Uncertainty, Crack Add to Skid Row Woes

These are uncertain times for Los Angeles’ Skid Row, and for the estimated 1,000 broken-down people who sleep on its sidewalks.

Politicians, city planners and merchants are haggling over whether the Union Rescue Mission should be moved five blocks into the heart of Skid Row, a move that would corral the homeless in an ever-tightening sphere and, critics maintain, bring even more tension to an already volatile environment.

The shortage of housing and shelter remains acute, despite efforts under way to renovate the shoddy, rat-infested hotels that provide an alternative to sleeping on the sidewalks.

Responding to Appeal

Led by E. & J. Gallo, makers of Night Train and Thunderbird brands, wineries have begun to respond to an appeal by Los Angeles County supervisors not to sell cheap, high-alcohol street wines on Skid Row. The announcements have generated some raspy consumer grumbling, but many people believe cheap wine no longer is the most dangerous substance on the street.

Crack cocaine has arrived, altering the demographics of the denizens of the 50-square-block area of downtown designated as Skid Row. A population of mostly alcoholic white males has given way to a disconnected group of younger black men, and more and more women. With crack, it has become an angrier, more violent place.

Those who try to help, with food or job programs and shelter services, share a growing sense that whatever they do is not enough, that things have gotten out of hand.

“It’s chaos,” said Jeff Dietrich, an official of Catholic Worker, which feeds the homeless.

Still, some things on “The Row” remain the same: The smell of urine, the shards of broken glass, the litter lining sidewalks and streets at day’s end; the incoherent ramblings, the glassy-eyed stares and, every morning, “the wake-up call.”

The wake-up call, as street people call it, shakes The Row to life shortly after dawn every day, without fail. Los Angeles Police Department officers cruise the streets, rousing anyone asleep on the sidewalks, telling them to move along.

The police have been doing this for more than two years on orders from City Hall. The objective is to prevent the homeless from re-creating the sidewalk encampments that appeared on Skid Row in 1987. The shelter problem has not improved, so the police action serves only to make the homeless somewhat less visible.

“No one is able or willing to provide enough shelter,” Police Capt. Gregory R. Berg, commanding officer of the Central Patrol Division, said of the wake-up call. “It’s not a law enforcement problem. It’s part of a much larger problem. Until someone solves it, we’re stuck.”

As always, many transients spend most of their day standing in line for meals or shelter beds. The longest ones form outside the Midnight and Los Angeles missions on Los Angeles Street, the Union Rescue Mission on Main, or at “Gravy Joe’s,” the street name for the Emanuel Baptist Mission, on 5th Street.

There is a sense of turf within the confines of Skid Row. Old people shoot craps at the corner of 6th and Stanford Streets. Young men and women cluster on Crocker Street, between 5th and 6th, a hangout for crack cocaine users and dealers.

A Bright Spot

One of the few bright developments on Skid Row is the blossoming of a small artists’ colony. A wall of poetry can be found on 5th Street, and a surrealistic mural has been painted on the side of a building a block away.

The wall is the province of Arthur Anderson, a self-taught poet who with brightly colored paints has created verses that address topics such as AIDS and black heritage.

“I learned to write in jail; I’m not educated,” he said proudly one morning as he sat in front of his artwork, straddling a yellow suitcase containing all of his belongings.

Anderson’s poetry wall is not far from the proposed new home of the Union Rescue Mission, a relocation that in Skid Row’s universe could carry a powerful impact.

Half a dozen programs for the homeless already serving thousands of people every day are within a two-block radius of the mission’s target site.

The Los Angeles Mission is also building a large shelter in this area, at 5th and Wall Streets. It will open next year and house 700 people. The Union Rescue Mission, which now shelters 800, hopes to expand at the new site.

“How much can a small area support?” asked Maxene Johnston, president of Weingart Center, the city’s largest homeless social service provider, serving 2,000 a day at 6th and San Pedro streets. “When you concentrate disadvantaged, what kind of tensions are we building into the community?”

“It’s crazy to put it there,” said Alice Callaghan, who heads Las Familias del Pueblo, a service for families with children on Skid Row, “It’s a planner’s nightmare.”

Redevelopment officials say the Union Rescue Mission’s current location at 2nd and Main streets, at the edge of Skid Row, threatens efforts to “upgrade” the downtown corridor between City Hall and the Ronald Reagan State Office Building under construction at 3rd and Main streets.

But businessmen near the mission’s proposed new location, particularly toy importers and fish-processing concerns that have located there in the last few years, say the move threatens their attempts to create a stable community.

“Skid Row can only exist as long as the land isn’t useful for anything else,” Dietrich said. Now that the land is more and more economically viable, shelter expert Gene Boutilier added, “Skid Row is threatened as I see it.”

