Greeting the Holiday Season Among ‘Cardboard Condos’

It was beginning to look a lot like Christmas amid the hundreds of “cardboard condos” littering the sidewalks and shadowy parking lots of downtown Los Angeles.

As toy wholesalers along Skid Row frantically loaded trucks with last-minute supplies for Southern California Santas, the men and women living in discarded toy and appliance boxes did what they could this week to get into the holiday spirit.

“We’re going to celebrate Christmas just like everyone else,” said 39-year-old David, who lives on Towne Avenue in a ’74 Chevy station wagon with cardboard over the windows. “We’re family. We’re closer here than anyone could be in any neighborhood. We’ll exchange what we can with each other.”

Across the sidewalk from David’s car, a woman named Marie and her boyfriend had placed a small poinsettia beside the refrigerator box in which they live.

Their home is covered with blue packing insulation and a small window affords a view of the street. Flowered curtains over the doorway conceal a homey interior. The foot of the carton contains their clothes and belongings, a clean quilt and neatly folded blankets line the floor, and a striped necktie hangs from a loop of plastic on the wall.

A couple of days earlier, “some nice people” dropped off a crate of fresh fruit and vegetables, and a sweet scent filled the night air as a pot of yams boiled over a small fire.

“The only difference between the people here and the people in the suburbs is that they have four walls and a roof,” David said. “The sky is our roof.”

For most of his life, David worked as a bus driver. When he lost that job, he went to school and learned to repair computers, but he hasn’t been able to find work, he said.

Now he retrieves frozen fish discarded by a local seafood company, cooks it on a sidewalk fire, and peddles it at $1 a portion.

“I want to go back to school and get a degree in electronics. He wants to go to school to learn VCR repairs,” David said, nodding at Marie’s boyfriend. “We still have dreams and hopes. Most of the people here are just people who’ve fallen into bad circumstances . . .

“In a country as rich as this country, for so few to have so much, and so many to have so little, it’s not fair . . .” David said. “Where’d all the money from Hands Across America go? It’s sure not being spent here.”

He Doesn’t Dwell on It

But David doesn’t dwell on the injustice of his fate. “I have food, shelter and clothing. I just thank God I’ll wake up to see another Christmas. It won’t be lonely for me.”

Down the street toward the corner of Towne and 5th, in the glow of the red neon S’s of the Fred Jordan Mission sign, 37-year-old Rachel Verdugo lives in a quilt-covered box in a long row of similar domains.

A large Christmas tree someone gave her leans against a wall, adorned with a silver garland, a handful of plastic candy canes and a religious tract, reading: “What Do You Want From Life?”

Verdugo didn’t want to talk much about how she lost her job “in computers,” but she did volunteer that her alcoholism has caused problems. Since she’s been living on the street, she’s been raped and beaten, she said.

Echoing a sentiment heard often on Skid Row, though, she said she prefers her box to the sort of hotel she can get with an $8-a-day county housing voucher or the $240 monthly check County General Relief provides.

“I’d rather live here. I don’t have roaches. I don’t have rats. Maybe a few fleas, but that’s no biggie,” she said.

A few feet from Verdugo, a 34-year-old man named James gestured broadly at a couple of old sofa cushions and a few scraps of cardboard. “You’ll have to forgive me,” he said. “I haven’t made my bed yet.”

James said he’s been on the street for 33 months. Like many of his neighbors, he gets sketchy about the details of how he became homeless. But he’s convincing when he says: “You’re looking at a guy who had $10,000 in the bank. I know what it’s like to have money.”

James now earns $20 a day delivering advertisements door to door.

How It Used to Be

“When I had money, I bought my mother central heating for her house and poured a cement patio in her backyard. I still save a little money and send her a present every year . . . But you think I’m going to tell her I’m living down here now?”

“Excuse me, please,” a man interrupted, brushing by on the sidewalk with two large cartons printed with the manufacturer’s label: DREAM HOUSE.

James laughed.

He sipped from a cup of soup a Salvation Army truck had passed out, and recalled a Christmas past.

“I was 7 or 8, and my father really outdid himself.” James remembers waking up in the family’s comfortable home in Sacramento and finding a pile of presents under the tree. He recalls unwrapping a new truck, and then discovering the bicycle.

“It was my first bike,” he said. “It had those long, gooseneck handlebars and chrome forks. My dad put each of the grips on for me . . . It was the nicest bicycle on the block.”

This Christmas, James said he’d eat at a downtown rescue mission, then “Maybe, I’ll go see an Eddie Murphy movie.”

A few blocks away in Gladys Park, Peter, 27, was trying to panhandle $1.75 for a movie--any movie. What he really wanted was to spend the night in a downtown theater instead of his “cubbyhole” in one of the park’s rambling cardboard and plastic structures.

His plan for Christmas, he said, is “to stay alive.”

“The last thing I want to do is die, and the people here will kill you quick, fast, and in a hurry.”

Around him, a hundred or so people milled about in the glow of the park’s floodlights and bonfires, creating a scene Dante might have envisioned. A scraggly Christmas tree someone had set atop the “two-story” cardboard structure on the corner added a nice touch.

‘The Real Nitty Gritty’

On the sidewalk, a mother sat beside a blazing trashcan, playing with a grinning 6-month-old and poking at a slab of fish and three doughnuts cooking on a grill.

“This is life, this is the real nitty gritty,” she said.

Behind her a young man splintered wooden pallets into firewood with a piece of iron. “Quiet,” she barked at an old guy in a wool cap who was bellowing angry, incoherent remarks about the Watts riots.

