hotel cecil tour

DTLA Murder Mystery Ghost Walking Tour

Highlights 😲 Discover some of the most shocking locations in LA 🚶 Be accompanied by an experienced tour guide 😊 Get the chance to meet new people on the tour General Info 📅 Date: every Saturday (select during purchase) 🕒 Time: 6 p.m. - 9 p.m. Aim to get there 10-15 minutes early, if you’re late you may miss the tour.  📍 Meeting Point: Historic Broadway Station, Los Angeles 👤 Age requirement: this is a walking tour and moves at a reasonable pace. It's not recommended for children under 12 y.o. ♿ Accessibility: the activity is not wheelchair accessible ❗ Please note: you will normally stop at two bars for cocktails (at your own expense). Entry to LA Times Editorial Library, Vibiana and Hall of Justice is not included. ❓ For this event, all sales are final and tickets can’t be refunded, changed or modified. For more information, please refer to our T&Cs

Description On this DTLA Murder Mystery Ghost walking tour, you will go on an investigation of the noir underbelly of Los Angeles. Firstly, you'll visit the Biltmore Hotel, the last place the Black Dahlia was seen alive. Next, you'll, stop at Clifton’s and learn about the anti-corruption drive of its Christian founder (who had a few secrets of his own). After that, it's the Hotel Cecil, which has a hellish history of murders, suicides and killers (including the Night Stalker). From there, the group moves to the once-grand Alexandria Hotel, where Rudolph Valentino’s ghost still haunts his old penthouse, then the Barclay Hotel, home to two serial killers and the scene of some brutal murders. You'll also visit the site of the Chinatown Massacre of 1871, before the tour finishes at the Halls of Justice, site of many trials including those of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and Charles Manson.

Getting there

Historic Broadway Station

United States, 90012

Select date and session

No booking fees

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Real experiences of the real Los Angeles

Inside la - the los angeles lowdown, crime seen: the hotel cecil.

Amongst Los Angeles hotels the Hotel Cecil holds a unique place. It’s a marquee name that not only a lot of Angelenos know, but also many visitors too. It’s been the subject of numerous documentaries, articles and, even, a TV horror series, yet you can’t actually rent a room there (at time of publication). In fact, it’s been closed for years, even as its fame has spread, due to the Netflix docuseries  Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel , like never before. Why is that? Well, the title of the show is something of a give-away – a lot of people have, unfortunately, died at the Cecil. And two serial killers have stayed there.

So, for people interested in true crime, there is a particular fascination with it, as well as a desire to explain why so many horrible things have happened there. Is the Cecil somehow cursed? Is it just an evil place, if not to start with then, with its ghastly history, has it become one?  The answer is, perhaps, a more prosaic one than most people want to hear, but really the only truly remarkable thing about the Cecil are things that have happened there, the hotel itself is, in many ways, quite ordinary.

Early Years of the Hotel Cecil

The Hotel Cecil opened in 1924 on a then fashionable stretch of Main Street, named after the famous Cecil Hotel in London , one of the premiere establishments in the world at the time (the Royal Air Force was formed there in 1918).

The Los Angeles Cecil was a little smaller than the original, but it had 700 rooms and catered to tourists and business travelers. Its location was considered pre-eminent for such an establishment. Just a few doors down was the downtown terminus for the Pacific Electric streetcar system , meaning that business travelers would have been able to take its trams to almost any part of the Los Angeles area. Only a couple of blocks East was Central Station – the main train terminus for Los Angeles.

On top of these factors downtown itself was a prime location. Before the corporatization of the U.S. economy, with its huge monopolies and quasi-monopolies, Los Angeles had an incredibly rich, diverse, eco-system of companies. Just in Southern California there were dozens of different banks, small department store chains, independent oil companies and – of course – movie production companies. There was a huge amount of manufacturing being done in the region, as well as shipbuilding and construction.

All these hundreds and hundreds of local companies would have considered it crucial to have Class A offices in downtown LA to impress their clients and competitors and these factors made the Hotel Cecil a prime location for any business traveler or salesman coming here. For any tourist Broadway, with its myriad department stores, restaurants and theaters, was less than ten minutes walk away, two blocks West.

Decline of the Cecil

Unfortunately for the hotel’s owners only five years after it opened the Wall Street stock-market crash and the onset of the Great Depression led to a gradual decline of Main Street, as it became absorbed by Skid Row. In addition to this general deterioration in the U.S. business climate there were several local changes that destroyed the advantages that the Cecil once possessed.

Firstly, in 1939,  Union Station  opened, moving the main LA terminus a couple of miles to the North (Central Station closed at the same time), then, in 1950, the Pacific Electric Building closed as a terminus. At the same time downtown as a whole was declining, as many companies began to relocate to other parts of Southern California, as an office in the heart of Los Angeles no longer seemed to be so necessary.

Something else that emerged during this time was a fatal flaw in the original business plan: the Hotel Cecil did not have parking for cars. It’s often said that timing is everything in life – and unfortunately the Cecil’s was poor. When it was being planned and designed around 1920 parking wouldn’t even have been considered for any city hotel, but car ownership in Southern California exploded in the 1920’s.

What this meant was, first of all, a growing traffic problem, which made getting out of downtown increasingly time-consuming, and then the closing of all the streetcar lines by 1961. Now the Cecil was not only cut-off from the stations and streetcars that were crucial to its customers, but it was marooned in an unfashionable, hard-to-get-to, backwater.

Change of Plan for the Hotel Cecil

This would have necessitated the development of a new business plan. Without parking OR access to good public transport the only clientele the hotel could reasonably expect to attract would have been longer term tenants who didn’t have cars. In other words, low-income people. In practice this meant that the hotel more and more became a home for people that live on the margins of society, who have to hustle to survive, who were drawn by the central location and cheap rent.

But even by the 1950’s the Hotel Cecil was developing a reputation like no other in Los Angeles, further complicating those efforts. 

Death and Crime at the Cecil

The first recorded suicide at the hotel was in 1927, when Percy Ormond Cook shot himself in the head after falling out with his wife and child. In 1930 a man called W. K. Norton killed himself by taking poison pills. The following year another man shot himself and the year after that a man died after being pinned against the wall by a truck at the rear entrance. In 1934 one Louis Borden committed suicide by slashing his own throat with a razor.

Then, in 1937, guests started jumping out of the windows. That year Grace Magro was found on the sidewalk in front of the hotel with telephone cables wrapped around her, dead. No one could be sure if she jumped or fell from her room on the ninth floor. Apparently, her “companion”, a young sailor, was asleep at the time and could shed no light.

The year after that a man was found dead on the roof of the building next door and investigators surmised that he’d jumped from the Cecil too. A few years later a woman, called Margaret Brown jumped out of her room and landed on the hotel marquee, dying a short while later.

