Motel, once a haven, now a crime-ridden jungle in downtown Las Vegas

When darkness falls, Wendy Yeh is afraid to walk the grounds of her Safari Motel. Here, just a few blocks east of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s prized downtown development project, trouble lurks.

Things were better when her boyfriend Harold Sweet was still alive. He chased away the crack dealers and hookers who descended each night in search of clients. He made sure the elusive freeloaders kept current on the rent. He battled the bed bugs.

Sweet died last year of cancer, but Yeh believes the stress of running the Safari and the regular beatings by off-kilter residents is really what killed him. Now the petite Vietnamese immigrant of Chinese heritage, whose family fled the communists after the fall of Saigon, has been left alone to face the motel and its mayhem.

At age 72, she’s been punched in the face by a prostitute and thrown to the pavement. She’s had dirt tossed in her eyes after discovering 15 people squatting in one room. She has coped with shattered windows and tenants who mocked her accent, parking lot stabbings and guest rooms regularly closed for health violations including cracked toilets and soiled carpets.

Then her renters started dying.

Last year, a man standing the doorway of Room 111 was shot point-blank between the eyes in a drug-related killing. In February, a desperate woman checked into Room 115 and promptly died of an overdose.

It wasn’t always like this.

The Safari and other motels along East Fremont Street were once popular tourist way stations, when the rainbow neon of nearby Glitter Gulch lit up the night sky and American families hit the road in sedans and station wagons, looking for a nice, clean place to stay.

Nowadays, the oversized art-deco motel marquees — like the towering black-and-white sign that looms over the Safari — serve as an unlikely backdrop for an urban jungle of vice, violence and chaos.

After dark, Yeh huddles behind the steel door of the office that has become her prison.

After-hours customers slide their payment and IDs through tiny portals next to a poster placed by police that warns of the evils of meth use.

As she watches TV in her cramped adjacent unit, Yeh will not respond if she suspects the motives of would-be renters captured on her surveillance camera. The office phone goes straight to a fax beep, and the motel marquee no longer lights up at night because Yeh’s regulars need no advertising — they know where she is. Just before midnight, she finally goes to bed, leaving the Safari to its inhabitants.

Yeh knows she has lost control of her business, like a neighborhood pub owner whose sketchy regulars reach over the bar to pour their own drinks. She’s looked after by a handful of loyal tenants who believe other renters are treating Yeh unfairly.

They try to help this woman they call “Mama.” But it’s not enough.

“I don’t feel safe here,” Yeh said. “I’m afraid of getting beat up. Every day, I’m like a crazy woman, chasing away people who don’t belong at my motel.”

Beyond the downtown bubble

Yeh’s travails at the Safari demonstrate how life just outside the bubble of Hsieh’s downtown gentrification zone remains gritty, desperate and often deadly.

Hsieh, who heads the online shoe retailer Zappos, recently unveiled a vision of a safer, more-walkable downtown beyond the Fremont Street Experience. His Downtown Project began buying up motel properties along East Fremont. Block by block, the group purchased a host of once-vibrant properties now fallen on hard times, motels with names such as The Alicia, The Gables, Fergusons, Travelers and Peter Pan.

The old motels were fenced off as waiting chess pieces to a future master development plan. Windows were boarded up and painted with colorful stenciled figures — images intended to take the sting out of what is still a dangerous neighborhood.

“They were unsavory places full of crime and drug use,” said John Curran, head of real estate portfolio management for the Downtown Project. “We shut them down to create a buffer.”

Now the Fremont Street corridor’s criminal element has been pushed east past the intersection of Maryland Parkway, toward the confluence of East Charleston Boulevard, North Eastern Avenue and Boulder Highway

The area has come to symbolize a darker side of Las Vegas and its roll-the-dice mentality. Many residents were lured by quickly dashed, get-rich-quick dreams, only to be marooned in a state with limited mental health services for the poor and the addicted.

A billboard ad for a local liquor store chain seems to taunt those motel dwellers who live below it: “I’m on a liquor diet,” it reads. “I’ve lost three days already.”

The motels there keep Metro police busy with round-the-clock calls for robbery, drug deals, assaults, stabbings and gun play.

None more so than the Safari.

Since March 2016, officers have been called to the much-bigger Sky Ranch motel 22 times; the Roulette 49 times; the Sterling Gardens 72 times. Meanwhile, they were summoned to the smaller 21-room Safari on 172 occasions — more than twice that of any other property, according to Metro.

Now authorities are taking action.

Police, fire and health departments and the city attorney are working to shutter the motel and perhaps seize the property.

Two lawsuits filed in state and municipal courts label the Safari as a “chronic nuisance” — a haven for crime and hopeless rabbit hole for the time and energies of health and public safety officials.

Authorities targeted the Safari soon after the drug-related slaying last April. They waged drug and prostitution operations, served search warrants and increased health inspections.

