The Brief

In recent months there’s been a lot of focus on hotels for downtown L.A.’s most vulnerable residents. Through the statewide initiative Project Homekey, efforts have ramped up to convert underutilized hotels into homes, and nonprofit organizations have also purchased old residential hotels to create units for folks experiencing homelessness.

However, despite their vital work, controversies and problems have swirled around the many nonprofit SRO organizations.In April last year, all 29 properties operated by the nonprofit Skid Row Housing Trust were placed in receivership after falling into disrepair and becoming drug hubs.

In fact this discussion has been ongoing for over 140 years. Rooming houses, small residential hotels, tenements and what we now know as “single residency occupancy” residences have all played a vital role in providing housing to hundreds of thousands of Angelenos as downtown has transformed again and again.

Bare bones rooms

Los Angeles was founded in 1781, a tiny, dusty outpost centered around what we now know as Olvera Street and the historic La Placita Church. As it grew, agricultural fields lining the Los Angeles River (roughly bordering what we now know as the Arts District and Little Tokyo) brought seasonal migrants to the area. In 1876, the transcontinental railway arrived, and the Southern Pacific Rail Yard (now the Los Angeles State Historic Park) opened. In 1888, the Arcade Depot opened at Alameda Street, between 5th and 6th Streets.

Small residential hotels and boarding houses began to spring up in the area to house the countless single men who came to work the rail yards, the fields — and help build the Los Angeles we know today. These residences often offered cheap rent, bare bones single or shared rooms, communal bathrooms, and storage facilities near sites of agriculture and industry.

But as the Victorian era made way to the 20th century, these facilities would prove woefully inadequate in the face of Los Angeles’ unprecedented growth.

“Railway fare wars at the turn of the century brought the price of train tickets from the East Coast way down, making travel more affordable. The city was also heavily promoted as a place to recover and recuperate,” said planning historian Meredith Drake Reitan, associate sean at USC Graduate School. “Later, migrants were attracted by Hollywood, by jobs in the aerospace industry, and the port. The population of L.A. basically tripled between 1890 and 1900. The population doubled again between 1920 and 1930. I’ve always loved that Carey McWilliams’ quote about L.A.’s growth: it has been ‘one continuous boom punctuated at intervals by major explosions.’ All of those people needed somewhere to live.”

During the early 20th century, more and more residential hotels and subdivided boarding houses opened in areas including Skid Row, Little Tokyo, Boyle Heights, and what we now know as the Arts District.

“The people who lived closest to industry were those who were the lowest income and who had less healthful conditions for where they lived,” said Catherine Gudis, scholar-in-residence at the Los Angeles Poverty Department and director of the Public History Program at UC Riverside.

“The boarding houses were intended for those seasonal laborers and those working-class men who might have gone to different places following the work,” Gudis added. “There were also different scales of residential hotels to serve those people as well as families, because downtown was an urban enclave.”

While the nicer residential hotels had all the conveniences of a comfortable apartment, seasonal worker and transient accommodations were often shockingly substandard. Some were simply makeshift cubicles — larger rooms divided by plywood walls. Single rooms were not much better. According to Paul Groth’s masterful Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States, these accommodations often offered “only a dilapidated bed (sometimes with a straw mattress), one rickety chair, and a hook for clothes.”

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According to Groth, these residences had a (often unfair) poor reputation and were frequently targeted by the LAPD:

With its unprecedented growth, California did attempt to standardize living conditions at these hotels. “California’s 1917 hotel act showed the framers’ close familiarity with cheap hotel life,” Groth wrote. “They allowed existing cubicle rooms to remain, and they included guidelines for open dormitory rooms, however, they outlawed new cubicle hotels. Most important; the act set lasting bath-to-room ratios for the cheapest lodging houses: a separate water closet and shower on each floor for each sex, at the minimum ratio of 1 per 10 rooms of guests.”

Different classes of hotels

While more and more cheap hotels and boarding houses — often three- or four-story brick buildings — were opening in downtown LA, another type of “hotel” was being built to service middle- and upper-class visitors and residents. Some of these were “palace hotels” in western downtown like the Barclay Hotel (1896) Hotel Alexandria, The King Edward (both opened in 1906) and The Biltmore (1923), large edifices which provided luxury accommodations for visitors and well-heeled residents.

Then there were the mammoth middle-class hotels, which provided guest and living quarters to businesspeople and middle- class visitors like the Rosslyn (1914) and the Hotel Cecil (1924). “If the palace hotel was usually surrounded by some of the city’s most exclusive boutiques, the mid-priced hotel was usually close to the city’s best department stores and reasonably close to the financial district,” Groth wrote.

