August 28, 2024 • 12 mins
How did a large section of downtown Los Angeles become a permanent fixture of unhoused individuals? Will it always be this way? Listen in to learn all about LA's famous Skid Row.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is short stuff.
Another short stuff, this one a bit crusadie and I
think important.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
That's right, because if you have ever driven through downtown
Los Angeles, there's a good chance you may have, maybe
on purpose or maybe accidentally, turned into the heart of
skid Row, which is a fifty city block area roughly
in the heart of downtown. That is something that happened
to me when I lived there, and I had heard
(00:37):
of skid Row, but I had never seen it, and
all of a sudden I was in the middle of it,
and I was like, wow, I didn't quite know it
was like this down here.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Yeah, we stayed nearby too, and I don't know if
we made it all the way there, but you could
tell it was very close by. And the hotel Cecil,
which was made very famous by the death of Elisa Lamb,
is right there in the midst of skid Row, and
as a matter of fact, it's been turned into housing
for the people who live on skid Row, and skid Row,
(01:07):
we should say, finds his origin the term here in
Los Angeles. Los Angeles is like, there's skid rows in
just about every town, that's what they call them. But
the original skid row is in Los Angeles and it's
been there essentially as long as Los Angeles has.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Yeah, sort of, I mean LA was there, but it
wasn't that LA.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
We know, yes, but okay, so it followed so quickly
on the heels of the establishment of LA that it's
practically part of it forever.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Well, it's definitely a part of it, fair enough. So
what is going on in skid Row is on house.
People are living there as many as ten thousand, eleven thousand.
It's kind of hard to get an exact number because
it fluctuates. A few thousand of those live in tent city,
the rest live in shelter, some live in SRO hotels,
(02:02):
single room occupancy hotels. The ones who are really lucky
are living in newer many apartments that have been constructed
by nonprofits. And that is what it's going on. About
twenty percent of them are US military veterans. Most are
black males, but there are people of all stripes on
(02:24):
skid row.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah, and like I said, it's been around a very
long time, but it's under threat actually, which you might
be like, well, isn't it always under threat? No, it
was actually protected for decades. We'll talk about the impending
threats and whether it's going to go through or not,
but let's talk a little bit about the original history
of the thing, shall we.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Yeah, and I think I see what you were saying
now about skid Row being there as long as LA
has been there, Thank you, But I just don't agree
because skid Row skid Row really was in nineteen thirties,
and LA started to become a thing at the turn
of the century. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
We're going to hash this out one way or another
over the course of this episode of Calm.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
So in the eighteen seventies, LA at San Francisco is
getting all the California love with in terms of infrastructure
and stuff like that, namely railroads going in there, and
so LA was like, Hey, what about us down here,
We could use a railroad. So they said, yeah, it's
a good idea. So they built that railroad down to California,
and where that railroad ended is what is now right
(03:28):
in the middle of skid Row.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Yeah, so, like you said, it wasn't skid Row yet,
fair enough, I can agree with you on that, but
it has always been a bit of a rough and
tumble area.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
So the skid Row area that we know and love
now is actually a remnant, a relic of the area
that grew up around those railroad yards to house and
entertain the workers, almost entirely single young men who came
to Los Angeles along with the railroad to unload railcars,
(04:02):
to load railcars, to box citrus, just do all the
things that you need to do around the rail yard.
And some of them started hanging out around there, and
that's where the neighborhood that is now skid Row finally
started to develop.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
That's right. And because they were young men, basically there
were you know, bars and saloons and brothels, and they
had those single resident hotels. Very early on, oil came
to LA and that brought even more people. The automobile
industry really brought a lot more people in the film
industry brought more people in. Basically, you know, people were
(04:38):
migrating westward in great, great numbers, and this area where
that train ended just became overrun. You know, there weren't
enough jobs. All of a sudden you had people sleeping
in hobo encampments. You had people sleeping on the rail
yards and in the cars, and some of them if
they were lucky enough to get into one of those
you know KREDI SI our own hotels, did so. But
(05:01):
the nineteen thirties is when I mean it basically became
the skid row that we know it now, a permanent
underclass living there.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Yeah, and so I mean it was already the downtrodden.
