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When Lam books a trip to the Stay on Main Hotel, she doesn’t know that it’s a façade or hotel within a hotel, sectioned off from the Cecil with its own lobby and three floors of rooms within the same building. The real hotel sits on the edge of the notorious Skid Row, which comes across as the L.A. equivalent of Hamsterdam, the fictional zone of Baltimore, where drugs and prostitution are legalized under a policy of containment, on HBO’s “The Wire.”
Here we see how even a city or business can be prone to push aside problems and leave them in exile rather than deal with them. If a fraction of the people posting Tumblr tributes to Elisa Lam had been there to help her when she was alive, maybe things would have turned out differently. So it goes with the residents of Skid Row, which is left a dumping ground for the homeless and a place where anything goes, crime-wise.
Despite its nice lobby, the Cecil itself becomes a breeding ground for homicides, suicides, and drug overdoses. Tourists share the elevator with tenants, who rent their rooms at a weekly or monthly rate. At one point in its history, the hotel even attracts the presence of serial killer Richard Ramirez, the infamous Night Stalker.
Lam is under-medicating with four different pills, one of them an anti-psychotic, when she enters this place. Berlinger’s treatment of her story is as discursive as Mikita Brottman’s treatment of the Rey Rivera case in her book, “An Unexplained Death: The True Story of a Body at the Belvedere.” Substitute Lam for Rivera, and the Cecil for the Belvedere, and you have this series, which is as much about people’s fixations on Lam as it is about her.
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