Skid Row Tour Goes Behind Fears and Facade

Locals call it “The Nickel”--5th Street, Skid Row’s major thoroughfare. On a recent Saturday morning, shabbily dressed men crowded the litter-strewn sidewalks. Many were drinking from bottles hidden in crumpled brown paper bags. Drug dealers and their clients flashed rolls of bills and exchanged merchandise, evidently unconcerned by a police station just across the street.

The motorcycle cop who pulled up to the stop light at 5th and Wall streets looked startled when he noticed the small group of neatly dressed people standing on the corner in the midst of the Nickel’s bustle and noise. The policeman smiled broadly at them. “Are you folks from around here?” he asked in a hearty, solicitous tone. They shook their heads. “Just be careful, now. This is a bad part of town.”

“Yeah, dangerous, dangerous,” a passer-by murmured.

When the light changed and the policeman sped off, the group crossed the street roaring with laughter. They felt they knew, better than the policeman imagined, what this “part of town” was all about. They had just spent two hours on an educational walking tour of Skid Row, guided by John Dillon, executive director of the Chrysalis Center, a multi-service self-help organization for Skid Row residents.

‘Past the Facade’

Dillon began giving his weekend walking seminars to “help people see past the facade” that he believes is created by the media and by people’s own fears.

Tours are offered once a month to show as much as possible of life on Skid Row: the various social service agencies and missions, the welfare hotels, the neighborhood landmarks, the streets and, most important, the people who inhabit the 50-square-block area of Los Angeles that he calls “the outdoor asylum.” The tours are open to anyone who is interested in learning about the area; no donations are requested.

Impressions from touring on foot are considerably different from those gleaned through the securely rolled up windows of a moving car. Pots of bright geraniums decorate the second-floor windows of residential hotels. Men wait patiently in long lines for meals served on paper plates; the discarded plates in the gutters always seem to have beans on them. The scents of urine and vomit waft occasionally through the air. Up close, some of the men biding their time on the streets are neatly dressed and seemingly educated; some have books tucked under their arms. Dillon is greeted with a smile as he walks by: “Hey John, my man.” “Hey, my favorite winos,” he kids in reply.

“When I first started working on Skid Row three years ago, I had never seen poor people in my life,” admitted Dillon, a sunny, well-scrubbed 24-year-old who is a former member of the Jesuit volunteer corps, an organization of lay people working in community service agencies. “Walking from Hill Street to Wall Street is like going into the valley of death at 6 o’clock in the morning. I used to put Old Spice on my upper lip because I couldn’t stand the smells. But when I really got to know the population, I found they were a nice group. I started informally walking people around the neighborhood, mostly people supporting the Chrysalis Center, to let them know what was going on.”

Jerry and Ginny Broms of Thousand Oaks joined the Saturday tour to gain a more complete understanding of the neighborhood and then spent the rest of the day doing volunteer work for the center. “When you read about these things it pulls at you,” said Ginny. “It’s easy to write a check every once in a while, but I wanted to contribute more. I’ve been blessed and I want to share a little.”

Diverse Group

Denise McMaster, a member of the Claretian lay missionaries volunteer program, took the tour to become familiar with the area--she’s looking for an agency where she can do full-time volunteer work. Also participating was Matt Sullivan of Santa Monica, a real estate investment broker and member of the Chrysalis board of directors.

It’s a crash course in the politics of poverty. Beginning at the Chrysalis Center on 5th Street, groups stop at many of the social-service organizations that serve the Skid Row population. Dillon gives his frank and outspoken opinion of each one, and seems to be an expert on the maze of multi-initialed government welfare programs that affect area residents. He also delights in myth busting. “Most people’s perception is that the Skid Row population is all older, and that they are winos or mentally ill,” he said. “But much of the population is under 40, they’re unemployed, and some crisis or series of crises has put them here temporarily.”

First stop on a recent Saturday was at the St. Vincent de Paul center on Winston Street, where hundreds of men crowd into a cavernous, gymnasium-type hall. A partition divides the room in half: On one side men play cards or watch television blaring at top volume in Spanish and English; on the other side, rows of cots are occupied by fully clothed men who seem to be sleeping, despite the din. On a bench next to the partition, men line up wearily for the next empty cot. Not inconsequentially, St. Vincent’s has the only public restroom in the Skid Row area.