We're already starting to accumulate in skid row. But it
was not helped at all by the depression and the
dust bowl that pushed migration further west and made people
even more destitute. So that kind of sealed the deal.
Like you said, from the nineteen thirties onward, skid row
as we understand it today was born. And I say
(05:32):
we take a break and we come back and talks
more about skid row. Let's do it, okay, Chuck. So
(06:01):
the skid row population was greatly added to during the
Second World War and the Korean War because Los Angeles
was a port of exit and entry back to the
United States for soldiers that were shipping out, and some
of them came back and were not prepared to go home.
They had PTSD, they had developed drug addiction, they had
developed alcoholism, and they stuck around LA and they just
(06:24):
inevitably would migrate to skid Row. That's just kind of
where people have always been funneled. And as part of
urban renewal in the fifties and sixties, a lot of
other cities were like, we're just going to build a
highway through skid Row and that's how we're going to
get rid of it. In Los Angeles, the people leading
the city at the time said, we're not going to
do that. We're actually going to preserve this area for
the people who need it.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
That's right. That was in nineteen seventy six. They said,
you know, there needs to be a place for people.
I think they labeled them extremely low income, but in
most cases it was probably no income. And you know,
there's a couple of ways to look at this, and
one way it was a more humanitarian policy than demolishing
(07:07):
it and building a highway through it. And another another
way to look at it is that it was a
part of a containment strategy, which is like, hey, don't
leave this fifty square block area, this is yours. It's
basically like escape from New York down there. But as
long as you stay in that area, then you know,
(07:27):
it's sort of like the not in my backyard thing.
We just you know, stay in that area and everything
will be okay.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
I think Escape from LA would be more appropriate, don't
you the sequel?
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yeah, but that was so not good, was it?
Speaker 1 (07:39):
I've never seen it?
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Strangely a garbage movie considering how great a filmmaker Carpenter
was and how great Escape from New York was?
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Well? Was it because he substituted Kurt Russell with Hillary Swank?
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (07:52):
That was it.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
I was wondering, you're gonna I was wondering what actor
was gonna come out of your mouth when you started
that sentence? Not what I expected.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
So that was the seventies. So that was pretty cool.
I mean, yes, it depends on how you look at it.
It was either a ruthless strategy or a humane solution.
I think it's kind of both. Do we have to
think in such black and white terms?
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Agreed?
Speaker 1 (08:16):
But this area now contained meant that the other area
of downtown could be refurbished and open for business, because
skid Row, as you might have imagined, chased the businesses
out of downtown but now that the people who lived
in skid Row were like, this is your spot, you
have to stay here. We're going to develop around you,
and the area became gentrified. But the people were from
(08:37):
skid Row actually benefited from that because those single room
occupancy hotels that had been built over the last like
fifty sixty, seventy years or longer, we're starting to get
really down in the heels and threadbare. So they demolished
some of them, or they refurbished them, and they did
(08:57):
it for the residents of skid Row. They essentially gentrified
skid Row for the residents of skid Row in the
eighties and nineties.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Yeah, they tried the Cecil Hotel in fact was I
think they finally finished it, but they were I think
they were refurbishing it and then it was shut down
because of COVID, and I think they eventually finished it.
Even though the Cecil Hotel property is now up for
sale and there's a lot going on now. You know,
(09:26):
is skid Grow going to look this way in ten years?
