Borrowing Some Hope : Counseling Agency on Skid Row Opens a Library for the Homeless

At any other library, it wouldn’t be unusual for someone to check out a book about buying and selling a single-family home. But for Melvin Carr, whose home is now at a drug rehabilitation center on Downtown’s Skid Row, the opportunity to borrow that book allows him to dream of better days ahead.

“I want to get a home one day, but right now it’s interesting just to read about it,” the 42-year-old former bank clerk explained Thursday.

Carr borrowed that volume, along with others about auto repairs and economics, from Project Open Door, a drop-in counseling agency on Skid Row that offers visitors a 2,000-volume lending library and a quiet place to read. Formally dedicated Thursday, the storefront in the Crescent Hotel on East 5th Street is a literary and friendly haven from the chaos outside.

The books, magazines and newspapers maintain crucial connections beyond Skid Row, explained the Rev. William Monroe Campbell, Project Open Door’s coordinator. “Once you get out on the row, you can lose touch of what’s going on in other communities. So this,” he said, pointing to the bookshelves and periodical racks, “is part of the re-socialization process.”

Project Open Door was established by the Canaan Housing Corporation, the arm of the Second Baptist Church of Los Angeles that has helped rehabilitate Skid Row hotels, including the Crescent. The Los Angeles Public Library donated surplus books, tables and shelves.

Homeless people often used the Los Angeles Central Library in Downtown while it was housed temporarily on Spring Street during the rebuilding of its regular home after tragic fires. Officials say the Skid Row population has been less evident in public reading rooms since the Central Library returned last fall to its location between Grand Avenue and Flower Street on 5th Street. That library now may be too far away from Skid Row, or the homeless may feel uncomfortable in the upscale neighborhood of office towers, said Fontayne Holmes, the library system’s assistant director of branches.

Skid Row residents are like everyone else--they want a wide variety of books within easy access, said Holmes, who helped with the book donations. Among the stock at Project Open Door are Bibles, a biography of actor Laurence Olivier, hard-boiled mysteries by Dick Francis and the classic Harper Lee novel “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Holmes stressed that the mini-library inside the storefront was not intended to discourage the homeless from using the Central Library. “Absolutely not,” she added. “Our doors are open except if somebody is disturbing other people in an outward way.”

Just before the dedication ceremony began Thursday, a homeless woman came into Project Open Door and began waving around a large meat cleaver and shouting profanities. No one was hurt and a security guard knocked the cleaver from her hand. Police arrived at the scene but did not arrest the woman, who Rev. Campbell said was recently evicted from the hotel upstairs because of disturbances. She later demanded her weapon back, but Campbell gently told her: “I can’t do that.” The speeches and luncheon that followed were not disturbed.

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Books are often an introduction to Project Open Door’s other services, such as alcohol and drug recovery support groups, housing and employment referrals, clothing distribution and free use of telephones to contact family and friends. “We didn’t want simply to warehouse bodies, to put people in homes and leave them there. We wanted to go further and provide programs of outreach,” explained Anna Campbell, who is Canaan Housing’s executive director and the sister of Campbell.