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You can find a Sutter Hotel in many cities. Go where the last wave of redevelopment has passed through and see what’s left standing. 

The hotel is seven stories high and 80 years old. A thousand scars have been endlessly painted over. The faucet handles in the room sinks often don’t match. But the rooms are clean and large and the walls are thick, built before the invention of fiberglass. 

It’s the toughest building on the block, tougher than the Oakland Federal Building that looms across the street. 

The hotel survived the big earthquake in 1989 that fatally damaged many residential hotels in downtown Oakland. 

Charlie, the hotel custodian and its institutional memory, said the old, thick walls also are filled with metal. Frank, who has lived at the hotel for 30 years, said there was a lot of alarming shaking that left a long crack across the front wall in the lobby. 

Police and firemen evacuated the hotel but let residents back in after a few hours, Frank said. “People in other hotels were moved to fancy places like the Holiday Inn and got expensive free meals. We got to come back here,” he said, not sounding too displeased. 

After the earthquake and much urban-renewing, operating residential hotels were reduced to 27 in downtown Oakland and along San Pablo Avenue where it runs into Emeryville, according to a 2004 report by the Oakland Community and Economic Development Agency. 

The hotels have 2,240 rooms to rent—not enough. From 85 percent to 95 percent of the rooms are rented out at any time. Hotel managers estimate that 20 percent of their tenants were “substance abusers,” but this is a pretty loose number. 

“Although ... hotel managers and police officers continue to complain of drug activity, prostitution and disruptive behavior ... police records confirm that disturbances of the peace are common at some hotels but do not support the complaints about drug activity and prostitution,” the report said. 

Regardless, many hotel operators are nervous about their customers. They hunker down in semi-darkness in lobby offices behind reinforced-looking glass. Sometimes there’s no light at all and you are talking to a voice coming out of pitch blackness. 

Mike, a resident and employee at the Sutter, said I missed an extreme case, a hotel where the front desk was defended by jail-type iron bars. 

Mike works for the Sutter as a driver of the hotel’s unusual elevator, which is at the heart of the hotel’s eccentric security system. 

The elevator is also very old, operated by a handle moved back and forth, requiring the operator to aim it at each stop to make it level with the floor. 

It used to have regular call buttons but they “disappeared in the mists of time,” according to Charlie. 

Users call the elevator by tapping their room keys on the glass front of the elevator shaft. Tim, who has driven the elevator for eight hours virtually every day for eight years, says he often can tell who is waiting by the style of the tapping. He has settled into a routine, reading almost a whole paperback novel on every shift, never raising his voice, and knowing most everything that goes on in the hotel. 

A crowd of tappers can collect and everybody piles into the elevator, which isn’t very large and is slowed by the weight. (Charlie says the elevator is expensive to maintain. Its parts must be specially milled by a company that mills parts for old elevators.) 

After a while, you have encountered almost everyone and after a longer while you know them and gradually become entangled in the community. 

I lived there for eight months. Shortly before I left, a tenant died from an illness in a nearby room. The guy apparently knew a lot of people. There was a sizable gathering outside his door—friends, relatives, children, staff people—awkwardly trying to be helpful. 

It wasn’t exactly a memorial service. But sort of.