A New Lease on Life : Hotel Renovation on Skid Row Gives Dwellers Hope
Last December, Joanne and Richard Calabrese’s old truck broke down one final time, taking away their sole means of support. Tree-trimmers by trade, the middle-aged Monrovia couple lost their apartment and landed in a kind of hell worse than any they’d ever dreamed of: a doorstep on Skid Row, Christmas Eve.
Days later, when they moved to a nearby flophouse, Joanne remembers not being able to walk to the bathroom for fear of the prostitutes and the ominous darkness of a long, filthy hallway. Richard remembers the gut-wrenching helplessness.
On Tuesday, a throng of business and government leaders formally unveiled the Pershing Hotel, a newly renovated $7-million former flophouse on Skid Row’s infamous corner at 5th and Main streets known as “The Pit.”
The Calabreses, chosen as tenants for the airy, $240-a-month studio-style rooms, stood grinning and shaking hands--a reminder that broken lives can be mended through something as simple as decent housing.
“Our beautiful room, the wonderful place they have made for us here on Skid Row, has given us the will to move on,” said Joanne.
Said Richard, “We had really been knocked out of the box. But now we know we will get ourselves another truck, somehow.”
A project of the nonprofit Church & Temple Corp. and the Skid Row Housing Trust, the 70-room Pershing Hotel is the second such face lift undertaken by a coalition made up of a Pasadena church, a Bel-Air Jewish temple and a group of homeless advocates who believe Skid Row can be retaken--flophouse by flophouse.
George F. Regas, rector of All Saints Episcopal Church of Pasadena, which is the long-term manager of the project, told about 250 private and public leaders at the hotel Tuesday that there is a growing church-based effort to revive Skid Row.
He said the Pershing Hotel project, done in partnership with the Leo Baeck Temple of Bel-Air, “comes out of the Jewish-Christian tradition that says, at its heart, that every single being is of infinite worth.”
On the outside, the three-story, 100-year-old structure is no showplace. But word has spread on Skid Row that it is something to behold within--pale cream and pastel walls, vaulted ceilings and skylights, tiny library, sparkling community kitchen, and sleek leather lounge-room chairs.
As clutches of business leaders milled around the hotel, a half-dozen tattered men approached from nearby pawn shops and adult video stores and asked if there were any rooms available?
But the Pershing--like the coalition’s first effort, the attractive 30-room Genesis Hotel just up Main Street--is full with its 80 tenants and has a waiting list. The rooms are offered on a month-to-month basis with no time limit attached to tenancy.
The project was backed by $2.5 million from corporate investors, including Kaufman & Broad, the state’s largest home construction firm; Bank of America; Chevron; KTLA-TV, and others, who pledged money to the nonprofit California Equity Fund, the project’s limited partner.
The firms will receive federal tax credits for investing in affordable housing. Major public financing came from the Community Redevelopment Agency and the state.
A total of 11 hotels are being purchased or built by the Skid Row Housing Trust.
Rev. Alice Callaghan, the trust’s founder, said Tuesday that churches and temples from throughout Los Angeles have asked her about the pioneering efforts by the Pasadena church and Bel-Air temple.
One of them, the Second Baptist Church in South-Central Los Angeles, has signed on as a partner and long-term manager of two Skid Row hotels.
If financial backing continues to pour in , such efforts could lead to the turnaround of virtually all of the 65 single-room hotels that clutter Skid Row and house about 8,000 people, Callaghan said.
For the Calabreses and their many new neighbors at the Pershing Hotel, though, the big picture is not as pressing as simple issues like finding work and opening a savings account.
Tonelle Rodrique, 32, a single father living at the Pershing, said he “fell apart and ended up on the streets” when his wife died in 1985, soon after giving birth to their son. His new studio room, complete with refrigerator, modern furnishings and mini-blinds, “is bringing me back up to where I used to be. I fell down into drugs and things, you know how the story goes.”
A floor above Rodrique, Elizabeth Alexander, 24, is following a different dream.
She and her husband, both members of the city’s Homeless Writer’s Coalition, were living under the 7th Street bridge last year, praying for an end to police raids that forced them to grab their belongings and hide, she said.
“I have found my home” in the Pershing Hotel, Alexander said. “Instead of worrying about the police, we are working on Skid Row poetry readings and we’re raising funds for a cultural center. To have this whole change of life, we are truly thankful.”
