Collier’s, Aug. 27, 1949

SKID ROW – U.S.A. By WILLIAM J. SLOCUM

Perhaps you’ll recognize one of your old friends or schoolmates on this tour through the jungles of our cities. Skid Row is an open jail for men whose only crime may be poverty or Ioneliness

PART ONE OF TWO PARTS “You see, he doesn’t speak modern Greek much. Just classical Greek.” I have just traveled 8,000 miles, groping This man won’t be hard to find. He’s a my way through the missions, saloons and Negro. flophouses of a dark and sometimes dank jungle I traveled 8,000 miles before I met known as skid row. I saw thousands of men, somebody I knew myself. I ran into a most of them drunk, half of them dirty, and all of schoolmate on the corner of Stanton Street and them beaten by life. I talked, drank, ate and the Bowery in New York at seven fifty one I sang hymns with them. had some small morning. (A saloon on Stanton Street hands out adventures, too, which weren’t very important. “coffee and ” each morning when the doors are What might be important though, is that I opened at 8:00 n.u.; My old schoolmate was probably met someone you have known. waiting. He laughed when he saw me and said, lf you went to Perdu, Villanova, the “you’re getting fat. You drink too much beer.” Haskell School for lndians, or to Heidelberg in Meeting him cost $5. Germany, it may be that I crossed paths with an I started this tour of Skid Row in Chicago old classmate of yours. Or, if you are a doctor of where I met Captain Joseph Graney of the medicine with a wide acquaintanceship, it is Desplaines Street Police Station. The captain possible my roommate in Kansas City counted made me a little bet. you a friend. He and I shared a six-by-four “lf you’re going all over the country to chamber with a crate full of chickens. look at Skid Row l’ll lay you 15 to 5 you meet an lf you are a pampered hambone living in old friend,” he predicted. “And l’ll tell you Hollywood, come along with me; step into your something else. You’ll meet guys who talk better chartreuse convertible, drive down to Fifth Street than you, think better than you, and dress better in Los Angeles and park outside the blood bank. than you. But you just won’t meet anybody as Sooner or later you’ll see him, and perhaps lucky as you.” recognize him. He gets $4 a pint for his blood, a The captain was right on all counts. sum which is immediately translatable into a couple of gallons of muscatel. Alcohol: the Cause or the Result? Are you a member in good standing of the Officers’ Club? Then, try Congress Avenue Skid Row is the end of the road for in Houston. You may recognize the man I saw thousands of Americans. lt is a jungle of there. He was a lieutenant colonel, up from the crumbling tenements, twisted shacks and filthy ranks, sir. Or check Clark Street in Chicago for a alleys. lt is an open jail for men who are guilty of West Pointer, or Howard Street in San Francisco no greater crime than being poor, or not getting for an Annapolis man. along with their wives, or just being lonesome. Did you know a linguist? Scout the Sure, many drink, but no man can honestly say Madison Street jungle in Chicago. Because a whether alcohol is the cause or the result of their derelict there surprised a cop by speaking to him hopelessness. in Gaelic. An assistant state’s attorney got ltalian Skid Rows are at their gaudiest in big from him. Later he lapsed into Chinese. A Greek cities, but if there are 5,000 or more people in lawyer, called in, said his Greek was good. your town, chances are you have a Skid Row of “Sure, he could get by,” the lawyer explained. sorts. You think not? How about that part of the city where the ne’er-do-wells gather-a couple of

