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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