‘Got a gift for you. Merry Christmas,” someone said, breezing through the park handing out plastic rain parkas. One car stopped on the dark street and dropped off a bag of old clothes. The others that stopped were there to buy cocaine, one resident of the park alleged.

Meanwhile, at 4th and Los Angeles streets, some of the 200 or so people who live in boxes outside the Midnight Mission were bedding down for the night.

According to people who work with the homeless, despite the constant crowding in shelters and rescue missions, many if not most of the people who live outdoors in Los Angeles could find funding and indoor housing if they chose to. But for various reasons, ranging from substance abuse and insanity to pride and a desire to remain independent, hundreds or thousands live on the streets.

“I’ve stayed in the hotels, but they’re pretty raunchy--worse than the streets,” said a 26-year-old named Joe as he sat on the busy corner, wrapped in a blanket emblazoned with the words: “Jesus Loves Me.”

With his nylon parka and ski cap, Joe would have looked right in place in a lift line at Mammoth. But he said he just arrived in Los Angeles from the Midwest.

“I came from a town of 100,000 people. It’s probably lost 20,000 people in the past five years. There’s just no work. The farm economy’s shot and everyone’s running out.”

So far, though, he hasn’t found a job in Los Angeles either.

A few boxes up the row, Aaron Palmer, 27, poked his head out of his home.

“You got a bad house there man,” a passer-by said.

“This is a double condo,” said Debbie, the girlfriend with whom Aaron lives.

Parade of Shopping Carts

A few feet from where they lay, trucks and buses passed on the dirty street, air brakes hissing like serpents. All night long, men and women with bedrolls or shopping carts passed on the sidewalk. Across the street in a parking lot, men clustered around big bonfires, their shadows dancing on graffiti-covered brick walls.

“Earlier today, a guy came by and said, ‘Get out of my way. I’m a taxpayer.’ ” Aaron recalled. “I told him, ‘Hey, I used to be a taxpayer.’ I wished him a Merry Christmas. I won’t say what he did back . . . “

A moment later, Aaron smiled at Debbie. “We’re going to have our own condo someday,” he said. “A real condo. We’re going to make it.”

“Just think, when Jesus Christ was born, they were living in straw huts and stables,” Debbie said. “They didn’t have no homes, either.”

People sleep all the way down the block on 4th Street and half way up Los Angeles.

The far end of the cardboard neighborhood is called “Tiny’s pit.” That’s what Tiny calls it, anyway, and who’s going to argue?

At 6 feet 3 and 300 pounds, 36-year-old Tiny Huston is the unofficial guardian of the block’s northern extreme.

Tiny moved into the Hotpoint refrigerator box he inhabits about three months ago. “Before that, I was in fat city,” he said.

The ex-Marine had a nice apartment in Glendale and two good jobs. Then the authorities busted the telemarketing company he worked for, and he ran into trouble at the warehouse where he was employed.

“They hired a Japanese consultant, and I don’t get along well with Orientals,” Tiny said. “The guy started ragging on me, and I popped him.”

The fact that Tiny once did six years in the federal penitentiary for bank robbery hasn’t made finding another job any easier, he said.

Now he earns $100 a month watching the blue Rolls-Royce the manager of a rock band parks in front of the boxes, Tiny said, as he shredded newspaper to make a nest for a puppy someone dropped off.

At his feet, Kristin Kearns, 18 years old and 4 1/2 months pregnant, lay in the box she shares with her boyfriend, smoking a cigarette and cuddling the little German shepard, whose name is Cocaine.

“We’re only here till we get enough money for an apartment,” she said, looking out from the cardboard door flap. “It may not be a very good Christmas, but at least we’ll be with people we know.”

Generous Mystery Man

If nothing else, Christmas on Skid Row means presents. Earlier that day, a mystery man passed out $10 bills. Some organization--LAPD according to one transient--gave away sleeping bags; and toward midnight, a car drove up the street distributing tins of Danish butter cookies.

Hearing of the giveaway, people jumped up and ran into the street, swarming around the car. The panicked do-gooder sped away.

Late into the night the bustle continued. A man pushed a shopping cart containing a large, garishly decorated Christmas tree up the sidewalk. Now and then shouting matches and scuffles erupted down the street.

In the midst of it all, though, people slept, sheltered from the chaos in an architecturally diverse array of cartons.

“This is the Rolls-Royce of boxes,” Tiny said, pointing to one that had contained a 48-inch Westinghouse refrigerator.

But function is more important than form in cardboard condo design, Tiny stressed.

The boxes keep out the cold and the wind, he said. “They also make it difficult for anyone to knife you, because they don’t know exactly where you are inside. And they protect you when people drive by and throw things.”

Tiny counts rebar, cinderblock, and tires among the items thrown from passing cars since he’s lived on the street.

Sitting with a few friends on some milk crates, Tiny passed around a tin of cookies.

With the “wandering lunatics and the hardcore coke fiends and the gang members waiting to jackroll bums,” life on the streets is never boring, he said. But he sees it take a toll. “After someone’s been bounced around in this pinball machine for a while they either toughen up or they break into little pieces,” he said.

He finds it amusing, though, that so many people who haven’t been there seem so smug about what’s happening on the streets.

Pointing to the high-rent high-rises and the skyful of bank logos towering in the skyline nearby, he said: “I’ve seen it. You’d be surprised. People can move from up there in the lights down here to the streets in no time at all.”