On Skid Row, A Glut of Good Will : Downtown Missions Welcome Yearly Outpouring of Gifts, but Some Feel Efforts Might Be Better Directed

Half-eaten hunks of pumpkin pie lay in the gutter beside “Night Time Express” bottles; Styrofoam plates caked with stuffing and cranberries littered the sidewalks; pigeons pecked at heaps of discarded turkey bones.

It was the day after Thanksgiving and the signs were everywhere--America’s cornucopia had spilled some of its abundance on Skid Row.

“I was stuffed,” said Bruce Young, a 32-year-old who lives in one of the low-rent hotels fronting 5th Street.

Moving from the annual turkey-with-all-the-trimming’s feed outside the Fred Jordan Mission to the spread at the Salvation Army’s Harbor Light Alcoholic Rehabilitation Center for Men, Young had wolfed down seven free Thanksgiving dinners.

“There were others going on too, but I was trying to digest,” he explained with a pained grin.

Like wise men going to Bethlehem, churches, charities and individuals come to Los Angeles’ Skid Row each holiday season, laden with food and gifts.

Celebrities Help Serve

This year actors Jeff Bridges, Rosey Grier, Jo Anne Worley, Earl Holliman, Katherine Helmond and Rose Marie, and the Los Angeles Kings hockey team were a few of the celebrities who helped serve Thanksgiving dinners at various Skid Row missions.

But as some of the people who work on Skid Row all year round see it, there’s little wisdom behind the orgy of meals and presents that abruptly appears in this seedy downtown area on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

It’s not that Southern California’s underclass doesn’t need help, they say, but rather that the outpouring of money and energy might better be spent in other ways, at other times, and in places other than Skid Row.

“Blind giving can cause crises,” explained John Dillon, director of the Chrysalis Center, a Skid Row self-help organization.

Last Christmas season, for instance, a church group from the Westside loaded up a truck with the canned goods they’d collected, then drove to Skid Row, Dillon recalled.

They found the street corners crowded with eager recipients, and the church volunteers “got so excited, they cared so much, they were literally pelting these people with canned goods. . . . It was like getting hit with dollar bills, ‘cause (the residents) could turn around and sell the cans,” Dillon said.

By the time the truck worked its way down 5th Street, “a riot” had broken out. “We had to call the police to stop them,” he said. “The ugliness of poverty came out.”

Every holiday season, Clancy Imislund, director of the Midnight Mission on Los Angeles Street sees “well-intentioned people” pull up and pop open trunks filled with blankets or sweaters or food to give away. What they don’t know is that “on the street, the strongest predators will get them, use what they need and sell the rest,” Imislund said.

“Guys come down and pass out $20 bills,” said Jill Halverson of the Downtown Women’s Center. “As a result there are fights, altercations. The whole thing is so undignified. So intrusive. Whose needs are these people serving--their own or those of the poor? Those needs sometimes are in conflict.”

Veterans of Skid Row charities go to great lengths to make sure they’re not misunderstood: Without good-hearted people donating time and money the important work being done would stop. But many of them feel that people need to reexamine their motives for holiday giving as well as their methods.

“The toy thing is starting now,” said Alice Callaghan, the director of Las Familias, a community center for families in the downtown area.

Each year, the center is visited by people such as the man who arrived a couple of years ago with a carload of stuffed animals. The problem was that he wanted to “come in and play Santa Claus--hand the toys to the children. He was more into the sentimentality of Christmas than the reality,” Callaghan said. “He needed to see the gratitude on the children’s faces. . . . We practically had to fight him off. He got really angry.”

Other donors want to deliver the toys to the children’s homes, and each year a few people will call and ask if they can take kids home with them for the holidays, she said. “Talk about insensitivity!”

Although such gestures are well-intended, Callaghan sees in them a threat to Las Familias’ mission of helping poor families survive.

Undermining the Family

“Christmas is a jeopardy time for families,” she said. And when poor children begin to associate Christmas not with their own home--however humble--but rather with a charity or a center somewhere, family cohesiveness is undermined, she believes.

“Christmas becomes something where you try to get in a line, get a ticket stamped. What possible gain can there be from that?”

So Las Familias asks donors to give inexpensive toys, which poor parents can then “win” in bingo games. “They wrap it, they give it,” she said.

“It’s so hard for us to imagine that a child can have a decent Christmas and not have the newest computer game,” Callaghan said. But the loss to the family that comes with seeing parents’ roles as providers supplanted “is enormous. The shame is enormous.”

Everyone seems to agree that the poor and homeless are better served when donations are channeled through established charitable organizations. There’s little agreement, though, on which organizations utilize contributions most effectively.

