Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Vegas’ urban jungle Safari
Motel, area once part of downtown’s tourism scene, now haven for round-theclock crime
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
I don’t feel safe here. 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. Wendy Yeh Owner, Safari Motel
by off-kilter residents is really what killed him. Now the 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 pointblank 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 wouldbe 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-richquick 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 spaciousrooms 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
The 1950s and ‘60s were the golden era of motels in Las Vegas. In those days, every other lot was a motel. Robert Stoldal Chairman, Las Vegas Historic Preservation Commission