The need for affordable housing grew exponentially in the 1930s. “The depression increased the number of migrants to the city. We’ve all seen the Grapes of Wrath — the boosters got their way and California became a destination for millions who were pushed off family farms in the South and Mid-West,” Reitan said. “In the 1930s, downtown L.A. remained an important location for reasonably priced rent. And for those who bought the houses, having tenants was an important and steady source of income.”

Luckily, there were options. For working class singles and families there were ample accommodations on Bunker Hill, the once upper-class Victorian hillside neighborhood bordering the Western edge of downtown. Reitan explained:

Since square footage was at a premium, much of daily life was pushed outdoors.

“A lot of life happened out on the streets,” Reitan said. “If you had the money, you probably ate at least one meal in a café. On the top of Bunker Hill there was a collection of benches. We’ve seen a lot of photographs of these benches, it was obviously a place to meet friends and socialize. There were a lot of single people on the hill, especially widows.”

In nearby Little Tokyo, one iconic building also served as a home to countless Angelenos. According to Cecilia Rasmussen of the Los Angeles Times, a Chinese migrant named Look Mar Jung and his family opened the famed Far East Café (now Far Bar) at 374 1st Street. Above the café, the three-story building served as a 24-room residential hotel. “Over the years,” Rasmussen wrote, “the rooms housed Japanese immigrants: bachelors, dentists, workers in the bustling furniture and hardware industry, and even students of a chick-sexing school.”

But Los Angeles officials knew that these housing options could be better. In 1938, the Los Angeles Housing Authority, dedicated to providing affordable housing to Angelenos, formed. In 1949, the controversial Community Redevelopment Agency formed, dedicated to revitalizing, refurbishing, and renewing economically depressed areas of California (it was dissolved in 2012).

'Coded to death'

These organizations had their hands full — and a skewed perception of the lives of folks living in these spaces. According to Groth, in 1949 a sociologist described a rooming house in downtown Los Angeles as a “universe of anonymous transients.” In post-war downtown, middle class residents and businesses fled the area and headed west for the suburbs easily accessible by the shiny new freeways.

This meant the demographics living in residential hotels in DTLA dramatically shifted.

“Downtown residents in the 1930s and 1940s were well connected to jobs. They were clerks, plumbers, schoolteachers, actors, and beauticians. They also worked in the restaurants in and around downtown,” Reitan said. “As the 1940s became the 1950s, the number of elderly residents and retirees grew – I think living downtown gave them access to services and support that might not have been available elsewhere.”

L.A. businesspeople and city leaders interested in revitalizing downtown decided that the lower-income residents in the area need to go in the name of “progress.” During the 1950s and 1960s, affordable housing in downtown Los Angeles was decimated by “anti-blight” campaigns, and “slum clearance” plans.

“Policy makers began to send out crews of people to call out violations of zoning or code or other things, because they wanted the private property owners to abandon those properties because the cost was too great to repair them,” Gudis said. “So that's what starts to happen in the '50s and into the '60s. People are kind of coded to death.”

Civic leaders envisioned a downtown of shiny skyscrapers, leaving no room for the small hotels and rambling homes that served as a landing spot for working class and transient residents.

“[In Skid Row] there's a dramatic push to get rid of what looks like those horrible Victorians with multiple families living there and putting their laundry out on strings,” Gudis said. “That same kind of discussion takes place on Bunker Hill, and that removes the housing there.”

Clearing out

Reitan believes that the destruction of Bunker Hill in the 1950s and ‘60s forced displaced residents to move into the flats of downtown Los Angeles. “There's a lot of housing that's removed,” Gudis said. “And that puts additional pressure onto those residential hotels.”

Bunker Hill's destruction forced many to move into the flats of L.A.

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Increasingly, it was the former “palace hotels” and business oriented mega hotels, long out of fashion, which picked up the slack. “More and more migrants from central America… start settling in the once grand hotels like Barclay and business-oriented hotels like Cecil,” she said.

According to Groth, this trend was occurring in downtowns across the country. “Building owners … made rooming houses out of run-down palace or mid-priced hotels,” he wrote. “They eliminated service, repairs, and amenities until the rents matched rooming house levels.”

But the thousands of residences removed as part of “slum clearance” was a catastrophe from which downtown has never recovered. According to Gudis, it got so bad that there were ads boasting that you could buy a seat in a theater at Fifth and Main where you could spend the night, albeit sitting up. Or you could pay a little more for bunked rooms with access to a shower.

