Taking the Skid Out of Skid Row : Center Founder Is Changing His Corner of the World

By 7:30 on a cold, rainy morning, the small crowd gathered outside the Chrysalis Center on Skid Row’s 5th and Wall streets was already shifting and murmuring in discomfort, vying for a spot in the recessed doorway.

They were waiting for their chance at some clothing, bedding or food, and a lucky few, the very early arrivals, were already inside. The others had been issued numbers. Considering the misery of the day and their surroundings, they were remarkably patient, making small talk, tolerating a crazed orator, making occasional “I’m gonna bust your head” threats at people trying to cut ahead.

Once in a while John Dillon, who started this place a year ago, would step outside and ride shotgun, installing order, calling out, “hold on, hold on,” inviting a woman with an infant to wait her turn inside. He was on the move most of the morning, picking up an unheeded phone, calling out instructions to the people giving out clothing in the back room, getting the volunteers more organized, shepherding visitors.

Firmness, Respect and Humor

Just inside the door Aurelia Tutt was seated at a desk doing intake: A green card to those who could prove they lived in a hotel, entitling them to food and clothing distribution once a month; a gray card to those who lived on the street, making them eligible for a monthly set of clothing only; a brown card for crisis situations, usually families, who would receive help on a weekly basis.

Once an individual had a card, there would be no more waiting in line out front. Card holders could come in the back door whenever they were eligible and get served right away.

A resident of Skid Row herself, Tutt interviewed people with a mixture of firmness, respect and humor. To one man’s cajoling that he get something to eat right away, she flatly told him she had not yet determined if he was eligible for groceries at all. (No sense giving a bag of groceries to someone living on the street, Dillon explained--since street people can’t cook, chances are they’ll eat a slice of bread out of a loaf and throw the rice, beans and staples away.) But to the shy young Latino couple with the infant in the pink bunting, she simply said, “You need food,” and got up, like their host, to walk them the short distance to the grocery area.

Toward the back, the center was operating at a different pace than the calm that prevailed around Aurelia Tutt’s desk. Paula Jones was sorting the available food into three-to-five-day packets. Beans, rice, packaged sliced corned beef, canned vegetables, soups, spaghetti, tomato sauce, baby food . . . . “I always aim to provide a balanced meal.”

She pulled down several stacks of disposable diapers from the top of a refrigerator until the Latino family had found the size of diapers they wanted.

She is not always so gracious. A Skid Row resident of six years herself, who has survived being stabbed in the heart, and three subsequent open-heart surgeries, she now lives in a nearby hotel and works at the center as a volunteer, organizing the food distribution. She reads people pretty quickly.

‘Get Out of My Pantry’

“When they come in here and start going, ‘I want this. Give me that,’ I say to them, ‘Get out of my pantry. I’ll give you your bag.’ ”

In the rear, about 10 area residents were busying themselves among the clothes. A number of them were volunteers, headed by Viola Brown, who was clearly in charge, scrapping a little with one vague young man who could not get her instructions straight.

The volunteers were at work sorting through recent acquisitions, the result of a clothing drive sponsored by USC Law School, sizing, discarding the ragged or dirty items, assigning the others to the proper racks.

“I’m gone with the wind,” one young man said, sounding chipper and heading out the back door with a plastic sack full of clothing and a tattered-looking blanket. “I’ve got my blanket and my shoes--I’m all set. These shoes are 8s and I wear a 9 1/2. They’re killing me right now,” he laughed, looking down at his newly acquired shiny, rubberized footwear.

A Look of Concern

Karen Arsenault, a full-time worker who is part of the Jesuit Volunteers program, was in charge of checking out the goods each person was leaving with. She looked concerned about the bad fit, cautioned him he’d break his toes, and asked if there weren’t a pair of sneakers in his size.

“Not now,” he backed away. “I gotta stay out of the rain. They’ll be fine until I can find something else. Until I can find me a place of my own. But right now, I got to get over to the hospital and get these papers signed, so I can get my disability.”

