Hotel With Riveting View

The new Checkers Hotel in downtown Los Angeles hoped that guests would enjoy the grassy lawn of the neighboring Los Angeles Central Library. But instead of gazing at parkland, guests on the hotel’s north side now look at a construction site.

Checkers, where penthouse suites fetch $975 a night, opened just a few months after the library began a large construction and renovation program. The project should take at least three years to complete.

“It hasn’t been that bad,” said Checkers spokeswoman Helen Chaplin, who adds that so far only one guest has asked to be relocated to the “quiet side” of the hotel. But “when they start the riveting,” she said, “that might be another story.”

Rolling Yellow Pages

Greg Klark found himself driving along Melrose looking for a restaurant whose name escaped him and wishing that he had a pocket-sized phone book in his glove compartment to consult. Then, he said, it dawned on him that such a directory was an idea waiting to be hatched--”a tool for the customer on the move.”

Result: California’s first Yellow Pages directory designed for motorists.

Klark’s Inglewood-based Mobile Telephone Directories--with about 70% of the ad space sold and some categories sold out--expects to begin distribution by fall to 100,000 customers of PacTel Cellular in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

The directory offers advertisers what Klark called “a targeted market of people who are relatively affluent, are consumers on the move--and have their wallets in their pocket.” On the horizon, no doubt, is a category for pizza parlors that’ll deliver to off-ramps.

High-Priced Dreams

Here’s one to sleep on.

A local art gallery is selling “sculptured” bunk beds for children--at $17,500 each. Saxon-Lee Gallery has 15 limited-edition beds--which look like double-decker fire engines--designed by New York artist Red Grooms for Fun Furniture of Los Angeles.

Each includes sculptures of a Dalmation dog, two card-playing firefighters and two more firefighters hanging from the rear of the bed. The beds, of course, are fire engine red. “These are not just functional beds,” said Daniel Saxon, co-owner of the gallery. “They’re sculptures.”

Indeed, three of the beds sold the first weekend that they were put on display, Saxon said. All three were bought by people in the film business--two directors and one producer.

But this is clearly no fire sale. After the first five are sold, the price of the remaining 10 beds will increase to $25,000 each. “The fewer there are available,” Saxon said, “the more valuable they become.”

Moving Up and Moving Out

Glitzy Fox Plaza in Century City won’t be Airline Takeover Headquarters much longer.

Financier Alfred A. Checchi, who recently outbid Fox Plaza neighbor Marvin Davis for Northwest Airlines, is moving his investment firm to roomier digs in a West Los Angeles high-rise.

Checchi said he had no problems with his neighbors at Fox Plaza--despite a lively bidding war with Davis for the Eagan, Minn.-based airline. It’s just that Checchi’s growing investment company needs more space--the new office is three times bigger.

Fox Plaza hasn’t dropped entirely from the takeover scene. Davis, the billionaire oilman, is trying to buy United Airlines.