Not surprisingly by then the Cecil had become known as ‘the Suicide Hotel’. Perhaps more surprisingly the hotel has absolutely no connection to Elizabeth Short ( the Black Dahlia ), although locals will often claim that she spent time there. For some people, I guess, the Cecil hasn’t been involved in enough death and crime, they have to connect it to every unsolved murder in Los Angeles.

Arguably the worst suicide was in 1962, when Pauline Otton and George Gianinni were both found dead on the sidewalk in front of the Cecil. The LAPD assumed that they’d made a pact, before jumping out of the ninth-floor window of her room. Then the police realized that Gianinni was still wearing his shoes, meaning that he couldn’t have fallen more than a hundred feet, as if he had his shoes would have been thrown off when he landed by the force of the impact. It turned out he was just minding his own business, walking down the street, when he was hit by Otton falling from the sky. The last thing she did while alive was commit murder. 

Talking of which, the Hotel Cecil has also seen more than its fair share of murders. In 1964, Goldie Osgood (who was known as ‘the Pigeon Lady’, because she kept some of the birds in a cage on the roof) was found robbed, raped and strangled in her room. The police arrested a man who was seen walking around the neighborhood, covered in blood, but later cleared him and the killer was never found.

Deadly Residents

Incredibly, it gets worse! Not one, but two, serial killers stayed at the Cecil.

Richard Ramirez , the infamous ‘Night Stalker’, is believed to have spent several weeks there while conducting his home invasion crime spree between 1984 and 1985. Ramirez was a devil worshipping thief, rapist and killer (a true triple threat) who terrorized LA during this period, breaking into homes all over Southern California and attacking people while they slept. A night clerk at the time was certain that Ramirez stayed in a room on the top floor.

Many articles and documentaries will breathlessly tell you that he was spotted dropping his bloody clothes in the dumpsters out back when he returned from his nightly excursions. It sounds so dramatic, if only it were true! How do I know it isn’t? Because he always wore the same clothes, that’s how so many witnesses identified him – and why he stank to high heaven (because he didn’t even undress to wash).

It does say something about the clientele of the Cecil though that someone like Ramirez could have stayed there for some time and none of them even noticed him.

A few years later, in 1991, an Austrian by the name of Johann Unterweger arrived in LA and where would he stay? The Hotel Cecil of course. Apparently, he chose it in a dark homage to Ramirez. During the five weeks he spent in downtown he brought three prostitutes – Shannon Exley, Irene Rodriguez and Peggy Booth – back to his room, where he raped and strangled them. After killing the women he managed to spirit the bodies out of the building unseen.

Johann, also known as ‘Jack’, had been convicted of murdering a young woman in Austria in 1974, but was released in 1990 after a public campaign to free him (whereupon he made up for lost time by killing eight young women). He then got a job for an Austrian magazine reporting on – of all things – crime and prostitution in Los Angeles. Even more incredibly he was a guest of the LAPD on ride-alongs, as they patrolled the red-light district, which was how he identified his future victims.

Unterweger later committed suicide while in police custody, in Miami.

Mystery at Stay on Main

Bearing all this in mind, you can imagine that in February 2013, when residents at the hotel began to complain about the tap water looking cloudy and tasting weird, the front desk wasn’t particularly concerned. In fact, management completely ignored these murmurings of discontent until the water pressure began to drop.

At that point a maintenance worker examined the roof water tanks and discovered the decomposing body of a young woman inside one of them. She’d been floating in it for nearly three weeks. 

Further investigation revealed that the deceased was a Canadian tourist by the name of Elisa Lam, a guest of the hotel which, at the time, had created a separate budget hostel section of the building and branded it Stay On Main.

Then an elevator surveillance video, recorded on the night that it seems she died, was found. In the video Lam is seen jumping in and out of the elevator and talking to someone else – a person that cannot be seen. Some have speculated that she was on drugs, but the autopsy found none in her system. Nor were there any signs on her body of a physical struggle or injuries.

It was a mysterious case that somehow seemed like it could only happen at the Hotel Cecil. Why, never mind how, would a young woman ascend the hair-raising external fire-escape onto the roof? And, even harder to explain, was her motivation to climb on top of the water tank, open the small hatch, and jump in. Was Lam trying to escape from someone?  Was she high on drugs and hallucinating? Did someone else carry her up there, dropping her in the water tank to conceal another crime?

In the end I’m a big believer in the old Sherlock Holmes maxim: 

When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes , Arthur Conan Doyle, 1895

The impossibility of an unseen person carrying even a small inert woman, such as Lam, up the fire-escape onto the roof, and, again, up to the top of the water tank means this theory can be discarded right-away. Why would they do this anyway? It would make no sense. They could just throw her out of the window and the LAPD would probably rule it a suicide.

Had Lam taken drugs? Well, unfortunately she  hadn’t  been taking drugs – the medication that she had been prescribed for her bi-polar disorder. She’d experienced hallucinations and suicidal thoughts when not taking her medication in the past and – as unlikely as it seems – the  only  logical explanation is that in a psychotic state, brought on by her condition, Lam climbed up there herself. Tragically, she may not have realized that she wouldn’t be able to climb out of the water tank until after she’d got in it.

The coroner issued a finding of death by accidental drowning, with her bi-polar disorder a significant factor.

Hotel Cecil Today

In 2017 the Hotel Cecil closed for major renovations, which were planned to create a mixed-use development of loft apartments and hotel rooms. However, in December 2021, it was announced that it would become a supportive housing project for people who are experiencing homelessness or are housing insecure, run by the Skid Row Housing Trust . At the present time it would appear that the renovation work is ongoing.

With this new, very positive in many ways, business plan, it seems like a new chapter in the unbelievable story of the Hotel Cecil is beginning, and that it won’t be available for visitors to stay at for the foreseeable future.

However, if that changes one day, and you do get the chance to stay there, and you hear a knock on the door in the wee small hours – don’t answer it! It’s not room service. The Cecil has never had it. Keep the door locked and the light on at all times. I’ve heard it on good authority that each door has four locks on it. Use them all! And put a chair in front too – just in case. 

‘Visit’ the Hotel Cecil

Our DTLA: Murder Mystery Ghost tour visits the Hotel Cecil every Saturday night – although we don’t of course enter, because it’s closed (but then again, would you want to?).

The tour starts at 6 pm and tickets are $50pp.

To learn about another DTLA hotel, that has a similarly ghastly history, read Crime Seen: the Barclay Hotel .

If you have any feedback on Crime Seen: the Hotel Cecil please email us or reach out on social media, we’d love to hear from you.

– By Damien Blackshaw ( Twitter )

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Home » Blog » Haunted Places » Infamous Cecil Hotel

Infamous Cecil Hotel

Posted: 06.07.2024 | Updated: 06.07.2024

Death at the Cecil Hotel

The cecil achieves infamy, elisa lam and the cecil, cecil's curse lives on, book a los angeles ghost tours tour and see for yourself.

Home of Hollywood, heartbreak, and tragedy. Find out why Los Angeles is the city where dreams are made until they become nightmares.