Various Skid Row charities report that they receive from 30% to 90% of their total contributions during November and December. Holiday dinners and gift giveaways have become a tradition for many charities, some of which close down streets for the meals and bring in entertainment industry and celebrity food servers. Many aspiring volunteers with a lower recognition factor are turned away.

Feedings for the Media

Some people whose organizations provide more modest holiday programs see these mass feedings as media extravaganzas.

“When you make such a big deal out of one or two or three meals a year, it’s basically just selling poverty,” said Dillon, of the Chrysalis Center.

Each year several Skid Row organizations announce that they’ve served Thanksgiving dinners to 3,000 or 5,000 people, points out Callaghan. “What they don’t say is that they may each have fed the same 3,000 or 5,000 people. . . . Last year I saw a guy eating a meal off a Styrofoam plate while he was standing in line for another meal.”

Callaghan and others say that it’s only natural for someone who usually doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from to become a bit gluttonous when a rare opportunity to eat well arises.

What she objects to is the “one-ups-manship” of the missions’ scrambling for funds, and she sees it as “tragic,” that so many poor people who live in other parts of the city arrive on Skid Row for the well-publicized holiday meals. She’s also critical of the “unthoughtful, unaware giving” of the churches from outside the area that arrive downtown each year to distribute free food.

“One group came from 43rd and Central,” she said. “You can’t drive from 43rd and Central and not see poverty. We might not have so many people on Skid Row if we took care of the people in our own neighborhoods. . . .

“What is it about people that makes them not see the poverty in front of them?” Callaghan wondered aloud. The answer, in her mind, is that poverty in one’s own neighborhood is more threatening than the almost-abstract poverty Skid Row has come to symbolize.

Dillon has a similar view. And the large-scale volunteerism that seems to be in vogue reinforces naive images of poverty, he said.

“If you’re a volunteer from the suburbs and you see poverty as a mass, not as a person, you leave feeling overwhelmed,” he said.

To help outsiders see what it really means to be poor, organizations such as the Downtown Women’s Center invite volunteers in to share more fully in their holiday celebrations. “Women’s groups come in and help us decorate the trees. We sing together and eat together,” said Halverson.

The women at the center usually hostess the open house. “They do the cleaning, baking and decorating, so it’s their chance to give during the holidays,” Halverson said.

Truth in an Old Adage

Watching the behavior of folks from mainstream society, Halverson and others have discovered the truth in the old adage about giving and receiving. Why deprive the poor of the more fulfilling of the two actions? she asks.

“Holiday emotions are complicated,” Callaghan said. “Our needs are wrapped up with others’ needs. . . . There’s something about helping the poor on Skid Row that helps people assuage consciences.”

And what’s wrong with that? ask some of the people whose charities receive the most outside help during the holidays.

“I agree that maybe there’s a glut” of giving during the holidays, said Willie Jordan, president of the Fred Jordan Mission, which closed off 5th Street and served 1 1/2-pound turkey drumsticks to 6,020 people on Thanksgiving. “But don’t criticize it. Say ‘Right on! Let’s (keep volunteering and giving) in January, February and March.’

“When people came to our mission and other missions (on Thanksgiving) they were giving themselves. . . . They were giving their treasure. They will remember. Once they’ve put a part of themselves into the homeless, they’ll want to help on an ongoing basis,” she said.

Efforts Appreciated

And the people of Skid Row do appreciate their efforts.

“It was a terrific holiday,” said Rochelle Davis, 30, who lives in her car near the La Jolla Hotel. “It was beautiful for me. Everyone was nice. No violence . . . I ate four times. I hope Christmas will be as nice.”

Oasis Aquila, 39, was one of about 70 people the Catholic Workers organization invited to its community home in East Los Angeles for Thanksgiving.

The next day, as he sat across from the Worker’s Skid Row “Hippie Kitchen,” waiting for the Hare Krishnas to deliver their regular Friday afternoon lunch, he said that going away for the day was “much better,” than the massive feed-ins he has attended on other Thanksgivings.

“People weren’t squabbling. You felt more like it’s a holiday. . . . It was nice. There were two TVs so we could watch all the football games. . . . It felt exactly like when I was a teen-ager back home in Tulsa,” he said.

Before they sat down to a dinner of turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, pie and apple cider, everyone was given time to say their own grace, Aquila said.

“I always say the same one I’ve been saying since elementary school,” he added. “It’s the only one I know: ‘Thank you for the world so sweet; thank you for the food we eat; thank you for the birds that sing; thank you God for everything.’ ”