Built in 1924, the Hotel Cecil opened just a few years before the Great Depression (1929-1939). The hotel was intended as lodging for business people, but with the economic collapse, the Cecil’s clientele drifted toward the less affluent. The Cecil’s central location in Downtown Los Angeles and proximity to the Pacific Railroad made it an ideal spot for transients including actress Elizabeth Short (The Black Dahlia.) The 1947 murder is one of the great unsolved murders of history. Apparently, Short was seen at the Cecil’s bar in the days leading up to her death. It has yet to be proven or disproven. More recently, Elisa Lam, a Canadian student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, was recovered from a water tank on top of the hotel on February 19, 2013.
The Hotel itself was known to have “insanity within its walls,” as said in Netflix's Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, with guests ranging from drug dealers to prostitutes and rapists. One interviewee in the documentary says the hotel is where “serial killers let their hair down,” perhaps in part because it was so cheap — in the mid-1970s and ’80s, rooms were about $14 per night. Killer Richard Ramirez, a.k.a. the Night Stalker, stayed at the hotel between his grizzly murders. One witness in the documentary said he would often see Ramirez take off his bloody clothes in the alley and walk up the Cecil stairs to his room.
Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger stayed at the Cecil for a time in 1991 in a twisted homage to Ramirez. During that time he posed as a journalist and killed at least three sex workers, all while taking advantage of his rapport with the police that he garnered during ride-alongs. Unterweger was later convicted of the murders and hanged himself in Austria. Other incidents at the Cecil included someone trying to burn down the hallways, domestic abuse, assaults and stabbings, someone slashing their own throat with a razor and even an infamous leap by Pauline Otton, who jumped from the ninth-floor window, killing herself and an elderly passerby who was on the pavement below her.
Back in 2015, the Cecil inspired Ryan Murphy to create American Horror Story: Hotel, which focuses on the disturbing events at the fictional Hotel Cortez. The most-recent incident happened in 2015, when a 28 year-old man was found dead on the pavement outside the hotel in an apparent suicide. Los Angeles-based firm Marmol Radziner was to helm Hotel Cecil’s rehabilitation, but it remains to be seen if the long-in-the-works project will continue, given that the pandemic has severely hurt the hotel industry and effectively killed off travel. Once again, it seems like fate has dealt the storied hotel a heavy blow.