Return to L.A.'s Skid Row -After 51 Years

The sun beat down on the Los Angeles Police Department’s smartly new, uniformed 50-officer Skid Row troopers last Sunday. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was proclaiming a new era of “urban reform” for the bleak streets and sidewalks that have harbored the downtrodden, the hopeless, the drug addicts and alcoholics for generations.

At 85, I sat on a folding chair graciously offered me behind the police lines down the street from the ceremonies because my police press pass had expired almost a half a century after I last roamed the streets of Skid Row.

In 1955, Virgil Pinkley, the publisher and editor of the Los Angeles Mirror News, then an afternoon paper owned by the Los Angeles Times, assigned Vernon McPherson and me to spend three months to prepare a 10-part series “exposing” the rot on Skid Row. Ironically, the occasion Sunday reminded me of President George W. Bush’s triumphant appearance aboard an aircraft carrier off San Diego on May 1, 2003, proclaiming victory in the war on Iraq – the war which is still raging and with no ending in sight.

At early dawn, before Sunday’s proceeding, Ernest Savage, who is producing a television documentary that deals in part with the problems of poverty in the city, took me on the tour that opened my eyes again to what I had seen 51 years ago.

There was modernization. Some denizens dwelt in little tents, but others still curled up in cardboard boxes or slept in doorways or out in the open sidewalks. The streets were littered with trash.

“Are they always like this?” I asked Savage.

“No, the City sweeps them clean regularly, but they look like this again the next day,” he said.
Spanking new “lofts” loom above some of the streets. Some of the old hotels have been “gentrified,” I was told, reserving the top stories for higher rent-paying customers, gradually removing some of the poorer from the lower levels.

A gray-haired woman, who identified herself only as “Goodluck Lady,” shuffled by, burdened down by what probably were all of her belongings. “I had to move when I could no longer pay the rent,” she said. “They gave me some money. It won’t keep me for long.”

“You appear to be in good health" I smiled.

She smiled back. “I’ve always been a vegetarian. I don’t smoke. I’ve never been married . . .”
But she had been on the Row. She had no family. She had nowhere else to go.

Savage and I went to breakfast at a sparkling, gleaming Starbucks Coffee Shop, edging the Row. As we drove into the parking lot, a black man rushed up and began swabbing the windshield to clear the dust. He didn’t stop to ask if we wanted the service, but kept on going, mopping all the windows.

Savage was delighted because he had planned to go to a car wash so his cameraman could shoot through the windows to catch the action before anyone was aware they were being photographed.

The window washer, seeing the camera grind, kept right on washing, but answered our questions readily. He was more than willing to go on record. He wasn’t new on the Row. He had tried for years to escape into better opportunities. But with no luck.

“I get $212 monthly from welfare,” he said. “That’s supposed to cover rent, food and all the necessities, but it doesn’t nowadays.” He didn’t sound complaining. He was just telling the facts.
Savage told me that Police Chief William J. Bratton had won recognition when he headed New York’s police force, beginning was cleaning out the “windshield washers” who plagued drivers in the city.

Our man listened but said, “It won’t make no difference. I’ll be right back here washin’ windows. Where else can I go?”

The television producer had lured me back to the Row after he had reproduced in print our full series from six decades past. I spent hours after midnight the day we went back, reading what The Mirror had published.

The series began by explaining that our editor had become well aware of the blot on the downtown area, mostly between 2nd and 9th Streets and Central Avenue and Main. We had been invited to accompany a wealthy hotel owner and property developer, Ben Weingart, into the area:

“We were in the front seat of a black Cadillac,” we began, “watching one of the wealthiest men in California warp it into a parking place near 5th and Crocker Sts.

“A wreck of a man lurched off the sidewalk. His hand caught on the fender.

“He leaned and bent over.

“And then he retched . . . and retched.

“Other derelicts weaved past unheeding. Our multimillionaire driver paid no attention to either. He knew the code of the street – you don’t stare at, or stoop to help and man who is throwing up.”

The number of “residents,” if you could call them that, was about 15,000.

“A ring of decay,” as Gilbert E. Morris, then head of the Department of Building and Safety” described it, “is spreading fast. There are infections at 3rd and Hill, Pico and Figueroa, on Temple St. and elsewhere.

“If humanitarian appeals are not heeded, perhaps the taxpayer will listen when he finds out how much it costs him to operate a slum, to pay for its police, fire, health and safety protection.”

We wrote that, “You who live on Los Feliz or Sherman Oaks, or in some other tidy section, go there as a tourist would to the Casbah, to Pigalle, or the Bowery. The drunks and the derelicts, the petty hoodlums and the prostitutes are color and atmosphere.

“You go to Skid Row to go slumming. You are flirting with danger. Be honest. In a way it somehow has an aura of tawdry glamour. A community with civic pride exerts pressure on its government to keep itself clean and decent and law-abiding. You draw the line at Skid Row. This is not YOUR town.”

Back to the Row today: The population had changed from a majority of whites, where 50 years ago it was mostly male alcoholics. In 1954, police had made 45,000 arrests, mostly for public intoxication. Today the population is mostly African-American and Latino. Peddlers of any sort of illegal drug descend on the streets every night.

In the morning, we found a man and his wife, sitting in the heat, outside their little tent.. “She’s been straight for a year,” her husband said. “But the temptation is always there. It is all around us all the time.”

“Why can’t you move away?”