LA Ghosts offers a remorseless look at Tinsel Town’s dark past. Our unique collection of captivating and unnerving historical stories reveals what makes this city one of the most compelling haunted locations in the country.

Get More Information And Book A Tour Today!

The Cecil Hotel: Where Dreams Go To Die

With years of checkered history and a transient clientele from all walks of life, old hotels offer fertile ground for stories of the occult, the otherworldly, and the paranormal to filter down. Newspaper cuttings of deadly crimes mix with urban legends of myth and mystery, and the scene is set for spine-tingling tales of supernatural interest. The Cecil Hotel sits in downtown Los Angeles, and it’s a fine example of the darkness and disturbance that can surround a place – so much so, that The Cecil featured in a Netflix documentary, Crime Scene: Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.

The Cecil Hotel, Downtown LA 

The fortunes of the Cecil Hotel are inextricably linked to those of Los Angeles itself. The hotel opened its doors in 1927, at a time when traditional streetcars whisked workers and travelers across town in style. Its proximity to the train system made The Cecil a popular place, with elegant interiors reflective of the opulence of the day. The hotel fitted in among the restaurants, theaters, shops, and the hustle and bustle of the busy Spring Street Financial District, and for a time, business was booming. 

But the Great Depression of the 1930s took its toll, and the arrival of the freeways in the 1950s allowed people to live in the suburbs and drive in. This was followed in the 1970s by the downtown area’s demise, when dilapidation and deterioration dominated the hotel’s fortunes. Eventually, the down-and-outs of nearby Skid Row stopped the business traveler and tourist bookings coming in, and the hotel switched roles to become a protected low-income building – accommodating long-term renters down on their luck. 

A Place of Darkness and Desperation

The Cecil Hotel is widely considered among the most haunted hotels in the world, and has seen so many bizarre accidents, mysterious deaths, premeditated murders, and suicides that many feel it can’t all just be a coincidence. This must indeed be a place of real darkness and evil. 

Not just one, but two different serial killers stayed at this hotel during their crime sprees. Jack Unterweger, an Austrian serial killer, stayed at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles while on a murder spree in the early 1990s. He killed multiple women, including several prostitutes, during his stay at the hotel. Unterweger was eventually arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for his crimes.

Richard Ramirez, also known as the Night Stalker, was an American serial killer who stayed at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles during his crime spree in the mid-1980s. He killed at least 13 people and committed several other crimes, such as rape and burglary, during this time. Ramirez was known for his terrifying and brutal attacks on his victims, many of whom were asleep in their own homes. He would enter the homes through unlocked windows or doors, and would often bludgeon or shoot his victims. He was eventually captured and convicted, and was sentenced to death in 1989.

No fewer that 16 people have lost their lives within the walls of The Cecil Hotel, and the most captivating of all is the story of 21-year-old Canadian student Elisa Lam – who featured in the Netflix documentary Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel mentioned earlier. 

Elisa Lam, The Cecil's Unluckiest Visitor

Elisa Lam was backpacking round the West Coast back in 2013, when she stepped inside The Cecil in search of a place to rest her head. She planned to stay four nights, but by the time her fourth night had passed, Elisa had disappeared. 

Her dead body was found in the hotel’s water tank, a full two weeks after her planned check-out. 

CCTV from inside the hotel’s elevators showed Elisa exhibiting erratic and bizarre – even psychotic – behavior, which led analysts to theories on her bipolar disorder and state of mind around the time of her passing. The story of her death went viral, and the verdict returned as accidental drowning. But the question marks that still surround her untimely death only add to the mystery. 

Pigeon Goldie 

Pigeon Goldie was the nickname of a certain Mrs. Goldie Osgood – an elderly lady known in the area for feeding the pigeons on Pershing Square in the 1960s. She was one of the residents of The Cecil at the time it served as long-stay accommodation for local people in need of a place to stay. 

Goldie’s body was discovered under the most horrifying circumstances imaginable. Newspaper clippings from the time explain that she was found in her room, assaulted at random and stabbed to death. It’s one of the most disturbing crimes in the Cecil’s checkered history, and one which still remains unsolved all these years later. 

Whether The Cecil Hotel is haunted, or whether the mysteries surrounding the property are merely spun from myth, rumor, and urban legend, is up for debate. But those newspaper clippings don’t lie, and what’s clear is that for anyone who cares to listen, this old place has dark stories to tell. 

For more chilling stories of murder and paranormal activity from the bright lights of LA to the rolling Hollywood Hills, make sure to join our Los Angeles Hauntings Ghost Bus tour and you can see these sites in person.

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The Cecil Hotel: 7 chilling reviews from former guests at the Netflix show hotel

The eerie la hotel inspired season five of american horror story.

Everyone is talking about the Cecil Hotel thanks to new Netflix documentary, Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel . Focusing on the mysterious death of 21-year-old student Elisa Lam in 2013, the series recounts the bloody history of the establishment, located on 'Skid Row' in Downtown LA.

American Horror Story fans will immediately see the parallel between The Cecil (now named Stay on Main) and the mythical Hotel Cortez in series five of the horror anthology. Show creator Ryan Murphy took inspiration from the LA hotel - where serial killers Richard Ramirez famously stayed in the 80s - from the gilded Art Deco lobby to the questionable clientele and eerie occurrences.

But is the Cecil Hotel really cursed? Most guests have simply complained about a lack of aircon and booking issues, while others loved staying in a "very cool piece of LA history" and the cheap price. There are dozens more, however, who have experienced some seriously spooky goings-on. Read on for some of the most chilling reviews we found on Yelp ...

DISCOVER:  The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel: viewers horrified by same thing in Netflix documentary 

The creepiest tourist reviews of The Cecil Hotel:

1. " Needless to say there was not much sleep for my daughter and I, it takes a lot to freak me out but this place did me in. And I did not know the history of this hotel nor ever heard of it before I stayed there."

2. "Lot of murder and crime here. Do not stay here. U will be disappointed and scared."

3. "The moment [the clerk] mentioned things I must agree on & sign before being handed the room key, such as: 'No drugs allowed in room or in the hotel', I thought to myself, 'You in danger girl!'."

4. "My advice, pick somewhere else to stay for a little more money. This place is scary."

5. " As we make our trip down the hall things get scarier, the paint's peeling and there are people SCREAMING at one another … Our room DID have a bathroom which was a nice surprise but honestly it didn't make a bit of difference, because we were living a god**n nightmare."

6. "There is little to love here beyond its lavish lobby… Not to mention they found a dead girl in the water tower not long after we stayed there."

7. "My room was on the 14th floor…. Soon as I entered the room there was a presence , it felt like nothing I have ever felt before. It was not a good feeling, it felt cold, alone and that I gave up on love and happiness."

READ MORE:  The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel: what happened after Elisa Lam's death?

The Cecil Hotel was built in 1924

What is the history of The Cecil hotel?

