After decades of false starts, the 1914 Hotel Clark finally reopens in downtown L.A.

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Set us as preferred The Hotel Clark has been throwing its stately shadow across Hill Street since 1914, first as a fancy lodging in the formative years of downtown Los Angeles, then as a last-resort residential hotel for the aged and desperate, then as a vast, lifeless structure between Grand Central Market and Pershing Square (now Biddy Mason Park).The 11-story hotel hadn’t seen a paying guest for more than 30 years.That is, until now.Last month, downtown historian Nathan Marsak was at Angels Flight when, as he recalls, “A guy comes up and says, ‘You like the Clark? I just had drinks there.’ And he slaps his receipt down.

And I lost my damn mind.”Marsak, who admits to “a fetish for old, lost Los Angeles,” once called the Beaux-Arts hotel a “great gray monument to grinding attrition.” Since the 1990s, Marsak has kept watch on the Clark, often labeled a “zombie building” because of its long idleness.Marsak included it in his 2002 book “Los Angeles Neon,” and has looked down upon it from his part-time gig taking tickets atop the Angels Flight Railway on Bunker Hill.In the downtown community, there had been rumors of a reopening over the years, but that seemed less likely as time went on.

Kim Cooper, a close observer of downtown politics and co-owner of Esotouric tours, said that after a while, it seemed that the hotel’s owner, the Chetrit Group, “just locked the door.”To see that structure “so dilapidated and dirty and covered in bird droppings and decades of grime, it broke my heart,” Marsak said.Still, “as long as they didn’t tear it down, there was always hope.”When he and relatives bought the hotel 27 years ago, owner Michel Attias of the Chetrit Group said people assumed they would flip the building.

“I guess they know by now that’s not the case,” he said.“Many of those p...