drunks, the old panhandler, the shiftless handy drunkenness must first be understood. The men man, the fellow who never amounted to much at the Yale Clinic are trying. after the war (pick your own war) and the village To the vast majority of people liquor is idiot? That’s Skid Row. refreshment, a part of good and congenial living. lf you live in a big city You know the And wine, always more exotic than the hard place. ln New York it’s the Bowery, biggest and stuff, recalls the warmth, the richness and the cruelest of them all. Chicago has two small good taste suggested by its historic use in Rows plus bloodstained Madison Street. There religious ceremony. is also Howard Street in gracious San Francisco, That’s what alcohol generally means to the dirtiest, drinkingest and most depressing most of us. But to the 90 per cent of the Skid thoroughfare in the land. ln Los Angeles it’s Fifth Row population who are chronic drunks, alcohol- Street off South Main where the bartenders in any form-is the be-all and end-all of their direct you to the nearest blood bank when you sordid existence. lt is pursued as other men run out of money and need some quick cash. seek fame, fortune or the third blonde from the Proud and booming Houston has its end. Congress Avenue where the bums try to talk like The other 10 per cent live there for Gene Autry, try to look like him, and never spill a financial reasons, usually because their earnings grain of tobacco as they roll their own with or their pensions permit nothing better. Some quivering hands. ln Kansas City, the flophouses are ducking alimony payments or more serious on Main Street and the tin-can shacks on the complications. Others simply are misers. Many banks of the Missouri have at one time or oldtimers eke out their last days in fleabags another housed a great Middle Western brain because they can fins companionship there surgeon, a millionaire” son, a farm equipment without the regimentation to be faced in the Old engineer who was the best man in his business, Folks Home. and wonder of wonders, Missouri’s leading But the typical Skid Row bum will drink madam. anything. Three Chicago policemen, planted Dungarees or blue jeans are the inside a stolen automobile in a garage, watched traditional uniform of Skid Row, but a neatly one bum tap an engine and then lie on his back dressed man excites no interest. He can be a to catch the spouting antifreeze alcohol. sightseer, a businessman off on a bender, or Rubbing alcohol and other forms distilled from one of the highly prosperous gentlemen who run wood are diluted or “cut” to make “smoke,” a the saloons, flophouses, barber colleges, universal Skid Row drink. pawnshops or two-bit movie houses that infest Bay run, hair tonic and canned heat are the jungle. also widely used. The solid canned heat is The saloons sell 1O-cent gin at a profit. reduced to liquid by putting it in a piece of thin Barber colleges are numerous because there cloth and then squeezing it. The resulting are always plenty of men in the neighborhood poison is known among the cognoscenfi as a who are willing to shed a few drops of blood in “Pink Lady.” return for a free shave. The two-bit movie Death or blindness is the frequent end houses provide a comfortable place to sleep result of this kind of drinking. As a minor note in despite the endless gunfire exploding from the a major iragedy, “smoke,” “Pink Ladies” and the sound tracks of the old Westerns that are Skid like do not produce the sense of well-being Row’s customary cinema fare. common to accepted alcoholic drinks. They I spent a month on the Skid Rows of the merely numb, render unconscious and perhaps nation and visited all these exotic hangouts of bring on death. the unlucky and the unwary. I also visited a quiet An oft-used drink along Skid Row, old building on Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven, however, is wine. Fortified wines. They run Connecticut. ln it work some of the brilliant and slightly over 20 per cent alcohol and are consecrated men who are devoting their lives to therefore about half the strength of a shot of studying alcoholism. lf anything is to be done for whisky. Skid Row bums, the whys and wherefores of

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There is a popular police theory across country over, but the difference is not great. ln the nation that the “winos” (or “wineeos” as general a dormitory cot costs a quarter and a some Chicagoans call them) will drink fortified private room usually sets a guest back about a wines because they keep a man drunk longer. half dollar. The winos disagree. I was told at least a The private rooms, called “bird cages,” hundred times in response to my question, “l are six feet by four feet and contain a bed and drink wine because I can’t afford whisky.” When locker. The walls are built at least two feet short a Skid Row bum does have a stake he drinks of the ceiling, and wire netting stretches across hard liquor. the top of each cell. This netting is a ventilating The business of getting drunk starts with device, and as the evening wears on, ventilation the dawn. The haggard man walks around with progressively becomes less of a blessing. one hand outstretched. In that hand is a nickel Each floor of a flophouse has a few or a dime. He hails each passing comrade with “suites.” These are rooms which have windows. “l got a dime.” The other in turn sings back how They rent for 15 or 20 cents more than the much he has. They join forces and continue the regular rooms. They also have electric lights, a search for a third and fourth, or until they have rarity in the majority of lodginghouses. among them enough to get a bottle. Many flophouses are patent firetraps. There are certain customs and etiquettes New York and Chicago recently cracked down observed. The largest contributor usually gets on the proprietors. But they remain firetraps, the first drink, but after that it is rotation drinking nevertheless. without regard to contribution. lf two men have Anybody (male) gets into a flophouse by enough to buy a pint they will do so, but not plopping down the necessary fee and muttering three. Three will wait until they have a fourth, a name to the clerk. The clerk tosses the guest a and perhaps even a fifth man, in order to get a key and scribbles down his interpretation of the larger bottle. A non-contributor often can get a name. drink. However, custom limits him to just one, All you get for your money is a flop. lf unless he has spent the night in jail. He may you smoke you get tossed out. lf you have a then join the rotation. These gentle rules apply visitor in your room you both get thrown out. lf everywhere except in New York. There, Bowery you make any noise (Not uncommon when you protocol is: No money, no drink. go to bed with a jug) you get the heave-ho. Shelter is a distant second need to Seldom does anybody get his money back when alcohol in the Skid Row pattern. Food is a bad evicted. third. Even in the mildest of weather the bum Credit regulations are basic the country wants a bed or, as he calls it, a “flop.” He knows over. There is no credit except for the steadiest he must sleep and his need for a bed is one per customers and pensioners. A steady customer is cent comfort and 99 per cent sheer survival. lf defined as a man in residence for more than six a he sleeps in park or an alleY he can years. He can expect two nights’ lodging on reasonably expect to have his shoes stolen and credit, then out he goes. The pensioner gets a his pockets sliced out of his pants. He will be too better break simply because his check comes to drunk either to know or to resist. the hotel, and the management forces him to endorse it on the spot. These rare courtesies are Many Names for FloPhouses likely to be withdrawn immediately if the recipient forgets to tip the clerk. Strangely, the The commonest of Skid Row shelters are itinerant guests invariably tip the clerk a nickel or the flophouses. The entrepreneurs of these a dime. substandard stables prefer to call their hostelries Some Skid Row bums, usually “lodginghouses.” The clients of the “lodging- pensioners, live in the same flophouse 15 and houses” prefer such basic descriptive 20 years. Two of the Four Horsemen gallop the terminology as “fleabag,” “scratch house,” “flop- corridors of the nation’s fleabags 24 hours a house” and a long series of accurate, but day. The ambulance and the hearse are almost unprintable names. Prices vary slightly the as common as the patrol wagon which makes