The Los Angeles City Council is scheduled to decide next week whether to approve a $6.5-million payment by the Community Redevelopment Agency to finance the Union Rescue Mission’s move.

Last August, the council voted to extend for five years a moratorium on demolitions of single-room-occupancy hotels, known as SROs, which Callaghan and other advocates believe was a positive gesture.

The 65 hotels on Skid Row represent the city’s cheapest housing, costing $240 to $350 a month for small rooms with shared bathrooms. If Union Rescue is paid to leave Main Street, Callaghan worries that it could attract more upscale development on the rest of Main, and jeopardize the largest concentration of these cheap hotels.

“One-third of the housing on Skid Row is on Main Street,” she said.

The effect of the decision last month by Gallo and other wine makers to quit distributing cheap street wines does not appear to have reached Skid Row yet. The wines still can be found stocked on the shelves of Skid Row liquor stores and stuffed into the paper bags clutched by street people.

“I think it is a mistake for them to pull out; there’s a lot of business down here,” said Steve Henzell, a liquor distributor who was interviewed as he unloaded a shipment of beer and soft drinks at Jack’s Market on 5th Street.

Jack Simone, owner of the market, also said the fortified wine ban was a mistake--but offered a different reason. “All this publicity and hullabaloo,” he complained, “when the time and energy should be concentrated on crack, not alcohol.”

Tommy Wilton, a resident of Skid Row for 30 years, stood outside Jack’s, holding a bottle of Thunderbird. He spoke of how crack, a cheap, potent form of cocaine, had changed the neighborhood.

“I don’t like it anymore,” he said. “It’s a new ball game. You got kids, 18, 19--they changed things around. More robbery, more stealing.”

He now worries about making it through the day in one piece.

Actually, major crimes are up only about 2% on Skid Row, said Police Capt. Berg, contrasted with 20% in some nearby police divisions. But, he added: “There’s probably an amount of unreported assaults of street persons by street persons.”

John Dillon, 27-year-old founder of Chrysalis Center, an employment and housing group, described the violence: “People who are mellow one minute go ‘boom!’ and it doesn’t matter if they know you or they’re a friend. It’s spooky.”

Walking to his office one day, he said, he saw “two guys were cracking each others heads with 2-by-4s. People drove on by, walked by--nobody stopped. It’s so common.”

Anger never seems far from the surface. A dwarf nicknamed “Little Bit,” for example, said she lives “on the street,” but wouldn’t say more unless she was paid. Refused money, she began screaming in fury.

On another street corner, a man erupted at a woman standing behind him in line for free soup from a Korean woman, who doles out food every day from her car.

“Don’t scratch your head all over people,” the man yelled. “You could have the decency to step back.”

At 5th and San Julian streets in a grass-lined, fenced park where street people gather, groups of men played dominoes, or a card game called spades. It is better to pass the day here, one man said, because, “if you congregate outside the hotels, they (hotel staffers) come and spray water on you.”

Tom Mayo, who operates a People in Progress program that picks up alcoholics from Skid Row streets each month and drives them to treatment or detoxification programs, said there is a different generation on the streets now, and it includes more women.

He blames crack, as does his wife, Mandira, who manages a walk-in center for women on 5th Street. They describe cocaine as a quicker route to Skid Row than alcohol.

“You go through your friends, resources and money (on cocaine) so much more quickly,” she said, “that you hit bottom faster. And bottom to a lot of people is Skid Row.”

The Mayos, like many others, point out that there are no drug treatment programs on Skid Row, and only a few programs for women.

So the women look dirtier and more ill-kempt than the men. One barefoot woman, with clothes hanging off her body and red sores on her arms, walked around scratching at herself.

“I been to two missions today,” she said, “but they won’t let me in to wash.”

Charles Davis, 43, a worker for the Homeless Outreach Program, which was started last year by formerly homeless people, walked through the park at 5th and San Julian one day and paused next to Cassandra Campbell. She was lying on a blanket on the grass. Another woman slept nearby, using a bag filled with crushed aluminum cans as a pillow.

Davis began asking Campbell about her life.

She was living on the streets, she said. “You know those SRO hotels? You can’t even get into ‘em.” Just talking about her existence made her angry, and soon she began to shout:

“I don’t come from the filth out here!”

“You’re getting angry,” Davis said softly.

“I am angry,” she said, “I’m angry about everything. You know how it builds up.”

Davis, who has been there, just nodded.

It’s never pretty, but the ugliest time on Skid Row is after dark. Then, the paper sacks that once held the bottles of booze litter the sidewalks and blow across the empty streets. Small groups of men with no evident agenda convene on the street corners and lurk in the alleyways.

The missions are full, their doors closed. Those who didn’t make it inside huddle near the entrances in hopes that the mission doors might offer a measure of safety. They settle down on blankets or hole up in “cardboard condominiums,” seeking a few hours of peace before the next wake-up call.