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The City within the City

by Patrick Appel

THERE IS A MAN in the community with “Black Power” and “187” tattooed on his neck who has written five books, “mostly about spirituality and mysticism,” he tells me. There’s the self-appointed King of Fashion who can be seen strutting up and down the block, giving high-fives, wearing gold sequined pants and a plastic crown. More Love! reads the cardboard sign around the neck of a homeless activist, who explains how the housing crisis in L.A. is only getting worse. “Ice cold sodas. Hot chicken,” yells an unlicensed street vendor, who smiles to friends as he pushes his cart up East Fifth Street in downtown Los Angeles.

Residents call East Fifth Street “The Nickel” because a nickel is how much many people in the district are thought to have to their names. Others say the name stuck because it’s so easy to buy a nickel bag of pot on the corners of East Fifth. Whatever the reason, the street forms the stem of a neighborhood referred to over the years as Wino’s Valhalla, Bum’s Heaven—and, most commonly, Skid Row.

Observed from a distance, through the glass of a car window and through the lens of old stereotypes, everyone on Skid Row in Los Angeles appears homeless, dangerous, and drug-addicted. Up and down East Fifth St. people hobble along, babbling through shattered teeth, hitting their arms against their bodies. On the fringes of the district, people will ask for change or a dollar. In its center, they stop asking.

A boy of no more than sixteen sits on a box, shaking back and forth, muttering to himself. Women give odd looks at passersby and call their daughters to their sides. Lying in the shade, a man uses his black Nikes as a pillow. The mentally ill and drug dealers stare out at you with varying degrees of lucidity and hostility. Upon first glance, the newspaper reports about a “gaudy nightmare in neon lights,” calling the place Los Angeles’ “open sore,” don’t seem to go far enough. That first time, most outsiders can’t see through the surface of Skid Row.

They don’t see the families that live in the district, who cram as many as eight people into a single hotel room; families who suffer for want of a real grocery store and a real school in the area. Outsiders don’t notice the old and the disabled barely surviving on Social Security and disability checks. Then there are the workers who toil in the nearby garment district, and those who sweep the streets. People here earn minimum wage by sitting in studio audiences for game shows, or by collecting signatures for political consulting groups. Those are the official jobs. Young and old alike sell individual cigarettes: twenty-five cents for one, forty cents for two. Scavengers with trash bags full of bottles and cans scour the garbage bins and walkways. They drop off their collections at the recycling plant where the man in charge, Moe, can be seen sitting back in his lawn chair, listening to the music of bottles clinking away.

Walking the district, just past the pictures tacked to the front of the Midnight Mission saying “Have you seen me?” or “Missing, please call,” I see a middle-aged man who feverishly glances from face to face, sorting through the largest homeless population in the nation one person at a time, waiting for someone to meet his gaze. In front of him, people sleep rolled up in soiled blankets, the slow rise and fall of their chests out of sync and disconnected from the fast-paced city around them.

That city squeezes in on those sleeping forms, with the Fashion District pushing in from the left.  Little Tokyo hedges in on the right, its apartments a wall of stucco and beige. The wholesale Toy District presses down from the front, while at the bottom, the L.A. River and the freeways corral the population.

Skid Row is a term born out of the Depression. The word is derived from a strip of earth in Seattle along which loggers once skidded trees to get them down to the river; it was a tract of land they called “Skid Road.” Hard times made the place a locus for the hard-up and unemployed, and the scarred earth came to represent the people, as it does on Los Angeles’ Skid Row.

In the 1950s and again in the 1970s, the city of Los Angeles tried to “erase” Skid Row.

Connecting the structural fatigue of the buildings to that of the residents, the municipal authorities promised to cure both problems, and quick. Eleven acres were flattened in 1956, making way for a bumper crop of more than 2,000 parking spots. The loss of cheap housing, mostly residential hotel rooms, pushed much of the Skid Row population into other parts of Los Angeles, but demolishing those buildings did not solve the problem. In South Los Angeles vice rose 30 percent and Skid Row remained Skid Row.

When the city tried to “rejuvenate” the area again in the 1970s, many of the residents ended up on the streets once more. Over the years, the city considered other plans, including pushing the whole community away from the heart of L.A., and housing the poor in a ship moored in the harbor. The district was re-imagined as an addition to the Financial District, as a Philippine Village to compliment Little Tokyo, and as a 1890s-themed adjunct to downtown.

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