The establishment was built in 1924 by hoteliers William Banks Hanner, Charles L Dix and Robert H Schops. Boasting 700 rooms and a grand marble lobby, the hotel was the place to be until the Great Depression hit and it became a meeting point for sex workers and criminals.

The hotel has since become famous for its association with serial killers. The Black Dahlia (the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short) is the first killing linked to The Cecil Hotel.

Richard Ramirez, known as The Night Stalker, resided on the top floor of the hotel in the 80s during one of his most deadly killing sprees and Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger also stayed in the hotel in the 90s.

Aside from the curious case of Canadian student Elisa Lam, whose body was found dumped in the water tower on the roof of the building, there have also been several high-profile suicides and crimes committed in the hotel.

The Cecil Hotel has been rebranded as Stay on Main

Is The Cecil Hotel still open?

The Cecil Hotel was rebranded as Stay on Main after being sold in 2007. It was then bought by hotelier Richard Born in 2014, before shutting in 2017 in order to undergo a $100 million renovation.

A fully-equipped gym, lounge and rooftop pool were being constructed, with the grand reopening scheduled for 2021. It is likely the pandemic has delayed building work, however, with no reopening date yet confirmed. Are you brave enough to stay there? 

DISCOVER:  6 ways COVID-19 will change travel in 2021 – expert predictions

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Tours Into The Secret Heart of Los Angeles

In The Shadow of the Hotel Cecil: A Main Street Time Travel webinar

Our deep Los Angeles history videos are now available on a subscription streaming channel, with all you can watch by the month or the year. To learn more and see everything on the channel, click here . 

If you’d like to subscribe and watch this webinar first, you’ll find it here .

One of the most fascinating, mysterious and poorly understood buildings in Los Angeles is the Hotel Cecil.

Prominently situated in the heart of historic Skid Row, the Cecil has witnessed the neighborhood’s transformation from central business district to anything goes vice zone, from cheap flophouses to gentrified loft district.

When Esotouric gave its first tours of Downtown L.A. true crime and cultural history in 2007, the Hotel Cecil was a featured location, notable for its association with the Richard Ramirez Night Stalker murders and with dark tourism slayer Jack Unterweger, and several less high profile deaths.

But it wasn’t until 2013, when Canadian tourist Elisa Lam vanished under mysterious circumstances, only to be discovered floating in the Cecil’s rooftop water tank, that the hotel became an object of fascination for armchair true crime sleuths around the world.

So what else is there to say about the Hotel Cecil? Everything!

Join Esotouric, L.A.’s most eclectic sightseeing tour company, for a virtual exploration of the notorious, beautiful and misunderstood Hotel Cecil and its history of mysterious deaths, peculiar management choices and central role in popularizing the Alcoholics Anonymous recovery program. We’ll talk about the high profile crimes associated with the building, and some lesser known tales. And we’ll step outside to get to know the lost world of tattoo parlors, freak shows, burlesque houses, B-girl bars, pawn shops, dime a dance halls, dirty movie houses and rescue missions that once were the hotel’s neighbors.

Esotouric’s Kim Cooper and Richard Schave are the go-to experts for journalists covering the Hotel Cecil and Skid Row history, and appear in the forthcoming Netflix series “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.”

This webinar is an illustrated lecture packed with rare photos that will bring the Hotel Cecil and Main Street to life. And you’ll find the look of an Esotouric webinar is a little different than your standard dry Zoom session, with lively interactive graphics courtesy of the mmhmm app .

About Esotouric : As undergraduates at UC Santa Cruz, Kim Cooper and Richard Schave inexplicably hated one another on sight. (Perhaps less inexplicably, their academic advisor believed they were soul mates). A chance meeting 18 years later proved much more agreeable. Richard wooed Kim with high level library database access, with which she launched the 1947project true crime blog, highlighting a crime a day from the year of The Black Dahlia and Bugsy Siegel slayings. The popular blog’s readers demanded a tour, and then another. The tour was magical, a hothouse inspiring new ways for the by-then-newlyweds to tell the story of Los Angeles. Esotouric was born in 2007 with a calendar packed with true crime, literary, architecture and rock and roll tours. Ever since, it has provided a platform for promoting historic preservation issues (like the Save the 76 Ball campaign and the landmarking of Charles Bukowski’s bungalow), building a community of urban explorers (including dozens of free talks and tours under the umbrella of LAVA ) and digging even deeper into the secret heart of the city they love.

Rights and permissions : By attending an Esotouric webinar, you acknowledge that the entirety of the presentation is copyrighted, and no portion of the video or text may be reproduced in any fashion.

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The True Timeline of the Cecil Hotel's Dark History

The hotel's backstory is examined in Netflix's Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.

Content warning: references to suicide and murder.

The Cecil Hotel garnered national media attention in 2013 when Canadian college student Elisa Lam was found dead on its premises. Netflix’s new documentary series Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel dives deep into the Los Angeles establishment's long and tragic history of mysteries and crimes.

While the docuseries has been criticized for being "exploitative" in its portrayal of Elisa's case, the Cecil Hotel has long been an infamous backdrop in pop culture , serving as an inspiration for the fifth season of American Horror Story, the Coen Brothers' 1991 film Barton Fink, and other film and TV projects.

From the day the Cecil Hotel's doors opened, multiple social and cultural issues have impacted the establishment more than anyone could have ever foreseen. To give you more context, here’s a timeline of significant moments that occurred at the Cecil Hotel over its 94-year history:

1927: The Cecil Hotel opens.

After three years of construction, the Cecil Hotel officially opened in downtown Los Angeles. Decked out with a lavish marble lobby, it was built with the intention of being a comfortable and polished spot for business travelers and Hollywood tourists to enjoy. The United States, however, entered into the Great Depression two years later. Some have attributed the tragedies prompted by the Depression along with the Cecil's proximity to the Skid Row area — the term which, according to the Skid Row Housing Trust , originated during the construction of the railroads in the mid-1800s — to the hotel becoming a spot for violence and crime activity.

1931: The first documented death at the Cecil Hotel occurs.

The first reported death was on November 19, 1931 when a man committed suicide. Since then, over a dozen other deaths — suicides, overdoses, and murders — have taken place at the hotel. Over time, the building was upstaged by nicer hotels in other parts of town, according to CNN .

"This was just a place where people who were really down on their luck were going," Richard Schave, a Los Angeles tour guide, told the outlet.

Eventually, the hotel transitioned into a single-room occupancy operation and long-term tenants would rent their own rooms and share bathrooms with other residents.

Mid-80s/Early 90s: Association with infamous criminals.

Best known as the " Night Stalker ," Richard Ramirez terrorized Los Angeles from June 1984 to August 1985. During this time, the Texas native stayed at the Cecil Hotel on the 14th floor. In summer 1985, Los Angeles residents surrounded him after recognizing him from the newspapers. He was convicted of 13 counts of murder, five attempted murders and 11 sexual assaults.