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regular rounds picking up drunks out of the unspeakably filthy or as spotless as a hospital gutters. operating room. They all specialize in the It is impossible to get statistics on the cheapest and most obscure cuts of meat, and Skid Row death rate but Chicago, whose Skid their prices vary in each citY. Row population varies seasonably between Missions hand out doughnuts and coffee 7,000 (spring and summer) and 15,000 (winter), in the morning and soup and coffee at night. But reporled last winter that 50 corpses a month are when a man eats in a mission he has been found in the Skid Row area. Another 50 persons broke and hungry a long, long time. A few are removed from Skid Row to die in hospitals. saloons give their regular customers coffee and Missions sometimes have dormitories cake in the morning. And soup is occasionally and “bird cages.” The missions are cleaner and doled out in the afternoon. But the saloon invariably more expensive than a hotel flop. usually uses only three or four bowls at a time, They are not popular with Skid Row bums so the bums must wait while the early comers because their admittance requirements are empty and clean a dish. higher than the floPhouses. Free soup and coffee are alwaYs a ln many cities there are also dilapidated miracle in alchemy. Somehow the cooks rooming houses which usually cater to a manage to water down the water. reasonably permanent clientele. A lady in The citizen of Skid Row has the same Kansas City runs one which has eight need-if not the same lust-for money that pensioners. None of the guests has seen his distinguishes his more normal brother. And he check in months. She handles everything. gets it precisely the same way. He works for it, When a Skid Row bum is without a floP has it given to him or he steals it. Skid Row for the night he “is carrying the banner.” When seems to be evenly divided among those who he is tormented with a hang-over that screams won’t work and those who can’t work. for a nerve placating drink he is “sick.” A bum Panhandling is a Prime source of who says he is “sick” or “carrying the banner” revenue in any jungle. Sometimes it’s plain can be certain of relief from his fellow bums if begging, but more often the price of a pint is among them they can dig up the necessary earned through devices such as peddling funds. pencils, shoelaces, and the like. The Soup and coffee are the staple items of a “lumbermen” or crutch carrying cripples can beg Skid Row diet. Where prices are high (40 to 50 $30 a day with ease. However, when one has cents for a portion of meat scraps, potatoes and made a $5 stake he simply calls it a day and all the bread without butter you can eat) a heads for a package store. The bums have regutar meal comes close to costing as much as learned that, for some reason, a young man on it would in a modest restaurant located in a poor crutches does better financially than an older section of town. person. All begging is risky business because Chicago and New York fit this category. the police are wont to discourage it with But wherever a man can get meat and potatoes controlled violence, but they dare not touch a for about a quarter, as he can in Kansas City cripple. and Los Angeles, it sometimes seems to me that Beggars hang together in groups of four he could do better to get his nourishment from of five. Frequently only one of the gang will work wine. Such restaurants are called “horse a full day while the others loaf. Each man simply markets” by their suspicious customers. takes his turn.

