Hotel, Housing Plan for Poor Lost to Fire : Blaze: Transients are blamed for a $500,000 fire that guts a vacant Skid Row building. Plans to remodel the structure to house the poor are put off indefinitely.

A vacant Skid Row hotel that was to be renovated for low-income housing burned Sunday, causing $500,000 damage and jeopardizing the project’s future.

The fire at the Leonide Hotel on 5th Street broke out while Los Angeles firefighters were battling a small blaze on the 17th floor of one of the Arco Towers.

The cause of the Skid Row fire was under investigation, but authorities said the hotel had been used by transients and drug users who may have built a bonfire to keep warm.

Extensive damage to the three-story brick hotel will indefinitely delay plans to remodel it as a low-rent residential hotel, its owners said. The hotel’s roof buckled and its back half was gutted as a result of the fire.

Two nonprofit agencies that serve the homeless, the Los Angeles Community Design Center and the Chrysalis Center, bought the vacant hotel in August for about $1 million after securing a loan from the city Community Redevelopment Agency.

The hotel’s occupants, including owners of an adult bookstore and movie theater on the ground level, had moved out when the 80-year-old unreinforced structure was condemned after sustaining damage in the 1987 Whittier earthquake.

Ann Sewill, executive director of the Community Design Center, said the agencies had hoped to begin a $2.5-million remodeling project this spring. Plans called for 66 single-occupancy units, a communal kitchen and living room, and space for a small retail store and the Chrysalis Center, she said.

“Obviously, we’re terribly disappointed,” Sewill said. “But there will be a low-income residential hotel there somehow, even if it’s not made of the same bricks.”

But Sewill said the fate of the project ultimately depends on the results of a Building and Safety Department inspection this week to determine whether the hotel must be razed.

Firefighters learned of the blaze before dawn Sunday, when someone from a nearby Skid Row hotel called, Assistant Chief Pete Lucarelli said.

The Leonide Hotel’s alarm did not ring, probably because the hotel’s power was off, he said, adding that vacant structures are not required to have working alarms.

It took almost three hours to douse the flames, and several firefighters suffered minor injuries, Lucarelli said.

Residents of the nearby Baltimore Hotel, whose back wall is just 15 feet away across an alley from the Leonide, said Sunday the fire was so hot it blistered the paint on their window jambs.

“I wet down my drapes and poured water over my windows to cool things down,” said Baltimore Hotel resident Steven Bute, 44. “I’m surprised no one got killed in the fire. Everybody down here knows that place was used as a rock house. To get in, you had to crawl in feet first.”

Sewill said the hotel’s owners fought “a constant battle” to keep the building boarded up so transients could not enter.

The small blaze at one of the Arco Towers near 5th and Flower streets was caused by an electrical short that ignited plastic used to seal the floor while asbestos was being removed from the ceiling, Lucarelli said.

That fire caused $16,000 damage.