'Containment'

To deal with the increasing number of unhoused community members, many suffering from mental illness and substance use disorder, the 1970s’ city leaders adopted the controversial policy of “containment.” According to Gudis’ highly informative “The Green Paper,” the problematic “containment” defined the boundaries of Skid Row and made it possible to preserve “housing, community, and services” in the area.

In 1984, the CRA formed the SRO Housing Corporation, which purchased over 1,700 SRO units close together to offer government subsidized housing while fostering a sense of community.

“In 1989, Skid Row Housing Trust was formed as well, to expedite the process and with the aim of securing the housing on the western edge of Skid Row, along Main and Los Angeles Streets, among others,” Gudis wrote.

But over the last four decades, the affordable housing crisis in downtown Los Angeles has only intensified. Many nonprofit community organizations, dedicated to providing emergency, transitional and permanent housing to downtown residents, were severely affected by the dissolution of the CRA, which had provided crucial funds for SRO housing throughout the state.

Nonprofit organizations have tried to fill the gaps with help from other sources of government assistance, with mixed results. The SRO Housing Corporation operates 32 properties which provide housing to over 2,500 formerly unhoused and low-income individuals, which includes refurbished historic small residential hotels, new construction apartments, and the larger former commercial Hotels like the Rosslyn, which offers 264 studio apartments.

AIDS HealthCare Foundation’s Healthy Housing Foundation has also become a major player on the scene, managing 13 SRO hotels and motels like the Madison Hotel on 7th street, which offers single rooms with shared showers for $400 a month. Other properties include the Baltimore Hotel, the iconic King Edward Hotel, and Barclay Hotels (rent $400-$700). According totheir website, in March 2023, AHF purchased the historic 12-story Insurance Exchange Building at 318 West 9th St. They plan to turn it into an SRO with 251 affordable homes.

The Barclay Hotel in 2005.

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The economic revitalization and hipsterfication of DTLA in the past 15 years have also destroyed many remaining residential hotels and low-income housing options, as luxury condos and renovated market rate historic apartments have dramatically raised prices and brought middle and upper- class residents back to DTLA.

In an attempt to combat the housing shortage in DTLA and plan for an estimated around 150,000 more downtown residents by 2040, in spring of last year the controversial Downtown Community Plan, known as DTLA 2040, was approved by the city. Its passage may impact the future of thousands of residents in Skid Row and other parts of downtown.

While the DTLA 2040 plan attempts to preserve low-income housing in Skid Row, while also bringing more higher income residents and businesses to the area, community leaders and planners, including the grassroots coalition Skid Row Now, worry that without expanding the proposed IX1 Zone(Affordable Housing Only) throughout the boundaries of Skid Row, low-income housing opportunities will be lost.

“The battle is that if all of those odd parcels and other historic buildings get converted or adaptively reused at a market rate, it will put speculative pressure on everything else,” Gudis said. “If we can re-utilize the existing housing and ensure that when additional housing is built, it's also affordable as opposed to being luxury, then we have a chance of continuing a real sense of community and that's much more ethical.”

In the Green Paper, produced by the Los Angeles Poverty Department, Gudis wrote:

And so, the struggle for every sowntown resident to have a clean, well-lighted place to call their home rages on, as the stakes get higher and the situation more dire.

NEW YORK — In Brian Sanchez's slice of Astoria, the FIFA World Cup doesn't begin with the first match. It starts weeks earlier, with the arrival of a sticker album — and a mission.

It's a deceptively simple one: Fill the book with all the stickers representing World Cup teams, players, venues and other tournament details. But these stickers are sold in blind packs, similar to baseball or Pokémon cards, which adds to the fun and the headaches.

Sanchez, 20, has tried to complete the task before but never succeeded. This year, he planned to skip it altogether, but it was hard to ignore the chatter and excitement among his friends and family — both at home and abroad — who were all participating.

"Honestly it comes down to a little bit of FOMO," he said.

The hunt for stickers, produced by the Italian company Panini, is a decades-old World Cup tradition that's especially popular in Latin America and Europe. In the U.S., interest has been building steadily over the years, but this summer, the buzz is bigger than ever.

Jason Howarth, senior vice president of marketing and athlete relations at Panini America, said retailers reported being sold out of sticker packets within a week of the release in late April — unseen in previous World Cup cycles.

"There's a different energy coming out of it," he said. "Right now, it's outpacing where we were in 2022 by three to five times."