Probably not. There are three big developments that are going on,
one of which is those SROs that you were talking
about from the eighties and nineties. That they helped build
back up, earn a lot of trouble financially and just
liveability goes because they're not putting the money into it
to keep them up. They were just built new and
(09:46):
have kind of become more dilapidated over the years. The
biggest of these providers, the skid Row Housing Trust, went
into a receivership last year, so that's not a good
sign of things to come.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
No, and there's a group called the AIDS Healthcare Foundation
that is trying to take over the skid Row Housing
Trusts properties to keep them going, but apparently their own
single room occupancy building as they're having so much trouble
running it that the city actually stepped in to be like,
we don't approve this deal. We don't want this deal
(10:22):
to happen. So it's not clear how this is going
to happen, but there does seem to be a progress
or a progression toward knocking down some of those buildings
and building up the high rises that again are being
built for the residents of skid Row, and if that happens,
they're going to be much better off than they are
(10:44):
now because a single room occupancy hotel room is it's
a room, there's a bed, there's a desk, there's room
enough for you. There's no bathroom. There's a bathroom down
the hall. What they're building instead are many apartments to
where like, this is your home. This is your unit.
You can stay in here and you don't have to
go out if you don't want to at all. There's
no shared bathroom. It's your spot. That's what they're trying
(11:06):
to build now, and if everybody can get it together,
that's what they're going to have, like you said, in
the next ten years.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah. And you know, if you've ever visited la and
you went to the sort of newly crowned downtown arts
district which is now booming with bru pubs and restaurants
and mind bars and theaters and all the things that
you would expect in a gentrified downtown situation, and if
you're like, why this arts district is great, you may
(11:34):
not know that the skid Row was literally right next
to you. I don't know if you saw that show
on Apple TV, Platonic with Seth Rogan and Rose Byrne.
No friend of the show, Janet Varney's also in it,
by the way, Okay, it's The whole thing basically is
earlyst seth Rogen and his brewpub is in the Arts
district and a lot of the filming takes place right there.
(11:56):
So if you've seen that show, just blocks away, are
you know, ten thousand some people living on the streets.
So it's just something to remember when you're being a
tourist in that town.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Yeah. I hope to get to make it to a
group hub someday, I'll take you.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
We'll have a have a nice hoppy I PA.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
That sounds great.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
I wonder if they'll have one.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
I don't know, maybe there to dream. Yeah, you got
anything else about skid Row? I guess the main message
here is wait and see and cross your fingers and hope, hope, hope.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
That's right?
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Okay, Well, then that's it for the short Stuff everybody,
and that means short Stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is short stuff.
Another short stuff, this one a bit crusadie and I
think important.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
That's right, because if you have ever driven through downtown
Los Angeles, there's a good chance you may have, maybe
on purpose or maybe accidentally, turned into the heart of
skid Row, which is a fifty city block area roughly
in the heart of downtown. That is something that happened
to me when I lived there, and I had heard
(00:37):
of skid Row, but I had never seen it, and
all of a sudden I was in the middle of it,
and I was like, wow, I didn't quite know it
was like this down here.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Yeah, we stayed nearby too, and I don't know if
we made it all the way there, but you could
tell it was very close by. And the hotel Cecil,
which was made very famous by the death of Elisa Lamb,
is right there in the midst of skid Row, and
as a matter of fact, it's been turned into housing
for the people who live on skid Row, and skid Row,
(01:07):
we should say, finds his origin the term here in
Los Angeles. Los Angeles is like, there's skid rows in
just about every town, that's what they call them. But
the original skid row is in Los Angeles and it's
been there essentially as long as Los Angeles has.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Yeah, sort of, I mean LA was there, but it
wasn't that LA.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
We know, yes, but okay, so it followed so quickly
on the heels of the establishment of LA that it's
practically part of it forever.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Well, it's definitely a part of it, fair enough. So
what is going on in skid Row is on house.
People are living there as many as ten thousand, eleven thousand.
