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The City within the City Residents had their own ideas. One old man, who had lived in the city since 1920 wrote into the Los Angeles Times suggesting that “we build a large walled city of Skid Row out in Death Valley,” so that the Skid Rowers could “dry out in the hot sun,” and so Los Angeles could replant the district with “rows of lettuce or citrus fruits.” In the 1980s, a Little Tokyo councilman agreed that the city should create an “open air farm” for the poor, where they could grow vegetables to eat and learn a trade, though he suggested Santa Clarita instead of Death Valley. This kind of thinking, coupled with rising property values downtown, continues to make what housing remains for the poor vulnerable to developers’ bulldozers. The old hotels that survived these waves of “development” and “rejuvenation” now provide the last reservoir of low-income affordable housing in Los Angeles. The hotels, arranged around East Fifth Street, include twenty-room flophouses and five-hundred-room hotels, some of which were built by A former L.A. sheriff used to joke that he ran the largest homeless shelter in the nation. With the biggest jail in the world, the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, down the block and with Los Angeles County Central Jail right next to that, there are more than 28,000 prison cells within a mile and a half of Skid Row, more than double the number of residential hotel units and mission beds. A hundred years ago, before the city disintegrated into rolling suburbs, these residential hotels were the center of Los Angeles. Their neon signs still point east, towards the memory of Central Station, the main railway depot before Union Station took over as the hub of L.A.’s train travel in the last days of the 1930s. Before the trolley lines were severed to make way for cars and freeways, anyone coming to Los Angeles came first to what is now Skid Row. Men from as far as Kansas paid a dollar fare to ride the rails west to California. Drifters and dreamers following their imaginations poured off the trains looking for work herding cattle or harvesting and shipping produce, the type of vanished unskilled jobs that the men and women of Skid Row still search for in vain. In olden days, long tracts of rich soil that were fed by the L.A. River sprouted citrus trees and rolling vineyards. By the end of the 19th century, millions of gallons of wine flowed from the region. The drink remained long after the grapevines had been paved over. Dime wine and fifteen-cent soup defined the district up through the 1940s. Notorious for its fall-down drunks, Skid Row's inhabitants filled the LAPD’s paddy wagon twenty times a night. The cops sometimes joined in and dressed up in tattered clothes; they staggered as if they too were drunk in order to ensnare the muggers who preyed upon the drunkards. When drinking became considered a disease instead of a crime, the police couldn’t haul in drunks by the truckload anymore, but the cops found other ways to keep tabs on residents. Violations which go un-enforced anywhere else—such as littering, riding a bike on the sidewalk, or jaywalking—regularly result in the offender getting handcuffed and strip-searched. “I’m from New York,” one man tells me. “I feel it’s my right to jaywalk.” Sweeps for parole violators are common occurrences on the streets and in the hotels. A resident explains that, in his experience, even gang members are less likely to use casual violence than the LAPD. That sentiment is widespread. The young and under-trained police officers, who often are assigned to Skid Row as greenhorns, don’t help the situation, and the general distrust of the police makes it harder for good cops to do their jobs. On the corner of Sixth and Towne Streets, a young officer with a fresh crew cut catcalls a woman. She glares back at him. He points across the street at a man sprawled out on the curb. “Does that look like laying down to you?” he says to his older partner, who doesn’t reply. They are enforcing, among other laws, Municipal Code Section 41 18(d); a law written on metal plaques, and bolted to the brick walls on the outside of the LAPD Central Precinct in Skid Row. The people who shuffle by the building rarely look up at the signs, which read, “No person shall sit, lie, or sleep in or upon any street, sidewalk or other public way.” The police and the ACLU have been battling for decades over the implementation of this ordinance. Judges have repeatedly struck down the law, calling it unconstitutional to ticket and arrest the homeless when it cannot be proven that enough mission beds are available, but still the police sweeps go on. The black and white cop cars circle the block constantly, while the crowds are monitored by video cameras and by officers standing on street corners in pairs. Along with the LAPD and county sheriffs are the private security guards, hired by the business district, often out of the same population they are policing. The guards are known as “purple shirts” for the color of the uniforms they wear. They ride by on mountain bikes with their radios tacked to their shirts. They stand in front of jewelry stores, and some even clear trash from out of the street. For these guardians of public safety, slipping from the group that monitors to the group that is monitored can happen in a month, a week, or a day. For Dennis, a longtime resident of the Alexandria Hotel, it only took one jerk of his arm to change sides. While working as a “purple shirt,” he tried to pull a heap of trash out of the road. Traffic was bearing down on him as he tried to lift too much, too quickly, tearing ligaments all along his arm and neck. Unable to work, he survives on his workers’ compensation money, which, after six months, is already a quarter gone. He does recycling to earn a little cash, keeping a shopping cart in his room. |
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