Then in 1991, serial killer Jack Unterweger checked into the Cecil Hotel — years after he was convicted of murder in 1976 in his native country of Austria. During his stay at the Cecil Hotel, he allegedly killed at least three sex workers. Despite receiving a life sentence, Jack was released on parole in 1990.

In 1994, the government of Austria found him guilty of nine murders, and issued a life sentence.

2013: Elisa Lam dies at the Cecil Hotel.

On January 26, 2013 , 21-year-old Canadian student Elisa Lam checked into the Cecil Hotel. She was originally staying in hostel-style accommodations with other roommates. But when the hotel began getting complaints, she was moved into a room by herself. On January 31 , Elisa was declared missing.

Three weeks later, on February 19 , guests began complaining about the low pressure and the taste of the water in their rooms. Shortly after, Elisa’s body was found floating inside a closed water tank on the hotel’s roof. Her clothes were at the bottom. The coroner declared the death an accidental drowning. Additionally, the autopsy stated that no drugs or alcohol were found in her system and there were no signs of trauma.

A surveillance video of Elisa became an integral part of the case. Wearing a red hoodie and black shorts, she stepped into an elevator and began pressing random buttons. Elisa then goes in and out of the elevator appearing to hide from someone and later on speak to them.

Still, many people aren’t sure what happened to Elisa. After the footage surfaced, several questions were asked: How did she get on the locked roof without triggering the emergency alarm? How did she get into the water tank? How was the water tank lid closed after she got in?

2017: The city of Los Angeles makes the Cecil Hotel a landmark.

Today, the Cecil Hotel is known as Stay on Main after being renamed in 2011. It holds 299 hotel rooms and 301 single-room occupancy residences.

A few years ago, the hotel closed its doors for renovation purposes. Although reports in 2019 indicated that the hotel may reopen in late 2021, it's unclear whether the coronavirus pandemic has delayed the renovation process.

Selena is the entertainment and news editor for Good Housekeeping , where she covers the latest on TV, movies and celebrities. In addition to writing and editing entertainment news, she also spotlights the Hispanic and Latinx community through her work. She is a graduate of CUNY Hunter College with a B.A. in journalism and creative writing.

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Here's What The Cecil Hotel Is Like Now — 10 Years After Canadian Elisa Lam's Death

It remains one of the most notorious hotels in North America.

The Cecil Hotel. Right: Footage of Elisa Lam in the elevator.

The Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles remains one of the most notorious hotels in the United States due in part to its connection to a number of mysterious deaths and unsolved murders.

The hotel, known to some as Hotel Cecil, gained even more notoriety in 2021 when it became the subject of a Netflix documentary series — Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.

This article contains content that may be upsetting to some of our readers.

The Netflix mini-series focuses on the disappearance of Canadian student and tourist Elisa Lam , who went missing during her short stay at the hotel — rebranded as Stay On Main — in 2013. Her story garnered international attention, particularly as she was seen behaving unusually in an elevator in the hours before she disappeared.

The docuseries also looks at the hotel's grievous past , which includes a tragic string of deaths by suicide, multiple homicides and connections to high profile serial killers, including Richard "the Night Stalker" Ramirez.

If you're wondering whether the Cecil Hotel is still open, what it's like now, and whether you can still stay the night at the Cecil Hotel or Stay On Main in 2023, here's what you should know.

• The Cecil Hotel

Tents line the sidewalk in front of a hotel in Skid Row.

Msphotographic | Dreamstime

The Cecil Hotel was built in 1924 by hotelier William Banks Hanner and was designed to be a glamorous hotspot for middle-class tourists and international businessmen, Insider reports.

The building — located on Los Angeles' Main Street between 6th and 7th street — cost over US$1 million to construct (the modern equivalent of around US$21.2 million), and featured 700 rooms across 14 floors.

Despite its majestic beginnings, the hotel's fortunes changed when the Great Depression hit in 1929.

Rooms were rented out at budget rates and the hotel began picking up an increased number of long-term tenants in single rooms, many of whom shared common areas like bathrooms.

The low-cost rates, coupled with the property's proximity to Skid Row — where the city of Los Angeles had pushed its homeless population — changed the hotel's reputation.

It became a place where day labourers, transients, sex workers, drug users and homeless people frequented. What followed was a string of tragic deaths, violence and harrowing crimes.

• The Cecil Hotel deaths

The Cecil Hotel has seen its fair share of tragedy, so much so that it was once dubbed "America's Hotel Death," Esquire reports.

The first of a series of tragic incidents was in 1927, when guest Percy Ormond Cook shot himself in his hotel room. In the years that followed, at least three other men died by suicide, and in 1937, a woman called Grace E. Magro fell from a ninth-floor window.

The sorrow continued in the years that followed. In 1944, 19-year-old Dorothy Jean Purcell gave birth on a bathroom floor in the hotel. Thinking the baby had died, she threw it from the hotel window. A coroner later concluded the child had actually been alive when it was born.

According to Insider, as many as eight guests died after falling from the Cecil Hotel's windows. In most cases, it's not clear whether these deaths were intentional or accidental.

Among those who died were Robert Smith (1947), Helen Gurnee (1954), Julia Frances Moore (1962), Alison Lowell (1975), and two unidentified men (1992, 2015).

In 1962, 27-year-old Pauline Otton jumped from the ninth floor of the Cecil Hotel, UPI reported . She accidentally struck another person who was standing outside the hotel — 65-year-old George Giannini — and he was also killed on impact.

Just two years later, tragedy struck again when a local woman, known as "Pigeon Goldie" Osgood, was found dead in her room. She had been sexually assaulted, strangled and stabbed. Despite an initial arrest, the case remains unsolved.

• Killers at the Cecil Hotel

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Among the guests staying at the Cecil Hotel in the 1980s and 1990s were high-profile serial killers Jack Unterweger and Richard Ramirez.

Ramirez – known as the Night Stalker — was reportedly a resident of the hotel during his killing spree between 1984 and 1985, paying just $14 per night for his room.

Netflix, in Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, suggests he stayed there undetected for many months, despite being spotted in corridors and stairwells naked or wearing blood-stained clothing.

The American killer was later convicted of 13 murders, 5 attempted murders and 11 sexual assaults.

Jack Unterweger is also believed to have lived at the hotel.

Despite killing a woman in Austria in 1976, Unterweger was released from prison in 1990 as the state no longer considered him to be a threat.

Unterweger moved to Los Angeles to write an article about sex workers in the early 1990s. It was here that he strangled and killed three women, all of whom were working in the sex industry.

In the years that followed, Unterweger was charged with 11 murders, with a jury later finding him guilty of 9.

• Stay On Main

Stay on Main.

After years of tragedy, the Cecil Hotel underwent a rebrand in 2011, the Netflix documentary explains.

The hotel was renamed Stay On Main and was advertised as an affordable, modern hotel for travellers on a budget.