“To me, clothing was dignity.”

And with that John Dillon opened the Chrysalis Center at 302 East 5th St. just a year ago.

He is 23 and looks younger. A fresh-scrubbed laughing kid, so boyish in looks and manner he could play light comedy if Andy Hardy movies ever make a comeback.

In the meantime, he runs his center on the premises of the old Hard Rock Cafe, one of Skid Row’s roughest landmarks. He pays himself a stipend of $100 a month, lives as a guest in the basement of the Catholic Worker community’s home in Boyle Heights, works six- and seven-day weeks, and operates month-to-month with no certainly that the $600 for the next month’s, and the rest of the $3,000 fixed monthly expenses will materialize.

A Goal in Life

“My new goal in life is to move into an apartment and pay myself $600 or $800 a month,” he said. And to rent a bigger facility down the street that would enable them to provide laundry and shower facilities.

He comes from Rockville, Md., talks about his “real neat” parents and seven brothers and sisters, his Irish Catholicism, his years at Indiana University where he was in ROTC and majoring in finance: “It sounded impressive.” He was one of those, he said of himself, who spent a lot of time at college arguing over a beer about the meaning of life and figuring out how he and his friends could change the world.

Graduation came and he said to himself, “ ‘So where are we going to go to change the world?’ ”

He thought about the Peace Corps, then opted for the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, a lay community of people offering a year’s service, and that brought him to Skid Row, Los Angeles.

Within three months he was on his own, not having seen eye-to-eye over the rules and regulations with the agency he worked for.

“I just tend to see food, clothing and shelter as basic rights,” he said.

Potential Helpers

He had $2,500 he had earned cleaning swimming pools that had been earmarked for a trip to Europe. With that, and some prodding from Jeff Dietrich of the L.A. Catholic Worker, who told him “so, go do it,” and encouragement from a few names he had called off a list of potential helpers, such as Father Donald Merrifield SJ, chancellor of Loyola Marymount University, he rented the Hard Rock Cafe.

He and his program have matured greatly in the past 12 months.

“We wound up giving away our own clothes to start. There were 87 people who came that first day. I knew you had to have some type of monitoring, but I didn’t know how to do it.”

He knew some people would just sell the clothes they received. Dillon figures in general, he said, that although there are numerous places on Skid Row that give away clothes, “a percentage, maybe 10%, of the people sell it and they’re the same people--the thug force--that are at the head of the lines. So we tried to regulate it, and help the 90% who got nothing.”

Basically, he ran it himself for the first four months, supplemented with a few volunteers, exhausting himself, giving himself no time for a personal life, trying to raise money in his off hours, starting to dislike what he was doing.

His parents paid him a visit, took a look at him and told him he was killing himself. After they left, he decided it was time to change.

“I asked Aurelia if she would work here from Monday through Friday. She was already volunteering. That made it a lot better.”

They talked of renovating the building, and he decided he wasn’t going to do it himself. He put up a sign requesting “sober, nonviolent” volunteers, handed the keys to Aurelia and went on vacation.

A New Tone

He returned to a building that had been painted, carpeted and rewired by neighborhood people, a combination of residents and business people.

“When I came back, we had a different program. The center belonged to the neighborhood now. There was a new tone. . . . I’ve become real big on saying, ‘I’m not going to do it. It’s your neighborhood.”

He manages to pay Aurelia Tutt now. Paula Jones and Viola Brown are regular volunteers, as are a number of other neighborhood residents. It was Brown who devised the green, gray and brown card system--their fifth system, Dillon laughed, saying finally they have one that works. With the center’s endorsement, Jones is running for a seat on the Mayor’s Community Action Board.

“I’d like to advise the mayor,” she said. “I can’t spend any money of my own, so I might as well tell somebody else how to spend it. And I definitely meet the poverty criteria (for the seat).”

She had to take her application personally to the Mayor’s Office. City Hall was a first for her, and she found it intimidating.

