, it was aimed squarely at business people, but the Great Depression hit the hotel hard. Its clientele became more transient and less well-heeled.
In the 1980s, the hotel’s notoriety reached new heights—it was revealed serial killer Richard Ramirez, who was nicknamed the Nightstalker, had lived at the Cecil for two years. In that time, he murdered 13 people.
The hotel was renamed the Stay on Main in 2011, but trouble lingered.
In 2013, a guest went missing and was found nearly three weeks later, floating in the hotel’s rooftop water cistern. Her death was ultimately ruled an accident, but her odd disappearance and the grainy security footage that documented her last hours alive in the hotel inspired American Horror Story: Hotel.
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