The surging demand comes as collectors face their toughest challenge yet. This year, they need to track down 980 distinct stickers to put the album to bed — 310 more than at the 2022 World Cup and a record number for the company. It's a reflection of the upcoming tournament's historic scale, which is expanding from 32 teams to 48 across three countries.

This edition will also be the second to last men's World Cup sticker album produced by Panini — ending a partnership that stretches back over five decades. Last month, FIFA announced that starting in 2031, U.S.-based Fanatics will be the official supplier of FIFA soccer cards, trading cards and stickers.

On a recent afternoon in Central Park, Sanchez met up with other collectors. Hunched over stacks of stickers, some two dozen people inspected the offerings with laser focus.

With only four stickers missing, Sanchez was already looking forward to earning bragging rights as the first person in his family across the finish line this year.

" I'm feeling pretty accomplished," he said. "I've been trying to get a win, and this is gonna be a huge win for me."

An expensive, labor-intensive but rewarding hobby

A single pack of seven stickers — available online, at corner stores or drugstore chains like Walgreens and CVS — now cost $2, compared to four years ago when five stickers retailed for around $1. That means simply buying enough packs to accumulate 980 stickers would total $280.

Given the costs, finishing the book is rarely a solitary pursuit, and aficionados often meet up to spread the wealth, according to Crista Latvis, 26, who organized the recent sticker swap in Central Park.

"You can't just buy your way into it," she said. "Otherwise,  it's super expensive and you've got to be very lucky."

For many, these gatherings are part of the pastime's draw.

"It's great to meet other people who are also doing it and also excited for the World Cup, especially since it's here," Latvis said.

Sebastian Clavijo, who attended Latvis' swap, said he spent tens of thousands of dollars on his quest this year. Clavijo, 32, has been collecting Panini stickers since he was 4. This year, his goal is to complete the book only with pieces featuring red and purple borders — an even rarer get.

" I just like soccer and I love collecting," he said. "That's my hobby, you know?"

In 2022, Panini introduced stickers with different colored borders that vary in rarity. That element has been an especially big hit with the trading card community and contributed to the hobby's appeal in the U.S., according to Howarth from Panini America.

Panini popularity has grown along with soccer

Demand has always existed in New York, Texas, Florida, among other big states, but it's also emerging nationwide, in places like Phoenix and the Northwest, according to Howarth.

" As soccer has grown, so has Panini," he said.

Howarth believes part of this year's popularity stems from the expanded World Cup format. Teams that have never qualified for the tournament — and therefore never been sticker-fied by Panini — are finally getting their moment.

For some, completing the sticker album is driven by nostalgia for their childhood, family or home country.

Linda Lino never heard of the hobby until she was 18, and her grandmother gave her a Panini sticker book. That was in 2014. Lino has completed every World Cup edition since, in part in memory of her late grandmother.

"It started with my grandma and then it became like a whole family thing," Lino said. "I love the community that it brings together."

That's especially true with her father, who never had the chance to collect stickers when he was a kid in Peru, Lino said. Now, the two are making up for lost time.

"My dad is so excited," she said. "He's like 'I want to help you. I want to put the stickers together.'"

Clemente Lisi, a sports journalist who has written about the Panini sticker phenomenon, said the sticker album serves as a time capsule for the World Cup. With the tournament's return to the U.S. after 32 years, he expects it will produce more first-time collectors looking for a way to remember this summer.

"This may be the only tangible thing from a World Cup unless you go to a game," he said.

Lisi, who also runs Planet Soccer on Substack, anticipates that the U.S. company Fanatics will further cater to the market at home.

" It'll even become more American and more baked into our culture," he said.

Sanchez, the college student from Astoria, dabbles in collecting other items, like vinyls and trading cards. But what he appreciates most about the Panini sticker scene is its supportive and rarely competitive nature.

" The community around the World Cup stickers is something like I've never seen before," he said. "The community is just so nice."

After countless hours of trading and visiting multiple convenience stores, Sanchez found his 980th and final sticker at the swap in Central Park. It was of the Iraqi team. He let out a gasp, followed by a smile that spanned ear to ear. "Let's goooo!"

With a mountain of duplicates left, Sanchez wasn't ready to move on just yet. His next step was to help his mother finish her album.

" I'm going to take a break," he said. "I'm going to celebrate today and then get back to it."

Topline:

The backstory: Once a year, dozens of sound artists converge on the hill with views of the harbor below to perform their audio art, which can range from serene to “beautifully weird.”