“It was something out of a horror movie,” said Capt. Andy Walsh, head of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Downtown Area Command. “The trash, the reek of urine, the lack of modern conveniences. The place just screamed of the idea that whatever you wanted to do, you could come here to do it. It was palpable. That motel was straight out of the Twilight Zone.”

Walsh said he believes the future of the area hinges on the effort to close the motel. Since 2012, violent crime along East Fremont Street and the surrounding residential areas has dipped slightly, by just over 1 percent.

The number of robberies fell from 35 in 2012 to 32 last year. Batteries dipped from 29 to 25, while assaults with a gun rose from seven to 14. Officer responses to violent crime calls in the area stayed about the same, rising from 75 in 2012 to 76 last year.

Walsh says he wants to do more but notes constant trouble at places like the Safari often overwhelm his officers. “We’re making progress,” he said. “But we know crime can come roaring back. And a motel like the Safari could help tip the scale in the other direction.”

The goal, he said, is to help empower Yeh to retake control of her motel. “We’re not in the business of taking people’s property and making them miserable,” Walsh said. “I feel bad for the owner. I feel worse for the guy who got shot between the eyes.”

For her part, Yeh insists she’s being singled out. She wants to sell, but no one has offered enough money for her to recoup her investment. In the end, the Safari is all she has.

“I don’t sell drugs; I don’t condone drugs,” she said. “I rent rooms to people, but I can’t control what they do inside. This is a bad area. It’s not just my motel.”

As they wait impatiently for the spoils of Hsieh’s downtown development project to inch closer to home, area businesses say they, too, have a stake in the Safari’s fate.

Adam Foulad, president of an area business association, tracks member motels that fail to control their clientele. The Safari tops the list.

“It’s a cancer,” he said. “I’m looking forward to the day that place goes up in flames.”

‘Smartly furnished for your comfort’

In the 1950s, the Safari was part of the face of downtown Las Vegas, joining other area motels to lure tourists with its spacious rooms and rectangular neon-lit marquee.

First opened in 1954, the motel was registered with Automobile Club of America, which vouched for its quality. Postcard advertisements boasted of “Beautiful, Carpeted 1-2 Bedroom Units. Smartly furnished for your comfort, with TV, Radio. Cooled by refrigeration, tiled tub and showers, heated swimming pool with large cabana & large shaded lawn area for lounging.”

The Safari helped provide the allure to the East Fremont Street corridor, the city’s own version of old Route 66 and part of the original route to Los Angeles before Highway 91 — the precursor to Interstate 15 — was built in the mid-1920s.

For years along the East Fremont corridor, midcentury motels such as the Safari, The Turf, Fair Price, Tinkler’s, Par-a-Dice and the Blue Angel handled the post-World War II car culture with their convenient drive-in auto-courts. They offered casino souvenirs and tickets for free drinks.

“The 1950s and ’60s were the golden era of motels in Las Vegas,” said Robert Stoldal, chairman of the city’s Historic Preservation Commission. “In those days, every other lot was a motel. They advertised ‘long beds for tall people’ and all kinds of marketing pitches.”

But neighborhoods change.

The development of the Strip eventually pulled both resources and tourist dollars from downtown. Used car dealerships replaced motels along East Fremont. Later, many remaining motels switched from nightly guests to those seeking “extended stays.”

By the late 1990s, much of the corridor had mutated into a crime-ridden no-man’s land.

“In many cities nationwide, fashionable downtown hotels turned into flop houses,” said Dennis McBride, director of the Nevada State Museum. “In Las Vegas, those buildings were one-story motels. But a flop house is a flop house. Their turnaround signaled the end of an era.”

A few years ago, Hsieh stepped in to purchase eight properties along East Fremont Street. By then, the once-wholesome motel row within walking distance of the Fremont Street Experience had continued its decline as a boulevard of broken dreams.The borderline Siegel Suites, low-rent squats for the down-and-out, became as numerous as Starbucks coffee shops in more well-heeled neighborhoods.

Marquees that once advertised “Nice Rooms” and “Air-Conditioning” carried different messages: “Free Adult Movies,” “NoRefunds!” and “No Visitors After 10 p.m.” One motel-turned apartment building tried a different pitch: “Our Background Checks = a SAFER Place to Live!!”

Local businesses complain that the old fenced-off motels remain an eyesore, but Curran, who manages real estate acquisitions for the Downtown Project, said the group has resisted tearing them down. “They’re relics of an older Las Vegas,” he said. “They’re more interesting than having a lot full of dirt.”

Don Cole has run an auto repair shop here since 2013. One recent morning, he found the remains of a discarded crack pipe on the sidewalk. There’s a bullet hole in one window of his shop, and the front door pane is shattered at the bottom.

Cole said he believes a late-night passer-by kicked the glass after his two guard dog pit bulls, Honey and Pretty Girl, began barking just inside the door.

