We can’t help but like the place,” Piper says. ![]() “It’s such a good place to live for guys. He moved to the Highland Hotel right around the time he became disabled, after he collapsed during a pulmonary embolism and lost most of the movement in his right hand. Piper, 52, is a character in his own right: an artist and former welder and former air force guy and former heavy-metal drummer who used to perform at the Excalibur Hotel in Las Vegas. “Walking up and down the streets talking to nobody on his cell phone.” This, Piper says, was a mode of self-defense to keep people from bothering Tony in what could be a rough neighborhood. “He was tone deaf, but he’d crank up his music and sing like a bird.” “There was Crazy Ralph - big, huge, bald Ralph,” Piper says. John Piper, who spent much of his childhood in Highland Park and came back as an adult to live in the hotel for almost a decade, described some of his most memorable hall-mates. Because there was more to the place than what you could see when you peered in through the dusty windows or read the real estate brochure about it being a Prime Highland Park Mixed Use Opportunity. Her verdict: the space divided into “cute boutiques.” She said that would likely happen soon.Įver since then, I have wondered what did happen.īut before I tell you that, let me introduce you to some of the people inside this building. ![]() I first encountered the building about a year ago, walking through the neighborhood with a real estate agent who, like many of her colleagues, was peering through the windows, imagining what it could be, now that the area was attracting a wave of new investment. The bottom floor was a “swap mall” where mom-and-pop vendors sold discounted goods. For several decades the building’s top floor has been home to the Highland Hotel, a 28-unit residential hotel for low-income men. This is a story about an old two-story brick building in a working class neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles called Highland Park.
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