DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

1. The carpets: The 500 West Hotel was built in 1924. I think this is when the carpets were put in. I suspect they may have been listed with the National Register of Historical Artifacts, as that would explain why they haven’t yet been hauled into the desert and summarily burned.
   
2. The bathrooms: The hotel website makes impressive claims about them:

   Every bathroom is lockable, self contained and private. Our professional housekeeping staff restocks and cleans every bathroom around the clock, 24 hours a day. If you think the bathroom at your home is clean, wait until you enjoy one of ours!

   Don’t believe the hype. At one point I hung a dirty towel in one bathroom as a test; it was still there the next morning. Convenient, in one sense, but sort of gross in another.

   Some of the bathrooms are worse than others, not because they’re more soiled, but ironically because they’re more clean — due to the wall-mounted Ecolab dispenser that squirts disinfectant into the room… and its occupants.

3. The irons: burned and sticky. I went for the wrinkled look.
   
4. The broken elevator: Actually, the fact that this one was out of order could be considered a safety feature, considering how badly the other elevator shakes.
5. The nearby train crossing.
   
6. The expired safety permit for the one elevator that still works.
   
7. The flaky wifi connection.
8. The mattress condom.
   
9. The apparent hotel policy of 1 blanket per guest. Requests for extras will be met by front-desk staff with a cheerful smile, a scratch of a pen on a scrap of paper, and … actually, that was the end of the exchange.

   Which brings us to:

10. The indifferent desk clerks: They smile, they nod. They don’t produce clean irons or spare blankets.

    On the other hand, they did promptly call the San Diego police when one of the guests threatened to break down the door of her neighbor.

So, you get what you pay for. At $50/night, the 500 West is one-sixth the cost of some of the other hotels in the area. It’s the most affordable, or even the only affordable hotel downtown. But ultimately the question of whether it’s worth it cannot be easily answered… at least not until my pathology report comes back.