What to expect: This year includes a performer bending a bar of tin with his bare hands to get it to emit what’s called a "tin cry" and synthesizer-based soundscapes that take inspiration from both the ocean and the industrial space below.

When to go: Soundpedro is free and lasts from 7-10 p.m. Saturday.

More info at the Soundpedro website.

When I first came to the states many years ago, if I’d mentioned Arsenal, people would have thought I was referring to the U.S. military or something. But all that has changed. You can now watch U.K. premier league games in sports bars, most kids play soccer, and Ted Lasso is must-watch TV.

To which I say — welcome. We English are proud of the fact that soccer began with us more than 150 years ago. And every World Cup, we think, surely this will be the year that the trophy returns home — the year that we’ll win!

Queen Elizabeth II awarding the Jules Rimet World Cup Trophy to Bobby Moore after England won the 1966 World Cup final at Wembley.

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I mean it did happen … once… back in 1966. It’s such a long time ago the game was televised in black and white and shillings were still being used. My mother was nine months pregnant with my brother, and got so excited jumping up and down she went into labor and had him the next day. World Cup Willie they called him. Actually his name is David, but never mind.

Since then, every four years everyone in the U.K. watches the games with bated breath. And then something stupid will happen, and we’ll lose, like that time in 1998 when David Beckham (who played for England before he came to L.A. Galaxy) lost his temper and was sent off, and we’ll sit there, gloomy and despondent. I know because I was there in my friend’s living room in London, gloomy and despondent, thinking just once, just once, maybe could we please have a win?

David Beckham's infamous 1998 red card in the England vs. Argentina game.

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The last World Cup, I went to Ye Olde Kings Head in Santa Monica to watch England play. At 7 a.m. it was full of people already on their third pint of beer. And when the team got through to the next round, the gentle men of England ran outside the pub, whipped off their shirts and started weaving through traffic, singing football chants and acting like hooligans. I really couldn’t decide if I was embarrassed or if it felt like home.

Anyway, this time, since I’m now an American citizen, it’s in my contract that I need to support Team USA. I’m a dual citizen, though, so I’ll also be cheering for England. If by any chance Team USA and England play each other, my two selves will be watching, with a cup of tea in one hand, and a cold brewski in the other, and the polarities will explode, or something. But what will probably happen is that both teams will be eclipsed by Brazil or France playing the beautiful game… beautifully. Cheers.

You may know about Union Station as an L.A. landmark or as a transportation hub — but how much do you know about its rich architectural history?

To foster that interest and knowledge, Metro created a series of public tours of the station this spring.

“There's so much that you might just walk by without really having the opportunity to delve deeply into,” said Zipporah Lax Yamamoto, deputy executive officer of Metro’s art program. “[The tours are] a really wonderful opportunity to be able to spend time with the station, learn more about the historic landmark, which belongs to all of us.”

Union Station in Los Angeles

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Architectural style

It’s called Union Station because when it opened in 1939, it connected the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific railroads with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railway.

While it was designed by father-and-son team Donald and John Parkinson, the architects who gave us L.A. City Hall, its style is very different. Union Station’s interior and exterior mixes art deco, Spanish colonial and other styles into a hybrid dubbed Mission Moderne.

As you begin the tour, entering from Alameda Street, tour guides ask you to look up at the decorative elements in the high ceilings. The beams and geometric patterns may look like wood — but they’re actually just painted to look that way.

A community destroyed by development

Along the way, the tour gives background on pieces created more than 30 years ago. These include "City of Dreams/River of History" by artists May Sun and Richard Wyatt in 1995. Sun’s piece uses remnants of the Chinese American homes torn down to build the station, a reference to the high price that community paid for this building’s construction.

Detail from "City of Dreams/River of History," created by artists May Sun and Richard Wyatt at Union Station.

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“It was an enormous price. Chinatown ceased to exist in this area. … The families that lived here during that time are still around and maintain archives of that time period and the original Chinatown here, and we've worked with those families to have those objects on display,” Lax Yamamoto said.

Meanwhile, Wyatt’s large-scale mural includes the face of a Chinese man, along with nine other people of different races, ethnicities and ages; a nod to the diversity of the city since its founding in the late 1700s.

There are also stops to see new art installed for the World Cup.

A mural by Richard Wyatt at Union Station

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There are three tours left in the series but the RSVPs have reached their maximum; however, Lax Yamamoto said Metro will decide whether to continue them based on what people have thought about the tours.

Meanwhile, Union Station is set to swell with people in the next couple of months as L.A. hosts World Cup games. The station is the site of an official FIFA-sponsored Fan Zone from June 25-28.