Skid Row Cultural Center Facing Closure
Supporters of Another Planet, a Skid Row cultural center run by and for the homeless that is facing closure, launched a campaign Friday to save the operation.
The center, a converted gas station at the corner of Wall and Boyd streets that opened last year, is an eccentrically decorated gathering place and the site of poetry readings, video screenings, chess games, jam sessions and other activities. It also provides homeless people with storage for belongings and two portable toilets. It is drug and alcohol free, organizers say.
Businessman Eddie Tyler had been sub-leasing the site on a monthly basis to Clyde Casey, who runs the center and lives there. Tyler told Casey last month that Casey must be out by June 27.
Tyler owns a wholesale Christmas card distributorship across a narrow alley from Another Planet. He said Friday that he served the eviction notices chiefly because he wants to use the entire lot on which the center stands for parking. Tyler now leases out about 30 parking spots on the lot.
“This area is very limited in parking and we’ve lost two major nearby parking lots to building construction recently and we need the rest of that lot (for parking),” said Tyler, who plans to hire an additional 30 employees next month.
In addition however, the center attracts a “bad-looking element” to the area and has hurt business, Tyler said. Other business people have called him to complain, he added.
Objects collected at Another Planet (“I call it trash, they call it art,” Tyler said) clutter some of the parking spaces Tyler rents on the lot, making parking difficult and sometimes impossible, he said. There have been auto break-ins and theft, and the increased influx of homeless people has caused sanitary problems, he said.
“The place stinks to high heaven,” Tyler said. “I’ve been on this corner for 40 years running a fine business and it’s just grown into an unbearable situation.”
Tyler has repeatedly asked Casey to improve the situation and asked him to buy liability insurance, but always to no avail, he said.
Casey, who has been out of town for about a month, said in a phone interview that he “will wait and see” what happens when he returns Monday before commenting on what he intends to do about the eviction.
The Los Angeles Police Department’s Central Division had no knowledge of recent complaints about Another Planet.
Meanwhile, Barbara Frost, an organizer of the homeless who also has been living at Another Planet, launched a campaign to save the site Friday. She sees the place as the start of a major cultural center for the Skid Row area, one that fills a critical need, artistically and socially.
Robin Wartell, a self-described “ex-addict,” agreed. He said Another Planet helped him kick drugs. “This is the only drug- and alcohol-free place in the area. I stopped off here and it turned my head around.”
Frost, who said she plans to legally fight the eviction, has drafted a petition for the cause and is asking for donations. She denied Tyler’s charges that the center caused parking problems and said that it reduced crime, not heightened it. Her ultimate goal is to buy the property.
“I think we could buy this corner,” she said, as about 15 homeless people were busy around her, some playing the piano, others playing chess. In nearby alley ways littered with trash, others loitered about listlessly. “The (homeless) situation is so serious that nothing but extraordinary actions will turn it around.”
Scott Kellman, owner of the defunct Wallenboyd Theater across the street from Another Planet, had been collecting donations from private individuals to pay Casey’s rent of $350 a month. It would be “terribly discouraging” to see the center closed, he said. “It is one of the finest examples of self-determination of the homeless people.”