It's kind of hard to get an exact number because
it fluctuates. A few thousand of those live in tent city,
the rest live in shelter, some live in SRO hotels,
(02:02):
single room occupancy hotels. The ones who are really lucky
are living in newer many apartments that have been constructed
by nonprofits. And that is what it's going on. About
twenty percent of them are US military veterans. Most are
black males, but there are people of all stripes on
(02:24):
skid row.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah, and like I said, it's been around a very
long time, but it's under threat actually, which you might
be like, well, isn't it always under threat? No, it
was actually protected for decades. We'll talk about the impending
threats and whether it's going to go through or not,
but let's talk a little bit about the original history
of the thing, shall we.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Yeah, and I think I see what you were saying
now about skid Row being there as long as LA
has been there, Thank you, But I just don't agree
because skid Row skid Row really was in nineteen thirties,
and LA started to become a thing at the turn
of the century. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
We're going to hash this out one way or another
over the course of this episode of Calm.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
So in the eighteen seventies, LA at San Francisco is
getting all the California love with in terms of infrastructure
and stuff like that, namely railroads going in there, and
so LA was like, Hey, what about us down here,
We could use a railroad. So they said, yeah, it's
a good idea. So they built that railroad down to California,
and where that railroad ended is what is now right
(03:28):
in the middle of skid Row.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Yeah, so, like you said, it wasn't skid Row yet,
fair enough, I can agree with you on that, but
it has always been a bit of a rough and
tumble area.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
So the skid Row area that we know and love
now is actually a remnant, a relic of the area
that grew up around those railroad yards to house and
entertain the workers, almost entirely single young men who came
to Los Angeles along with the railroad to unload railcars,
(04:02):
to load railcars, to box citrus, just do all the
things that you need to do around the rail yard.
And some of them started hanging out around there, and
that's where the neighborhood that is now skid Row finally
started to develop.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
That's right. And because they were young men, basically there
were you know, bars and saloons and brothels, and they
had those single resident hotels. Very early on, oil came
to LA and that brought even more people. The automobile
industry really brought a lot more people in the film
industry brought more people in. Basically, you know, people were
(04:38):
migrating westward in great, great numbers, and this area where
that train ended just became overrun. You know, there weren't
enough jobs. All of a sudden you had people sleeping
in hobo encampments. You had people sleeping on the rail
yards and in the cars, and some of them if
they were lucky enough to get into one of those
you know KREDI SI our own hotels, did so. But
(05:01):
the nineteen thirties is when I mean it basically became
the skid row that we know it now, a permanent
underclass living there.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Yeah, and so I mean it was already the downtrodden.
We're already starting to accumulate in skid row. But it
was not helped at all by the depression and the
dust bowl that pushed migration further west and made people
even more destitute. So that kind of sealed the deal.
Like you said, from the nineteen thirties onward, skid row
as we understand it today was born. And I say
(05:32):
we take a break and we come back and talks
more about skid row. Let's do it, okay, Chuck. So
(06:01):
the skid row population was greatly added to during the
Second World War and the Korean War because Los Angeles
was a port of exit and entry back to the
United States for soldiers that were shipping out, and some
of them came back and were not prepared to go home.
They had PTSD, they had developed drug addiction, they had
developed alcoholism, and they stuck around LA and they just
(06:24):
inevitably would migrate to skid Row. That's just kind of
where people have always been funneled. And as part of
urban renewal in the fifties and sixties, a lot of
other cities were like, we're just going to build a
highway through skid Row and that's how we're going to
get rid of it. In Los Angeles, the people leading
the city at the time said, we're not going to
do that. We're actually going to preserve this area for
the people who need it.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
That's right. That was in nineteen seventy six. They said,
you know, there needs to be a place for people.
I think they labeled them extremely low income, but in
most cases it was probably no income. And you know,
there's a couple of ways to look at this, and
one way it was a more humanitarian policy than demolishing
(07:07):
it and building a highway through it. And another another
way to look at it is that it was a
part of a containment strategy, which is like, hey, don't
leave this fifty square block area, this is yours. It's
basically like escape from New York down there. But as
long as you stay in that area, then you know,
(07:27):
it's sort of like the not in my backyard thing.
We just you know, stay in that area and everything
will be okay.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
I think Escape from LA would be more appropriate, don't
you the sequel?
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yeah, but that was so not good, was it?
Speaker 1 (07:39):
I've never seen it?
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Strangely a garbage movie considering how great a filmmaker Carpenter
was and how great Escape from New York was?