While the hotel was repainted and rebranded, it still had connections to its past.

As part of the rebrand, the building had been divided into three separate uses. The fourth, fifth and sixth floors were for Stay On Main, the second and third floors were for the remaining long-term tenants, and everything from the seventh floor up remained The Cecil Hotel.

While Stay On Main had separate entrances and lobbies from the rest of the hotel, there were still common areas used by everyone using the building, including the elevators.

Thanks to the revamp, many of the travellers and tourists who came to stay at Stay On Main did not realize upon booking its connection to the Cecil Hotel.

It was after the rebrand, in 2013, that Canadian student Elisa Lam checked in.

• The Cecil Hotel and Elisa Lam

On January 26, 2013, 21-year-old Canadian student and tourist Elisa Lam checked into Stay On Main.

Several days later, on January 31, Lam's family reported her missing after they hadn't heard from her for several days.

Police found that all of Lam's belongings were in her hotel room, including her passport, money and phone, but Lam was nowhere to be found.

In the days leading up to her disappearance, Lam was reported to have been seen acting strangely.

Complaints about her behaviour led to her being moved from a shared dorm to a single room, and police found posts on her social media accounts that suggested she may have been struggling with her mental health.

What really garnered international attention following Elisa Lam's disappearance, though, was the elevator footage publicized by police, which showed the last-known movements of the Canadian student.

• Elisa Lam and the elevator

As part of their efforts to find Elisa Lam, police checked all of the hotel's CCTV cameras. While footage was not available in many areas of the hotel, police were able to find footage of Elisa Lam in an elevator on the day she was believed to have gone missing.

The footage shows Lam acting unusually for several minutes, appearing to converse with an unseen person, jumping in and out of the elevator, and pressing all of the elevator's buttons.

At the end of the clip, Lam leaves the elevator, but police confirmed there was no footage of her ever leaving the hotel.

The elevator footage was released to the public in an attempt to gather information about her last movements, but it prompted a significant wave of conspiracy theories and captured the attention of internet sleuths worldwide.

Lam's social media accounts, in particular her Tumblr, were analyzed by YouTubers and online sleuths, with some drawing attention to her posts about depression and bipolar disorder.

As shown in the Netflix docuseries, social media was also flooded with speculation of murder, international conspiracies and even paranormal activity, which police say made the investigation even more complex.

• How did Elisa Lam die?

Despite all of the conspiracy theories around murder and paranormal activity, Elisa Lam's death was ultimately ruled accidental.

While police were fairly sure that Lam had not left the hotel before she disappeared, in-depth searches of the property were unsuccessful.

However, weeks after Lam went missing, Stay On Main guests complained about the hotel's water, noting that both the taste and pressure were unusual.

Lam's body was then found by a hotel employee in a closed water tank on the roof.

Although there were unanswered questions about how Lam came to be in the water tank, including how she got onto the roof, how the lid of the water tank was closed and why she was found wearing no clothes, her death was ruled as an accidental drowning.

A CBC News report from 2013 explains that the case's lead investigator, LAPD Detective Wallace Tennelle, believes Lam's death was an accident.

"My opinion is that she fell off her medication, and in her state, she happened to find her way onto the roof, got into the tank of water," he told lawyers at the time.

"At the time [she climbed in], I think that the water tank was maybe full. But as people used the tank, used water, unknown to her, the level was dropping to a point where she could no longer reach out and escape, and she died that way."

• The Cecil Hotel movies and documentaries

The Netflix docuseries Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel takes an in-depth look at the history of the Cecil Hotel, as well as the disappearance of Elisa Lam.

While no movies about the hotel specifically have been released, the 2015 show American Horror Story: Hotel is believed to have been inspired by the Cecil Hotel.

The fifth season of the American horror anthology TV series focuses on the mysterious (and fictional) Hotel Cortez in Los Angeles.

• Is the Cecil Hotel / Stay On Main still open?

In 2014, hotelier Richard Born purchased the hotel for $30 million, Architectural Digest reports.

According to Yelp reviews , the hotel remained open for a short time in 2017 before eventually closing to tourists and short-term travellers.

The same year, it was closed for renovation after being taken over by Simon Baron Development. However, the COVID-19 pandemic hindered the scheduled 2021 reopening.

Around the same time, the building was declared a " historic-cultural monument " by the Los Angeles city council, with councillors agreeing that it is a prime representation of the 20th-century American hotel industry.

According to reports from Insider and the L.A. Times, as of late-2022, the Cecil Hotel remained closed to all except the few long-term residents who live there.

The Skid Row Housing Trust now manages the property, and it is used as a privately-funded permanent supportive housing project full-time.

It's no longer possible to book a stay at the Cecil Hotel or Stay On Main, and all of the building's original main entrances have been boarded up.

While two-thirds of the hotel remains unoccupied, those who live there have reportedly built a community amidst the darkness of the hotel's past.

• Here's Where Robert Pickton Is Now & What's Happened Since His Pig Farm Was Raided In 2002 ›
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Two-Hour Special 'Ghost Adventures: Cecil Hotel' Launches Exclusively on discovery +

Riddled with stories of paranormal activity, the historic building is the epitome of creepy – an inspiration for books, films and even a season of American Horror Story.

Related To:

Stationed along downtown Los Angeles’ Main Street stands an infamous hotel with a checkered past beset by multiple suicides, murders, devil worshipping and serial killers. Perhaps it is most known for the recent mysterious death of a young girl named Elisa Lam, whose body was found in the hotel’s water tower without any explanation as to what may have happened. Her peculiar demise remains unsolved, and bizarre elevator surveillance video of Lam has fueled an abundance of theories, including that of supernatural forces.

Now, for the first time ever, the Cecil Hotel is allowing cameras inside for an investigation of ghostly proportions in the two-hour special, Ghost Adventures: Cecil Hote l , launching on Discovery, Inc.’s new discovery+ streaming service beginning Monday, January 4, 2021. The special will be available exclusively to discovery+ subscribers and is one of the featured marquee programs launching with the new platform. For more information on discovery+, please visit discoveryplus.com .

“It doesn’t get bigger and more sinister than this,” said Zak Bagans, lead paranormal investigator. “We’ve been trying to get inside these rooms for more than a decade, so this is really a big deal – the first-ever paranormal investigation in the Cecil Hotel. It has a dark history and reputation and it’s one of the heaviest places we’ve ever been in. This is not your average hotel. With its connection to serial killer Richard Ramirez and the disturbing death of Elisa Lam, it’s undeniable that there are spirits inside this building. But the question is who, or what, are they.”

The Cecil Hotel has a history of seedy activity and housing transients, drug dealers and even serial killers. Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker,” was a self-proclaimed devil worshipper rumored to have carried out some of his murder spree while living in the hotel during the 1980s. Riddled with stories of paranormal activity, the historic building is the epitome of creepy – an inspiration for books, films and even a season of the “American Horror Story” series.

