A New Home for the City’s Homeless : Skid Row: Benefits of Union Rescue Mission’s move into a spacious modern building will defuse community worries about drawbacks, its planners say.

For seven decades, the Union Rescue Mission has provided food, shelter and spiritual solace to untold thousands of homeless people at its headquarters near Main and 2nd streets in DowntownLos Angeles. In that time, the nondenominational Christian charity has seen its clientele change from a small corps of elderly men down on their luck to a much larger and more troubled army of younger men and women.

The mission has come to symbolize both civic pride in its good deeds and civic shame in the social woes it illustrates, particularly the sidewalk encampments of people who want to be close to free meals. Its location next to the region’s Roman Catholic cathedral and a block from City Hall gave the Union Rescue Mission special prominence.

Now the city’s oldest shelter for the homeless is moving from its cramped and run-down facility to a new $29-million building three times the size. While the shift is only seven blocks away to the epicenter of Skid Row, it has been prefaced by a decade of debate about how best to help street people and where their congregating should be encouraged--or discouraged.

Its planners maintain that the new facility will offer so many humane benefits that the controversy over location will disappear. The five-story building comprises an eye-popping 235,000 square feet, dwarfing nearly all such shelters in the nation, experts said. It can hold up to 810 dormitory beds for transients and longer-term residents enrolled in substance abuse recovery programs. Its kitchen can serve 2,000 meals a day.

“This is almost the supermarket of missions. It really represents state of the art,” said Robert Jacques, the project’s design architect at the Nadel Partnership in West Los Angeles. “We had to design it in such a way that it brought life and hope to people who are hopeless basically. So it had to look like a flower, but be built like a tank.”

Warren Currie, Union Rescue’s president, said: “Our old facility was a one-lane road to help lead people out of Skid Row. Our new one is a three-lane major highway.”

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But some nearby businesses and social service providers are not anticipating the move so happily. They continue to question how physically concentrated shelters on Skid Row should be, how competing property interests in Downtown can be balanced and whether public monies should aid a religious institution. Less openly discussed is whether the drug-ridden sidewalk encampments will follow the mission.

Those uncertainties linger even as workers are putting final touches on the L-shaped building, which has a contemporary, sculptural appearance and is painted cheery blue, green, brick-red and beige. It is located mid-block between 5th and 6th streets, with entrances on both San Pedro and San Julian streets.

“I think it’s a good-looking building and will be a positive contribution to the neighborhood,” said Don Spivack, director of operations for the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency. “Once they start operating, we’ll see whether it works or not. As far as I can tell, it should.”

The redevelopment agency provided $6.5 million in public funds for the move and is expected to purchase the mission’s old property for at least an additional $1.5 million. A city plan calls for a plaza on that site next to St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, along with housing and shops.

Remaining construction costs for the new mission come from donations and bequests, including $11 million from a family that requested anonymity, Currie said. The building is named after Louis W. Foster, the founder of 20th Century Insurance Co., and his wife, Gladyce. The Fosters and the company donated a total of $3 million.

The first of several ceremonies marking the move will be a parade Sunday of Union Rescue employees, supporters and clients from the old to the new facilities. A public open house tour is scheduled for noon Oct. 13.

Soon afterward, Union Rescue guests, as missionaries call homeless clients, will no longer spend the night on plastic lawn chairs because of bed shortages. Women, an increasing presence on Skid Row, for the first time will have an emergency dormitory and space in the rehabilitation programs. Young and middle-aged men, who now outnumber elderly men among the homeless, will have a gymnasium with a full-length basketball court.

“I got no complaints about living here,” said Robert Arzate, a heavily tattooed 47-year-old who recently moved onto a bunk bed in the old mission’s crowded dormitory. “After being on the streets, anything is better. But I’m looking forward to the new place.” Through the mission’s prayer and work regimen, he is trying to kick the drug habit that landed him in state prison and then on Skid Row.

The new building’s most dramatic feature is a 400-seat chapel focused on a towering cross-shaped window that leans over San Pedro Street. Other facilities include computer classrooms, a health clinic, a barber shop and beauty salon, rooftop recreation areas and a hotel-style kitchen with four walk-in freezers to store donated food.

The design also seeks to solve hygiene and security problems. It has easy-to-wash concrete floors, graffiti-resistant walls and surveillance booths in some dormitories and waiting rooms. The sexes are segregated in most circumstances. To eliminate hiding spots for drug use, many restrooms have no stall dividers. Dining room chairs are attached to tables to prevent use as weapons.