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Well? Was it because he substituted Kurt Russell with Hillary Swank?
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (07:52):
That was it.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
I was wondering, you're gonna I was wondering what actor
was gonna come out of your mouth when you started
that sentence? Not what I expected.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
So that was the seventies. So that was pretty cool.
I mean, yes, it depends on how you look at it.
It was either a ruthless strategy or a humane solution.
I think it's kind of both. Do we have to
think in such black and white terms?
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Agreed?
Speaker 1 (08:16):
But this area now contained meant that the other area
of downtown could be refurbished and open for business, because
skid Row, as you might have imagined, chased the businesses
out of downtown but now that the people who lived
in skid Row were like, this is your spot, you
have to stay here. We're going to develop around you,
and the area became gentrified. But the people were from
(08:37):
skid Row actually benefited from that because those single room
occupancy hotels that had been built over the last like
fifty sixty, seventy years or longer, we're starting to get
really down in the heels and threadbare. So they demolished
some of them, or they refurbished them, and they did
(08:57):
it for the residents of skid Row. They essentially gentrified
skid Row for the residents of skid Row in the
eighties and nineties.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Yeah, they tried the Cecil Hotel in fact was I
think they finally finished it, but they were I think
they were refurbishing it and then it was shut down
because of COVID, and I think they eventually finished it.
Even though the Cecil Hotel property is now up for
sale and there's a lot going on now. You know,
(09:26):
is skid Grow going to look this way in ten years?
Probably not. There are three big developments that are going on,
one of which is those SROs that you were talking
about from the eighties and nineties. That they helped build
back up, earn a lot of trouble financially and just
liveability goes because they're not putting the money into it
to keep them up. They were just built new and
(09:46):
have kind of become more dilapidated over the years. The
biggest of these providers, the skid Row Housing Trust, went
into a receivership last year, so that's not a good
sign of things to come.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
No, and there's a group called the AIDS Healthcare Foundation
that is trying to take over the skid Row Housing
Trusts properties to keep them going, but apparently their own
single room occupancy building as they're having so much trouble
running it that the city actually stepped in to be like,
we don't approve this deal. We don't want this deal
(10:22):
to happen. So it's not clear how this is going
to happen, but there does seem to be a progress
or a progression toward knocking down some of those buildings
and building up the high rises that again are being
built for the residents of skid Row, and if that happens,
they're going to be much better off than they are
(10:44):
now because a single room occupancy hotel room is it's
a room, there's a bed, there's a desk, there's room
enough for you. There's no bathroom. There's a bathroom down
the hall. What they're building instead are many apartments to
where like, this is your home. This is your unit.
You can stay in here and you don't have to
go out if you don't want to at all. There's
no shared bathroom. It's your spot. That's what they're trying
(11:06):
to build now, and if everybody can get it together,
that's what they're going to have, like you said, in
the next ten years.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah. And you know, if you've ever visited la and
you went to the sort of newly crowned downtown arts
district which is now booming with bru pubs and restaurants
and mind bars and theaters and all the things that
you would expect in a gentrified downtown situation, and if
you're like, why this arts district is great, you may
(11:34):
not know that the skid Row was literally right next
to you. I don't know if you saw that show
on Apple TV, Platonic with Seth Rogan and Rose Byrne.
No friend of the show, Janet Varney's also in it,
by the way, Okay, it's The whole thing basically is
earlyst seth Rogen and his brewpub is in the Arts
district and a lot of the filming takes place right there.
(11:56):
So if you've seen that show, just blocks away, are
you know, ten thousand some people living on the streets.
So it's just something to remember when you're being a
tourist in that town.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Yeah. I hope to get to make it to a
group hub someday, I'll take you.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
We'll have a have a nice hoppy I PA.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
That sounds great.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
I wonder if they'll have one.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
I don't know, maybe there to dream. Yeah, you got
anything else about skid Row? I guess the main message
here is wait and see and cross your fingers and hope, hope, hope.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
That's right?
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Okay, Well, then that's it for the short Stuff everybody,
and that means short Stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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