In 2013, it was the site of one of the most chilling mysteries of the 21st century, when the body of college student Elisa Lam was found in one of the hotel’s rooftop water tanks. The only clue was disturbing security camera footage of Lam exhibiting odd behavior inside the hotel elevator right before her untimely disappearance and death. The incident remains a mystery and questions linger about how Lam got in the tank – and whether it was a person, or a darker force, that drew her there.

The GHOST ADVENTURES team – Zak Bagans, Aaron Goodwin, Jay Wasley and Billy Tolley – begin their investigation by retracing the steps of Elisa Lam. Calling in psychic mediums Michael and Marti Parry for assistance, they investigate the room she was staying in, the water tower where she was found and even the elevator where she was last seen. They’re convinced there’s more to this property, and it might be because of one of its most famous former inhabitants – killer Richard Ramirez. Could it be that Ramirez’s devil worshipping rituals opened up the Cecil Hotel to a demonic infestation that could have affected Lam?

As the crew explore Ramirez’s old room, they make startling connections with what may be his dark energy. But the list of figures who could be contributing to the hotel’s hauntings extends beyond just Lam and Ramirez. As they go deeper into their investigation, the team experience physical afflictions, including unexplained scratches, and some of the most frightening and compelling audio and visual evidence they’ve ever captured – leading them to believe that the many dark forces at this hotel are still very much alive.

Follow @DiscoveryPlus, @GhostAdventures and #GhostAdventures on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram for exclusive content and the latest updates. Follow the team on Twitter: @Zak_Bagans , @AaronGoodwin,

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Former guests share what it’s really like to stay at the Cecil Hotel (and the reviews will give you chills)

If you hadn’t heard of the Cecil Hotel before the documentary about it dropped on Netflix , it’s likely you have now.

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel charts, in harrowing detail, the grisly establishment where 21-year-old Elisa Lam went missing and was subsequently found dead in 2013.

Now, former guests of the hotel , which was renamed ‘Stay on Main’ in 2011, have revealed what it was really like staying in one of its 700 rooms.

Ashley, who gave the hotel one star in her Google review and called it ‘dirty’, said it’s a place she and her husband would ‘never forget’.

“We were not informed about the communal bathrooms/showers, or about any history of the place,” Ashley wrote, referring to the hotel’s infamous past that’s seen at least 16 people die there since opening in 1927.

Another guest, Reggie, who stayed at the hotel seven years ago, said he was only giving the hotel one star because you cannot give it zero on Google reviews.

“This is the dirtiest hotel I have ever been to. After I checked into my room I went back to the front desk to get a refund and they did not give me my money back,” Reggie added. “They claim to have newly refurbished rooms but the room I was given had a window screen with many holes, the bathtub had not been finished and the whole room was dirty and very dingy.”

On Google, the Ceceil Hotel/Stay on Main has an average of 3.1 stars from over 1,000 ratings - 33% of these are five-star reviews while 28% are one-star reviews.

One of the five-star reviewers, Kel, said: “Me and my friend needed a quick place to stay on our journey back home. Stay on Main was central to everything, and has a lot of history. The rooms were creepy, I’ll give it that, but definitely made a great story for my experience there.”

Other users commented that there was black water coming from the taps and there were ‘many’ scary noises at night too.

If you were hoping to stay at the hotel yourself, Stay on Main is currently closed for renovations, but it will likely reopen after this. The hotel was bought for $30million (£21.2million) in 2014 by hotelier Richard Born and it closed in 2017 to start renovations.

At the time, plans were to completely redevelop the interior and add a gym, lounge and a rooftop pool .

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WorldFood Moscow 2024 | Crocus Expo International Exhibition Center, Moscow Oblast, Russia

WorldFood Moscow 2024, a premier event in the food and beverage industry, is set to take place from September 17 to September 20 at the Crocus Expo International Exhibition Center in Krasnogorsk, Moscow Oblast, Russia. This distinguished exhibition serves as a pivotal platform for industry professionals to explore the latest trends, innovative products, and cutting-edge technologies in the global food market. With a rich history of fostering international business connections, WorldFood Moscow 2024 promises an unparalleled opportunity for networking, knowledge sharing, and business growth. Attendees can expect a diverse array of exhibitors showcasing everything from fresh produce and dairy to beverages and confectionery. Additionally, the event will feature insightful seminars and conferences led by industry experts, providing valuable insights into market dynamics and future opportunities. WorldFood Moscow 2024 is not just an exhibition; it's a gateway to the future of the food industry.

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The Hotel That Inspired Amor Towles' 'A Gentleman in Moscow'

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Rules of Civility author Amor Towles’ engaging new novel, A Gentleman in Moscow (Viking), tells the story of a Russian aristocrat who is kept under house arrest—for years—in the city’s Hotel Metropol. Here the author (who wrote an essay on his childhood obsession with grand hotels for Condé Nast Traveler’s September issue) reveals how he researched his book, and his favorite hotel for finding writing inspiration.

You've written about the Hotel Metropol 's fascinating backstory: It was a Belle Époque grand hotel in the style of the Ritz in Paris or Claridge's in London, which was seized by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution and used to house part of the new fledgling government. Recognizing that Western travelers would judge Communism harshly if they had no decent place to stay, the Soviets restored the Metropol's extravagance (silver service in the dining room, uniformed bellhops) against the backdrop of severe hardship for its citizenry. Did you actually stay at the hotel to research the book? If so, what were your most interesting or surprising discoveries?

When I visited Moscow for the first time in 1998, I wandered into the historic Metropol Hotel as a curious tourist simply to ogle the giant painted glass ceiling that hangs over the grand restaurant off the lobby. It was the memory of that short visit that prompted me, some years later, to set A Gentleman in Moscow in the hotel. When I was about two-thirds of the way through the first draft of the novel, I returned to Moscow and spent a week at the Metropol in Suite 217—the very room in which the first Soviet constitution was drafted in the aftermath of the Revolution. While on that stay, the gracious staff gave me a comprehensive tour of the hotel. One of the most eye-opening aspects of that tour was the kitchen—a warren of interconnected rooms covering the expanse of a city block. As the hotel’s manager explained, this was a vestige of the austere early days of Communism, when the hotel had to make virtually anything they wanted to serve. Thus there were butcheries, fish cleaning facilities, vegetable pantries, bakeries, and rows of refrigerated rooms abutting the actual kitchens.

Before you became a novelist, you worked in finance and traveled a lot. Did you have any favorite destinations and/or hotels? Which and why?

