Rebuilding the Nether World

You ever turn a corner in Los Angeles and find yourself facing a scene that does not jibe with your memory of the city? Like you expect a certain house or building to be standing at a certain site and suddenly it’s gone, just disappeared?

Or you walk down a shopping street that only yesterday was filled with plumbers and hardware store owners and you discover they’ve been replaced by stores selling socks at $30 a pair?

And does the experience leave you disoriented, like you had dozed off in the middle of a movie and then woke up not knowing what the characters were talking about?

Well, it happened to me last week. Downtown. I had headed to skid row because I wanted to know about the shopping carts.

You recall the shopping carts. Exactly 100 of them were handed over, free of charge, to the homeless by social organizations. It seems the cops had been busting anyone using grocery store carts to haul their goods, and the social groups were fed up. The new carts were legal in every way and stamped with the name of one of the groups--The Catholic Worker--to signify their status.

That was two weeks ago, and I was intrigued. Were the new carts a big hit? Or had they met with unintended consequences?

So I went down, and it turned out the shopping cart situation was a bore. But skid row was not.

Friends, have you seen skid row in the last 10 years? If you haven’t, you will be shocked. Something fundamental has changed. Skid row--as you probably picture it--no longer exists.

For those not familiar with our underworld, skid row fills a 50-block rectangle of eastern downtown between Main and Alameda. It has been mired in its squalid state for more than 60 years, ever since downtown’s first train station was demolished in favor of Union Station and the area’s many hotels fell into disrepute.

Since that time, skid row has amounted to a nether world, a place of abandonment beyond the reach of hope or help. Its signature was the flophouse.

And most important of all, it was the perpetual target of governmental extinction. Mayor after mayor sought to destroy it physically with bulldozers and dynamite. Skid row was seen as an urban cancer that would spread if not cut out.

Well, that policy got reversed. We don’t tear down skid row anymore, we build it. In Los Angeles, we have invested more than $100 million in local tax money over the last 10 years to construct new buildings and restore old structures all over skid row.

Add the federal money, private money, and the total would probably reach $300 million. An amazing sum, and it has produced dramatic change. If you eliminated the guys staggering down the sidewalk, parts of skid row would remind you of old town in Pasadena.

A little exaggeration perhaps, but not much. More than 40 small hotels have been restored to nifty condition and now operate under the supervision of nonprofits like the Skid Row Housing Trust. Trees have been planted along some streets. Two small parks have been added. The area has its own police station and fire station.

Anchoring the district are the huge, multimillion-dollar structures of the Los Angeles Mission and the Union Rescue Mission. They’re modern and, to some degree, reflect the same jazzy architecture you might see on Melrose Avenue.

“Skid row has become a permanent, stable neighborhood. No one’s going to mow it down. Where else are you going to put 11,000 people?” says Alice Callaghan, who founded Las Familias del Pueblo, one of the district’s children’s centers, and has witnessed the change.

Callaghan took me on a tour of the district. Skid row will never be the happiest of places, she says. Dozens of men with thousand-yard stares occupy the small parks and lobbies of hotels. Half of them are drunk or drugged.

They operate under an intricate set of rules. If they leave the safety of the parks and hotels, the cops will harass them back into their enclaves. Skid row is one of the few places in the city where stopping on the sidewalk and talking to your friends can get you cited for loitering.

“Just picture stopping on your own street to talk to your neighbor. What are the chances of the police stopping, putting you up against the car and frisking you?” asks Callaghan.

Still, she believes that a corner has been turned in the way our culture deals with skid row. Skid row is no longer regarded merely as a blight but rather the best--and perhaps the only--system for dealing with people who choose to live on the margins. That’s why governments are now helping to build the structures of skid row rather than trying to bulldoze them.

Indeed, it is now recognized that skid rows exist in virtually every culture. Discussing Tokyo’s infamous San’ya district, author Ian Buruma wrote recently: “Every society has its bums, social scapegoats . . . and prostitutes. One of their functions is to take the pressure off the mainstream by existing in an underworld where normal conventions don’t apply and taboos are routinely broken.

“Japanese officialdom always recognized this but sought to isolate that underworld as much as possible.”

And so do we. Even as government has poured mega-millions into skid row, it has also sought to contain it. The intricate rules mentioned above usually seek to govern the movement and visibility of its inhabitants.

“If you’re visible, you’re a problem,” says Callaghan. That’s why the police harass those who gather on sidewalks. The practice reflects an unspoken desire by the city government to keep our bums as invisible as possible, she says.

It also explains the subtle interplay that keeps skid row contained between 3rd Street on the north and 7th Street on the south. Several years ago the city fathers persuaded the Union Rescue Mission to move away from its “off the reservation” location near 2nd Street and Main by offering the mission a sweet deal on a new location. It now sits in the heart of the district.

And, in one of the more intriguing aspects of life on the row, residents are confronted with several disincentives to cross 7th Street on the south. That’s where the Flower Mart does business, and the Flower Mart does not favor bums at its doorstep.

Thus, says Callaghan, police will often remind residents that they have been ticketed in the past for offenses such as jaywalking. Since the skid rowers almost certainly failed to pay the fine, the ticket probably had “gone to warrant,” meaning a bench warrant for their arrest had been issued.

If you cross 7th Street, the residents are told, the warrants will be enforced. So they don’t.

In a sense, you could think of skid row these days as a lavishly financed, minimum security prison. A prison without physical walls, surely, but nonetheless a place that’s hard to leave.

One evening last week, I asked a young police officer what he thought about the soft prison theory. He agreed but then added: “You forgot one part of the equation. Half these people deal drugs, the other half buys. They stab each other, rob each other. That’s what they bring to the party.”

And so they do. Some, at least. Thus the rules of the new skid row seem to say that you can find there a comfortable bed, a hot meal and probably a life of marginal dignity. At the same time, you will be watched constantly and expected to make yourself disappear on command.

Not the best of deals. But this is skid row. It’s not the worst, either.