“It’s still a bad part of town,” he said. “They’re starting to buy it up, but it takes time to make the change.”

There are hopeful signs — even outside Hsieh’s development bubble.

For years now, owner George Kosla has been renovating the once-neglected Desert Moon motel, where curtains were held back with garbage bag ties and guests could peer out into the parking lot through cracks next to sloppily installed air-conditioning units.

Now, the Polish immigrant has installed surveillance cameras outside newly refurbished rooms, and his managers confront intruders who try to wander onto the property.

His staff makes a Thanksgiving turkey for the dozen or so weekly renters — regulars who watch out for one another.

One resident, a 56-year-old military veteran who suffers from depression and PTSD, has lived there for years.

“We keep it family,” he said. “I feel safe here.” He gestured to the stretch of East Fremont Street just outside the property. “But not out there.”

Symbol of notorious neighborhood

Just down the street, the lot outside the once-pristine Safari symbolizes the area’s descent. For years, East Fremont Street motels had located their glimmering swimming pools near the road to lure in passers-by. Now many have become their own gravesites, filled in with gravel and cemented over.

The Safari’s long-closed pool is fenced off from view, until recently a dump site for trash, old couches, wooden pallets and other detritus of a neighborhood gone bad.

Sweet bought the Safari almost on a whim.

After regular stays at a Las Vegas Boulevard motel owned by Yeh’s older brother, he decided he liked the motel life. He purchased the place in 2004 for $730,000.

He had met Yeh in Arcadia, just outside Los Angeles. Up until then, her life had been anything but easy. With her young son, she arrived in the United States in 1978, the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer-turned Vietnamese refugee who spoke no English.

After working various jobs, she eventually became a real estate agent and met Sweet. After he bought the Safari, Yeh loaned him $180,000 for the business. In 2011, she moved to East Fremont Street full-time to cope with an emergency: Sweet was in over his head at the Safari.

“He was constantly getting beat up,” she said.

For the couple, 2016 was the worst of a string of bad years. In April, months before Sweet died of cancer in September, a 37-year-old maintenance man named Pedro Rodriguez was shot and killed just outside Room 111.

Nicknamed “Gaga,” he had lived at the Safari for months. The boyfriend of Yeh’s housekeeper, he had done odd jobs until he stopped paying his rent. Days before the killing, Yeh had issued him a notice to vacate.

At 2 a.m. on the night of the slaying, Rodriguez stood in the doorway of his room when a figure jumped out of a car and asked about an acquaintance. Rodriguez, who police say was a player in the local drug scene, said the man wasn’t there.

“And then boom!” Walsh said. “The guy pulls out a gun and shot him between the eyes.”

Yeh said she had called the police about Rodriguez but was told to begin the eviction process. “And then someone killed him,” she said. “Do you think it’s my fault? It’s a city problem. It’s not my problem. My life is at risk, too. I live here.”

For Las Vegas police, the homicide provided a wake-up call. In the first four months of 2016, there were 11 homicides in the downtown area that Walsh supervises.

The killing epidemic called for a change in strategy.

“At some point, we had to stop saying, ‘It’s just Fremont Street. It’s just the Safari,’” Walsh said. “That was no longer good enough for me or the people I report to. Accepting this level of crime as normal or routine just didn’t work.”

Within months, police served a half-dozen search warrants at the Safari. They arrested residents, confiscating heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine in significant amounts, sometimes arriving as guests desperately tried to flush their drugs down the toilet. They found drug scales and weapons and busted a parade of prostitutes on the property.

After authorities filed the two lawsuits against Yeh, Walsh is ready for what comes. He’s already targeting other problem motels to pursue if the effort to shut down the Safari pays off. “If Wendy Yeh no longer owns the Safari, but I can save lives, I can live with that,” he said.

Supporters step up

Yeh recently hired a part-time security guard, saying it’s all she can afford. She wants to sell but has yet to receive a fair offer. “My health is getting worse because of this,” she said.

Meanwhile, supporters have stepped up to help her. Travis Acosta, a 38-year-old restaurant worker who once lived at the Safari, said Yeh has empathy for her residents.

“She’s helped people out,” he said. “But a lot of people take advantage of her.”

In the wake of the March drug overdose death, Acosta helped erect a makeshift barrier made of rope and a few orange cones at the motel entrance to discourage troublemakers from wandering onto the property.

On a recent afternoon, he ripped out the carpet in a room that had been closed by the health department. The stench of urine and neglect was overpowering. Outside the next room, a resident had spilled a can of beans, which has been trod over and smashed onto the concrete.

“Mama helps people, and this is how they do her,” Acosta said with a sigh.

He went back to pulling the stained and filthy carpet.

In a few short hours, darkness would return and the Safari would once again turn wild and untamed.

Award-winning freelance journalist John M. Glionna, a former Los Angeles Times staff writer, may be reached at john.glionna@gmail.com.