“I’m a highly-qualified cook,” he said, “but I have arthritis so bad I can’t stand up long. I can’t get no work.” His wife sat on the curb, smoking a cigarette. A woman walked by, snatched the cigarette. The wife calmly retrieved it. No scuffle.

Riding back on the train that night to my home ion Oceanside, the events of the day drowned out any other thought.

Reform Skid Row? You may recycle the denizens from the streets to the jails, but they will be back. They have nowhere else to go. It is the only home of desperate people. Change will not occur until mental health treatment and psychological encouragement is accorded by a society that still bears the cost of the “city of decay,” worse than it was 50 years ago.

Eliminating Skid Row would only scatter the homeless like the spray of an explosion, placing them anonymously, still helpless, throughout the community.
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Ralph Story: 1920-2006

Ralph Story, the veteran radio and television personality best known for his wry and witty observations about life in Los Angeles, died Tuesday at his home in Santa Ynez after a long battle with emphysema. He was 86."
(Lead on J. Michael Kennedy's obituary for Ralph Story
in the L.A. Times on Sept. 27, 2006.)

Remembering Ralph Story. . .

By Paul Weeks

He was the best newsman and story-teller of them all in Los Angeles. He was a good friend, but didn't let that get in his way when a TV appearance he wanted me to arrange for him went awry. It was this way:

When Richard Nixon was elected, I knew it was time for me to resign from my job with the government's "War on Poverty" in San Francisco and go home to L.A. Ralph was among my contacts and said he'd try to help.

Come 1971, I was handling the public information job at the RAND Corporation when Dan Ellsberg's leak of the "Pentagon Papers" -- taken from RAND's top-classified files -- broke in the New York Times. I had always secretly admired what Dan had done, but found myself in the midst of a disaster for RAND.

Ralph called. "Will you get me someone from RAND for my morning show tomorrow to talk about it?"

"Sorry, Ralph," I said, swinging into my p.r. spin, "Dan is a fugitive from justice and it wouldn't be proper for us to talk about it at this time."

I'm sure he expected that and laughed. "Well, what can. . ."

I probably broke in about then and thought, hmmm, maybe I can find someone high in the management to talk -- not about Ellsberg, but what RAND is and what it does.

"I can get you reports that Ellsberg wrote at RAND that are unclassified. But suppose I can get you one of our people to explain what we do -- both in defense and domestic research?"

Undoubtedly, Ralph thought that would be a good idea to get his oar in on the story
. . . would answer his questions and at least get a "we-can't-comment-on-that" from his guest.

Gus Shubert, our vice-president who was a splendid overseer of my office among his other duties, agreed. Great. Arrangements were completed for him to go to the studio.

Morning arrived. Time for Gus to get along. My phone rang.

"Harry wants to speak with you." It was the secretary to RAND's president, Harry Rowen."
(We called them secretaries then. Now they are "assistants.")

I trembled. I think I knew what was coming.

"Cancel that thing right now!" he ordered. "We won't have Gus going down there!"

"But," I sputtered, "we've already agreed to Gus' appearing. Story's going to have five minutes of time to fill!"

"CANCEL IT!"

I did.

Jack Vogel, my immediate supervisor as head of the publications department, heard my sad story. Story wouldn't be sad. . .He would be mad as HELL! Jack didn't hesitate.

"We'll tape record it," he said. Brilliant idea. We did.

You should have heard Ralph spout: "Who are these people who hide what they're doing with taxpayers' money?" or words to that effect. "They exist on government contracts. What's so mysterious about them?"

Oh, didn't he lay it on to us. . . snubbing the media . . . high fallutin' research scientists who won't talk to the people. Five full minutes of it. Well, maybe I don't remember a break or two to champion Wheaties or Firestone Tires.

"Paul," Jack Vogel said, "we'll take it down to the management's morning committee meeting. You come with me."

"OK, Jack, but. . ."

"We will play the whole thing for them."

We did.

Silence. Then a snigger or two. Silence.

It was my turn to get mad. I started to fire away at all of them.

"Gentlemen," (I don't remember any ladies present in those days), you've answered up to now to the Defense Department, a few Congressional committees, and . . ." (I don't know if there was anyone else on the list). "And now you're going to answer to everyone from Peoria to Timbuktu." Yes, I remember saying Timbuktu, but I guess Timbuktu didn't care what the hell RAND did.

I sat down. Well, I said to myself, you've talked your way out of another job. I'd get fired. I learned over the next 19 years or so that RAND doesn't settle its internal problems that way. Everyone got a chance to blow his or her top once in awhile.

Harry Rowen had always called me Paul. RAND likes the idea of everyone calling each other by their first names, no matter how high or how low they are on the ladder.

Harry Rowen rose. He turned to me. He took a deep breath.

"Well, Mr. Weeks, we will continue doing it MY WAY!"

By golly, we didn't. I never had so much satisfaction over the next couple of decades proving to this high-touted think tank that you have to keep the door wide open to the press. Tell them what you do. Give the public an accounting of what you do, just as you do to your sponsors.

Harry Rowen was a brilliant scientist himself. He had to take much of the rap for what had happened. Ellsberg had been a close friend. Ellsberg, out of conscience, betrayed him and RAND. But Dan told the truth about the terribly botched war in Vietnam. I have told him that.

Ralph, I owe you much gratitude because it was you who gave a very important institution in the shaping of governmental response to heavy problems a lesson how it best serves its broad constituency.

Rest in peace.