In contrast, the Midnight Mission, which serves 1,500 meals three times a day--” good meals,” the reception desk clerk proudly states--is immaculate, quiet and orderly. A sign on the lobby door warns “No Weapons in the Building. Automatic 86!” The Downtown Women’s Center, a residential facility for elderly and mentally disturbed women, has a homey, tranquil atmosphere. Sunlight streams through the windows warming a pet cat curled on one of the bright, flowered sofas. In the open kitchen at the back of the main room center founder Jill Halverson prepares lunch, including home-baked muffins.

To avoid attracting too much attention, tour groups are limited to three or four people. “A lot of times people will come with this mentality of ‘Let’s visit the zoo’ or ‘Let’s look in the fish bowl,’ ” said Karen Arsenault, program director of Chrysalis Center. “I think there is some hostility on the part of the people who live here because of that, and it’s not totally unfounded. Besides, whites are conspicuous in a predominantly black area. Some of the people in the neighborhood resent it, but most are used to it.”

‘Know When to Run’

Dillon and Arsenault evidently walk the streets fearlessly, at least during daylight hours. “I’ve been doing this so long, I know when I need to run,” said Dillon with a laugh. After some initial trepidation, tour members, too, relaxed, although the potential for violence never seemed too far away. In a parking lot on the corner of Ceres Avenue and 5th Street, two plainclothes police officers searched a man’s belongings; in front of the Frontier Hotel, the group hurried away from a shouting and shoving match between two locals. Behind the Alexandria Hotel, according to Sullivan, “two policemen had frisked some type of a bad element and pushed him to the ground. A lot of guys were watching and they were really angry. I could feel the anger filtering onto me.”

Taking photos is definitely discouraged. A Times photographer was concentrating on photographing tour members when a man lying on the street behind them rushed at her, shouting at her to give him the film. Dillon pushed her out of the way and the irate photo subject hit Dillon, who landed face down in the gutter. Dillon was not seriously hurt and downplayed the incident.

The tour was not without its lighter side. As the group walked toward a corner notorious for drug dealing and violence, someone on the sidewalk shouted out good-naturedly, “Hey, you-all going the right way ?” In front of the American Indian Center, a man commented in mock disbelief, “ What ? White people here ?”

Most social-service organizations are known to neighborhood residents by nicknames: the Catholic Worker Kitchen is the “Hippie Kitchen,” Downtown Women’s Center is “Jill’s Place” (after founder Jill Halverson), St. Vincent’s is known as “Misery House,” and Emmanuel Baptist Rescue Mission as “Gravy Joe’s.” And, “for the record,” Dillon added at the end of the tour, “the favorite drink is still Thunderbird, also known as T-Bird and Chateau T.”

“I didn’t feel scared or anything, like I thought I might,” McMaster said. “It was good to see that there are so many types of resources here. I was surprised that there were so many hotels because I was under the impression that more people lived in the streets.”

Hotel Homeless

Commented Arsenault: “People get the notion that there are 30,000 people sleeping in the alleys around here, which is not the case, but we include those living in hotels as homeless, because they have no sense of rootedness or permanency. A place that you have to leave every three weeks is not a home.”

“At one time, I would have called these guys trolls or porch monkeys, but now I realize more about why they are here and I can show more compassion,” Sullivan said. “This is as much a spiritual depression as an economic depression. You can see how many spiritually deprived people there are in the world and how we as a group, the larger family, don’t take care of our own.”

One woman was so shaken by what she had seen on October’s tour that she was unable to express her reactions, Dillon said. “ ‘I can’t talk,’ ” Dillon reported her as saying. “ ‘I’m going to have a couple of margaritas and then go to bed.’ ”

Others, though, have had their eyes opened. “I have empathy for the people who live this way,” McMaster commented. “I don’t look down on them. Each one has a unique story to tell.” Said Ginny Broms after visiting the L.A. Men’s Place, a center for mentally ill men, “This really is an education, isn’t it?”

On the corner of Gladys Avenue and 6th Street, the group paused at a safe distance to observe a park that has become, in Dillon’s words, “a 24-hour drugstore.” Group members shifted uneasily on their feet; even from across the street the potential for violence was palpable. Yet within five minutes, two young men recognized Arsenault and approached her, eagerly inquiring about joining the job-hunting workshop sponsored by Chrysalis. Another, named Simon, shyly reported to her that he had had a job for almost two weeks.

The next Chrysalis Center-sponsored walking tour of Skid Row is scheduled for Dec. 6. Information: (213) 623-9394.