Inside the notorious Gatwick Private Hotel

"ARE you sure this is the place for you?" The man in the office of Melbourne's biggest and most notorious flophouse - can tell we are not his usual customers, but that's not his problem.

Gatwick

"ARE you sure this is the place for you?" The man in the office of Gatwick Private Hotel - Melbourne's biggest and most notorious flophouse - can tell we are not his usual customers, but that's not his problem.

For $60 cash, the double room is ours for the night. For $260 we can have it for a week.

The Sunday Herald Sun checked in to the Gatwick in 2011 to see for ourselves the St Kilda eyesore that has escaped the area's gentrification of the past two decades.

That was when the Fitzroy St hotel returned to the headlines after a lay-off of a couple years when police shot dead a man staying there who had earlier stabbed a long-time resident in the back.

It was the fourth violent death connected to the Gatwick in the past six years.

Unsurprisingly, the business owners and nearby residents hate the Gatwick - there's even a Facebook page calling it a hub of crime that should be bulldozed.

The first thing you notice when you walk into the Gatwick is the smell - a mixture of sweat, alcohol, vomit and tobacco.

The next thing is the sticky, dark carpet.

A man is marching up and down banging on doors.

"I'm not f---ing happy today," he shouts.

"Watch out or I'm going to get you!"

The object of his anger keeps the door closed.

A sign at the desk says alcohol is not be drunk in the foyer.

In armchairs a couple of women are drinking alcohol, a nearby man playing with a screwdriver.

He's not happy either. As he explains to his friend, he's picked up nits from somewhere.

People come and go while we wait for someone to rent us our room. Most of them are drunk.

Even at 4pm the atmosphere is volatile.

"You know what you're doing but I would do a risk assessment," a policemen advised us before we got there.

It's good advice. The Gatwick is a very dangerous place.

The last murder there didn't make the papers.

In February last year, a long-term resident was bashed and kicked to death in an upstairs corridor.

His killing - which police say left the walls splattered in blood - was captured on CCTV, which will be the centrepiece of the murder trial of his two alleged killers later this year.

The previous murder victim at the Gatwick was Arthur Karatasiosis, 34, who was repeatedly stabbed in the foyer of the hotel in 2006. His killer, Michael Paul Smith, 34, was guilty of defensive homicide.

He will be eligible for parole this year.

A year earlier, 57-year-old Russian immigrant Sammy Garfunkel was found dead in his room in August 2005.

The night manager had found him unconscious in the corridor the night before and, thinking he was drunk, put him to bed.

His alleged killer, John James Steward, had a criminal record that ran to 32 pages and included "umpteen" previous court appearances for violence and robbery offences.

He was acquitted of murder four years later.

His co-accused, Jenny Fiona Kirkham, didn't go to trial for lack of evidence.

Violent death at the Gatwick is unusual.

More common is death by drug overdose - one detective told us that he alone has dealt with four in the past 16 months.

Sitting around a cafe table with three colleagues on Friday, the detective reminisced about the time they executed a warrant on the office of the Gatwick.

"The guy working there was dealing cannabis from the front desk - he was keeping it in the kettle," he said.

They said the Gatwick was a magnet for Melbourne's down-and-out crooks.

"They head there as soon as they get out of jail," one said.

"We get a lot of cars dumped out the back," another said, laughing.

Those crims prey on the Gatwick's long-term residents.

"There are some very vulnerable people who live there and they fall victim to these crooks," another said.

Surprisingly for a place with such a rich criminal past, police have praise for the Gatwick's owners, twin sisters Rose Banks and Yvette Kelly.

"I wouldn't want you to get into them - they're very kind-hearted people who are helping these people," said detective Sen-Sgt Phil Hubbard, of St Kilda police.

The sisters' mother, Vittoria Carbone, bought the Gatwick in the 1960s.

Known as the Queen of St Kilda for 30 years, she operated the hotel as well as five other rooming houses in the district.

She also owned numerous units and houses.

When she died in 1998, hundreds of people lined the streets as her horse-drawn hearse progressed through St Kilda.

Later that year, a "For Sale" sign went up on the Gatwick.

It was saved after the Office of Housing stepped in and lent the sisters $2.5 million to buy it and keep it open.

The loan was conditional on the Gatwick Hotel continuing to provide low-cost boarding house-type accommodation to tenants eligible for public housing.

In the 11 years since, the world of the rooming house has moved on.

Many of those which remain have installed security to make sure only residents can come and go.

The Gatwick, by contrast, with its unattended desk allowing anyone to come and go, seems a relic of a bygone era.

It's an era that can't end soon enough for Steve Paraskevas, who has run the restaurant Monroes over the road since 1983.

"I would like to put a match to it," Mr Paraskevas jokes.

"Enough is enough. It drives people away from Fitzroy St.

"I couldn't tell you the number of bodies I have seen carried out of it."

And what was our room like?

The carpet was heavily stained, the bathroom filthy, the toilet was blocked and it stank.

But the TV worked and the bed had clean linen on it.

Following the policemen's advice, we conducted our own risk assessment.

We decided not to stay the night.

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 This article was first published on 8 May 2011.