All that is a far cry from the converted warehouses and armories that house many of the nation’s shelters today. It is also vastly different from Union Rescue’s origins as a gospel food wagon begun in 1891 by Lyman Stewart, who was the president of Union Oil Co. The mission settled in its current location in 1926.

The top two floors of the new building will not open right away because of funding shortfalls for furnishings and fixtures. Still, neighbors worry that free meals and the available 630 beds will attract too many people to an area already packed with facilities for the homeless. (Union Rescue allows people not enrolled in its rehabilitation programs to stay five days a month but does not restrict meals or showers.)

At 5th Street, just half a block away, is the Los Angeles Mission, another large and well-appointed Christian mission that opened two years ago. Across San Pedro at 6th Street is the Weingart Center, a high-rise complex of social and residential programs for the homeless. Newly built or renovated single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotels are adjacent on San Julian, as is a vest-pocket park where many homeless people pass the day.

Other charitable agencies share nearby streets with wholesale toy and fish businesses. Also battling for turf are crack cocaine bazaars and cardboard box camp-outs.

“The neighborhood is very apprehensive,” said Andy Raubeson, executive director of SRO Housing Corp., which operates neighboring hotels for low-income people.

He and others are most concerned about crowding and crime on San Julian, a narrow roadway where the mission will have its main entrance for the homeless who want a meal, shower or bed. Union Rescue staff and residents in long-term programs will be able to enter on San Pedro.

That dual entrance was designed under Community Redevelopment Authority pressure to appease San Pedro Street businesses that had fought the new mission’s location there, records show. Then, to calm operators of hotels along San Julian, a landscaped courtyard and indoor recreation rooms were designed to draw people from the San Julian sidewalk and avoid big lineups.

Mission president Currie promised to work with other agencies to improve Skid Row safety and sanitation. The new courtyard, he said, will be “as attractive as possible so people will want to come in off the street and out of the sun.”

The compromise has made neither side very happy.

“It’s just kind of an unknown at this point,” said Tracey Lovejoy, spokeswoman for the Central City East Assn., which represents area businesses. The mission and the redevelopment agency “have made a lot of promises and we can only take them at their word.”

Alice Callaghan, a leader of the Skid Row Housing Trust, which also owns hotels, is pleased to have the new mission in the neighborhood. Yet she considers the San Julian entrance “a nightmare” that could make the street too unruly.

“It’s amazing to me that the concerns of businesses to have as few poor people on San Pedro as possible was the highest priority,” Callaghan said.

The irony of such debate, mission leaders note, is that they did not want to move at first.

More than a decade ago, city officials began to advocate a neighborhood make-over near the cathedral, including construction of a now-open state office building a block away. Although some mission officials suspected that the city wanted to push homeless people out of the Civic Center, redevelopment officials insisted that services would improve if the mission moved to Skid Row’s center.

The redevelopment agency originally offered to acquire land through eminent domain and give it to the mission. That would have required Union Rescue to sign a pledge not to discriminate by religion in hiring staff. The mission balked, saying its independence could be violated.

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After much haggling, the City Council in 1989 approved a $6.5-million relocation grant and allowed the mission itself to buy land. The controversial pledge was dropped.

Back at Main Street, the city’s Downtown Strategic Plan calls for the demolition of the old mission and the creation of “Plaza St. Vibiana,” a pedestrian plaza and complex of low-rise housing and commercial structures south of the cathedral.

The mission’s move can “really give St. Vibiana’s another kind of presence in the Downtown as a great cultural institution itself,” said USC architecture professor Robert Harris, an author of the strategic plan.

Father Terry Fleming, the archdiocese chancellor, said it was premature to say if the cathedral would participate in the project.

Asked if encampments near the cathedral will fold once the old mission closes, Fleming replied: “I think that’s a good assumption. The scenery doesn’t draw them. It’s not the beach or being close to City Hall.”

Meanwhile, excitement is mounting among Union Rescue staffers and residents. “What makes this place special is that if a man really wants to get his life together, he can do it here,” said Walter Boone, 56, who recently graduated from the mission’s drug rehabilitation program. “The new building is very, very important and it will play a great role.”

A New Home After 68 years near the corner of Main and 2nd streets, the Union Rescue Mission is moving to a new building at the heart of Skid Row. At its new location, the shelter and rehabilitation center will be next to other facilities for the homeless, including the Los Angeles Mission and the Weingart Center. 1. St. Vibiana’s Cathedral 2. L.A. Mission 3. San Julian Park 4. New S.R.O. hotels 5. The Weingart Center 6. City Hall 7. Reagan State Building