Social Worker Puts Toilets on Skid Row--but Relief Is Brief

Los Angeles’ Skid Row was rocked again Friday by a tempest in a toilet bowl as a social worker defied City Hall by delivering portable outhouses to the area only to haul them away seven hours later under pressure from city officials.

“It’s very sad. . . . I’m extraordinarily disappointed,” said Alice Callaghan, director of the Las Familias del Pueblo service center. Callaghan had nine chemical toilets trucked to the Skid Row area, then yielded to pressure from Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and other officials and ordered the privies packed up and hauled away again.

The green chemical toilets had been placed on the sidewalks of downtown without requisite city permits.

For the short time that they stood along ravaged portions of 5th and 7th streets, the toilets drew plaudits from the city’s teeming homeless population while outraging inner-city business leaders, who had earlier voiced fears that the unsupervised structures would become havens for drug addicts and prostitutes.

Bradley, who earlier this week canceled $23,000 in city funding for a trial program that would have put 33 toilets on Skid Row, responded immediately to Friday’s surprise blitz by Callaghan.

The mayor’s office released a statement announcing that the city’s Public Works Department, which oversees streets and sidewalks, had been notified of the permit violation. Those officials, in turn, stood ready to call out city trucks to remove the structures by early next week if Callaghan failed to back down.

“You can’t just put something on the sidewalk and walk off,” said Pat Howard, director of the department’s Bureau of Street Maintenance. “It’s an obstruction of the public walkway.”

Callaghan’s nonprofit group planned to spend $3,600 of its own money to put the toilets in place for a one-month trial period. Although she was invited to apply for a permit through the five-member Board of Public Works, she seemed acutely aware that board members are Bradley appointees.

“No chance they will vote for it,” she said. Instead, she vowed to ask the City Council to take up the fight, still hopeful of putting the toilets back on the Row in time for Christmas.

“It’s clear to me the mayor has no intention of providing toilets on Skid Row,” Callaghan said. “He is removing toilets that cost the city nothing--toilets that (were) sitting where there’s nothing other than a doorway to use as a urinal.”

In his statement, Bradley said he plans to negotiate with existing Skid Row service agencies to expand their hours so that available toilets are accessible more often. In addition, he said, appropriate city departments will convene to look for a permanent solution to the toilet problem.

Several transients, who said the shortage of toilets robs them of their dignity and increases health risks in living on the streets, seemed happy--albeit briefly--as the structures were unloaded from trucks Friday morning on dollies.

“You have a lot of people here (urinating) in doorways . . . and it gives homeless people a very bad (image),” said Lester, 41, a homeless man in a wheelchair who became one of the first--and last--to use one of the outhouses.

“(It’s) important,” he said, perhaps sensing the turmoil that was to come. “I hope it lasts a long time.”