“It was a big ol’ slick office and all the people were dressed so sharp. But you know, it was a thrill. I’ll be going there if I’m on that board.”

Mayor Tom Bradley has taken an interest in the center. He came by (“just to see what we were doing,” Dillon said) after they opened. In February he turned over a check for $198 to them, a fee he had received for a public service commercial he had filmed. (Dillon had a hard time cashing the check, he said, because “nobody would believe I had a check from the mayor.) He channeled a $2,000 contribution to them last summer and last month Bradley presented Dillon with $5,000, part of a $10,000 International Integrity Award he received from the John-Rogers Foundation.

More Particular

They still depend on individual contributions of cash and kind, but they have become more particular. They do not pick up donations, other than large quantities of food. They insist over the phone that the clothing be decent.

And they try to be specific: They need men’s pants, shoes, underwear and socks, large-sized ladies clothing, baby clothes, blankets, sleeping bags, tote bags or back packs, small appliances, plates, flatware, toys.

“And hygienes,” Paula Jones said. Toothpaste, soap, shampoo, deodorant, shaving supplies.

The people they serve are about 60% male, Dillon estimated, “and 60% of those males are Vietnam vets. It’s a disgrace, really. There’s so little for them here.” The 40% who are women and children, he said, have changed. There are fewer Latino families, due, he said, to another program, Las Familias del Pueblo, that is helping those families to move away from Skid Row. But he has noticed an increase in black children, some of them referred, with their mothers, by Travelers Aid at the Greyhound station.

Those who come represent a racial mix, with about 40% of them having some form of mental illness, a large number receiving General Relief, and “at least 50% under 40, many of them my age.”

Because of the diversity, the center has begun expanding its services, offering an English as a Second Language class, and some employment counseling and welfare and Social Security advocacy, mostly helping untangle bureaucratic tape.

“The food is real sporadic here. So many people give during the holiday season, but we’re here year-round. July was a real hard month here. We had almost no food to give out. So we did a lot of advocacy work.”

Although the Chrysalis Center still retains more than a few traces of the starry-eyed, do-gooder quality of its now wised- up and street-wise but still starry-eyed, do-gooder founder, it is now a nonprofit corporation with a board of directors.

“I want this to be an organization. I don’t just want this to be John Dillon giving out clothes,” Dillon said.

For the moment, however, John Dillon is giving out clothes--at least for the next two years. He used to say forever, he said, but it started to sound like a long time. Recently he made a pledge to commit himself for the next two years. By then, the board should be more in control, he said. They can decide if they want him.

And he has a new attitude. It may be he does not wind up changing the world.

“This is all going to continue. You help one, there’ll be another. It’s persistent. There is a structural problem going on (in society, causing the situation). This is just crisis management. I’m more laid-back now. There’s the food, the clothing, but a lot more than that. It’s the laughter here, just being human. I’ve decided to enjoy what I do. I like the people down here.”

No Shortage of Anger

There is plenty of anger on Skid Row, and it is more than understandable, he said, attributing it to “the lack of love, the lack of caring, the lack of meaning.” He described a typical Skid Row day spent standing in line for coffee and a doughnut, in another line for clothes, another for lunch, another for a bed or a meal ticket.

“You’ve got nowhere to go all day. There are lines to go to, but no direction. I’d be angry and frustrated too. . . . You can encourage people to get mad. You can tell them they’re persecuted. You can let them feed on that. I’m trying not to do that, not to keep blaming. I went through that. I was always fighting with God, saying, ‘Why would you do this to a bunch of people?’ Now I think, God is here. God is manifesting himself in people. God is crying out, ‘Why are my people suffering? Why are you doing this to my people?’ ”

He would rather stop placing blame, whether it be God or institutions or individuals. He would rather just do something.

“I started realizing, I could just go on attacking, or I could make an alternative. I thought people had a right to food and clothing. Fine. So, I work to give them that.”