The story
The Cecil Hotel opened on Main Street in downtown Los Angeles in 1924, a 700-room hotel built for business travellers that slid, with its neighbourhood, into the long hardship of the mid-century Skid Row era; across the decades it became associated with deaths, crimes and notorious guests, and in 2013 the death of Canadian student Elisa Lam in the hotel's rooftop water tank — recorded as accidental — drew worldwide attention that documentaries and dramas have since amplified. The building, renamed and later converted to affordable housing, is today a residence, not an attraction, and it cannot be toured; any interest must stop at the pavement. Its haunted reputation is largely a product of that publicised history: accounts from its hotel years describe figures in corridors and windows, voices and a heavy atmosphere, but the record should treat every element with restraint — these were real deaths and real hardship, and the people involved deserve dignity. Present the building as a piece of Los Angeles history viewed from outside, its legends noted briefly and its residents' privacy respected absolutely.