When I traveled professionally in Europe, I would inevitably spend a weekend at the Hôtel Costes around the corner from the Place Vendôme in Paris. Though established in the early 1990s, the Costes’s interior is a fin de siècle fantasy with plush velvet couches tucked in nooks, 19th-century paintings hanging on the walls, and candles burning everywhere. The hotel’s restaurant is in an interior courtyard (with awnings that get extended in case of rain) in which distractingly attractive waiters and waitresses serve fashionable clientele from noon until the early hours of the morning—all to the tune of the hotel’s branded style of international lounge music. One of the main reasons I inevitably stayed at Costes is that I found it a perfect place to write. My room in the attic overlooking the Rue St-Honoré had an antique French desk adorned with fresh roses that faced a pair of 19th-century landscapes. I would work at that desk well into the night, and whenever I flagged, I would go downstairs to be recharged by the relentless glamour of the lobby.

Find inspiration at Hôtel Costes in Paris, Amor Towles's favorite writing hotel.

What’s your favorite airport and why?

Strangely enough, my favorite airport is Logan Airport in Boston—but largely for sentimental reasons. My first real summer job was working as a journeyman for the airport’s resident maintenance crew—a small army of union electricians, plumbers, and carpenters. In any given week, I would be assigned to assist a different member of the team in a new task somewhere on the airport’s sprawling grounds. On my very first day, I was assigned to help someone tar the roof of the main terminal. During the lunch break as my overseer napped, I wandered over to the roof’s edge to watch the cars unload the arriving travelers. I took special interest when several police cars raced up to the terminal followed by a pair of fire engines. Next thing I knew, Boston’s Finest were carefully crossing the roof towards me, having assumed that I intended to jump. Needless to say, I found myself in the chief administrator’s office at the end of the day. But the hardscrabble crew that I worked with found the incident hilarious, and they took great pleasure in calling me the Leaper for the two summers I worked there.

What one place in the world tops your bucket list and why?

I would be hard pressed to choose one place… But one thing I inevitably enjoy visiting anywhere in the world is a panorama. Wildly popular at the beginning of the 19th century, panoramas are circular paintings with diameters often exceeding 300 feet that depict a 360-degree view from a particular spot on earth at a particular moment in time; they never cease to amaze me. I have spent hours at Franz Roubaud’s panorama of the Battle of Borodino (1911), housed in a special building on Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow. This particular panorama has the added bonus of being adorned with realistic sculptural objects—such as fences, shacks, rifles, and soldiers—to enhance the illusion that you are in the middle of the battle as Napoleon approaches. Similarly, I routinely visit John Vanderlyn’s Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles (1818-1819) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In fact, I had seen Versailles at least five times while standing in the Met before I finally visited the real thing with my wife and children a few years ago.

What dish, served at which restaurant, would you travel for?

One restaurant I visit without fail, whenever I’m in the Bay Area, is the Boulevard at 1 Mission Street, a few strides from the waterfront. It has excellent food and wine very much in the modern California style, but I go there less for any one dish than for the pleasure of dining with the restaurant’s chefs. For the Boulevard’s kitchen is a narrow open galley in the middle of the restaurant bordered by an Art Nouveau dining counter. As such, you can choose a stool at your preferred station (sitting two feet from the gentleman searing the lamb chops on an open fire, for instance, or the young woman finishing the salmon with fennel flowers and Chanterelles). I’ve never been disappointed by a meal at the Boulevard; I’ve loved watching that special efficiency of expert chefs on a busy night; and, most importantly, I’ve learned many fine cooking techniques from this open kitchen’s amiable experts.

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Watch CBS News

A visit to the Metropol, star of "A Gentleman in Moscow"

March 31, 2019 / 10:12 AM EDT / CBS News

The grand Metropol Hotel has stood at the center of Moscow life for more than a century, as a playground for the rich, and later the headquarters of a revolution. Most recently, it's been re-invented as the setting for a blockbuster novel, "A Gentleman in Moscow."

The book's American author, Amor Towles, first visited the Metropol in 1998. Twenty years on, he came back to see it again, with correspondent Elizabeth Palmer.

"I had a love of Russian history to begin with, so it's very natural to want to start the story here, for me," Towles said.

The entire novel takes place inside the Metropol, a hotel that has rediscovered its art nouveau roots after decades of Soviet makeovers.

Towles' hero, Count Rostov, is living in one of the Metropol's elegant old suites when the story opens. But the fictional Count is soon evicted from the posh rooms. Sentenced by the Bolsheviks to house (or actually hotel) arrest, for the next 30 years he's banished to an attic, and witnesses decades of Russian history through the windows of the Metropol hotel.

Lenin himself addressed the workers just outside, and the Revolution transformed old Russia into the Soviet Union. Wars came and went, and so did epic political tyranny.

And still the Count never loses hope.

Palmer said, "The Count is an admirable person who demonstrates courage and grace and resilience and love."

"I think of it as a will to joy in the human spirit," Towles said. "There's that desire as a human being to make fundamental connections, to find causes for laughter, to be enriched by our relationships.  And the book is very much an exploration of that process in the context of a challenging era."

In Towles' novel the once-fabulously-wealthy Count is forced to live in a tiny attic servant's room. Towles remarked, "Occasionally now, I'm told by the staff that people come with the book in hand and they want to go see, 'Where is the Count's room on the 6th floor?' And they're, 'Well, we're sorry but there is no attic on the 6th floor!'"

Towles, a former investment executive who now writes full time, is delighted that the world he crafted for the Count is so convincing. He mixes fiction with fact, like the hotel's location next to the Kremlin and the lovely Alexandrov Gardens, where the Count once strolled. Within view is the Bolshoi, where the ballet has performed since before the revolution.

"I confess right off the bat, I am not a historian, and the book is not a work of history," Towles said. "I think the job of the novelist is different. What you're trying to do is use the backdrop of history to tell a story which is a representation of events in Russia but that is really ultimately a universal tale at the same time."

"A Gentleman in Moscow" has made Towles a bit of a celebrity here. The Metropol hosted a reception for him with local journalists, and management is trying to bring some aspects of the novel to life. They've created the cocktails named in the book, and give tours that include the real Boyarsky Hall, where the imaginary Count became a waiter.

Some tourists have even travelled to Russia just because of the book. "That's kind of crazy but terrific," Towles said.

Minutes later we saw it for ourselves; Joan and Bennett Gates, from San Francisco, were thrilled to spot Towles signing books in the lobby. They're staying at the Metropol because they loved the book. "I would have you sign it, but we read it on Kindle," Joan said.

So Towles obliged with an old-fashioned autograph on paper.

The Metropol has just celebrated its 110th anniversary. It's got a picture gallery of famous people who've stayed here through the years. The imaginary Count Rostov isn't here, of course, but his creator is: Amor Towles, now part of the Metropol's history forever.

• Book excerpt: "A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles

         For more info:

• "A Gentleman in Moscow"  by Amor Towles (Viking), in Hardcover, Trade Paperback, eBook and Audio formats, available via  Amazon
• Metropol Hotel , Moscow
• "A Gentleman in Moscow" Tour at the Metropol

        Story produced by Randall Joyce. 

        See also: 

• A walk in Moscow's grand new park, created by an American ("Sunday Morning," 10/7/18)

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