Chef Earns All He Gets Meet TramPdom’s UPPer Grust

A restaurant on Madison Street in The gandY-dancers are the Skid Row Chicago pays its Skid Row chef $150 a week aristocracy. They work for the railroads, laying and he is worth it. A strange characteristic of track, grading roadbeds and digging drainage Skid Row restaurants everywhere is their ditches. Their name is derived from the attitude on cleanliness. They are either rhythmical movement they once made as they

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tamped gravel and cinders tightly around When a man comes back from a period railroad ties. They worked in pairs, bobbing up of gandy-dancing or an agricultural job with a and down. Modern machinery has made this couple of hundred dollars in his pockets, he type particular type of work extinct, but there is wants a shoeshine. A bootblack on Kansas other heavy labor easily worth the standard City’s Skid Row told me, “l’ve shined shoes that $1.06 to $1.09 per-hour rate. That shoots up two didn’t have any soles on ’em. They always throw cents per hour when the gandy-dancer has a you a half buck. lf they have any money, they’ll year or more of continuous service, a most get a shine three or four times a day. I don’t unlikely eventuality. know why but they all love to get their shoes The gandy-dancer usually works from shined.” May 1tt to November 30th. During this period he The shoes may be polished in a barfrequently leaves Skid Row and lives in work room and often a man who is flush will leave his camps where he must pay for inferior food and wad with the bartender. He may or may not drink bad lodging. At the typical camp the tab varies it all up in a night. Obviously no man can drink from 65 cents per meal to $2.93 a day. He works $200 worth of two-for-a-quarter whisky in a six, but pays room and board for seven days. single evening but there are repeated rounds of Many railroads maintain labor offices on Skid drinks for the house. And the ba(ender usually Row. Others contract for help through keeps tab with equal abandon. commissary agents who supply the men and Men who want a day’s work will gather at feed and board them. The agents’ profits comes a rendezvous point in Skid Row to be picked up out of the food and lodging bill. each morning by independent truckers. The pay A gandy-dancer is entitled to is usually a dollar an hour and no Skid Row unemployment benefits from the railroads based laborer will accept hire from an employer who upon how much money he makes. These insists upon withholding taxes. He wants $8 for benefits, plus local unemployment relief, help eight hours and the trucker can pay the see him through the winter, or as he says, “Keep government anything Uncle Sam has coming. me safe to Paddy’s Day.” A few gandy-dancers, This work is as unpopular as it is arduous, so as soon as they hit town, will pay their flophouse four or five men will band together to take daily rent in advance for December 1’t to St. Patrick’s turns at working and each day’s $8 is divided Day. Most of them are lucky if they have a nickel among the group that night. left a week after they come in from the camps. Most of the handbills distributed in any Agents say 70 per cent of the men stay at work town are set out by Skid Row workers. To get throughout the season. around minimum-wage laws, an hour is not used From my own observations, I doubt it by as a unit of time in this industry. An hour is the 70 per cent of their estimated 70 per cent. duration it takes to distribute a specified number Many go out to pick fruits or vegetables. of handbills. ln crowded areas an hour is This is piecework and those who have the equivalent to 125 deliveries; medium crowded strength and the necessary manual agility can it’s 100; and sparsely settled suburbs are 75. make as much as $12 a day. The food is always Payment in this field seems to work out to better than the railroad camps provide and is around 35 cents an hour for a day” work. But it frequently excellent by any standards. Labor can be a lot less. agencies are numerous in Skid Row and help The lowest form of Skid Row labor is supply agricultural workers. bottle collecting. Men trudge around picking up It is an accePted custom for a man to empties which, by a custom which is nation-wide sign on as a gandy-dancer so he will be shipped except in New York, are carefully lined up along close to the Connecticut tobacco fields or the the curbs for the convenience of the bottle-man. California vegetable crops. Then he jumps the He gets a cent and a half for gallon jugs, a cent railroad and justifies it, if he bothers, because of for quart bottles and a half cent for pints. And the bad food and dirty living quarters that seem they must be wine bottles, because whisky to be part of the railroad camps. bottles by law cannot be refilled.

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Brisk Trade with Blood Banks General agreement was voiced and then a bleary old gent said, “You know, America is If you have ever been given plasma or the greatest country in the world.” This was serum you are closer to Skid Row than you immediately acknowledged as gospel by all and think. Thousands of bums peddle their blood to sundry and there began a round-table legitimate banks, many of which are located in, discussion among a half-dozen down-and-out or reasonably adjacent to, Skid Row. The price hulks, each vying to add further vocal tribute to for a pint which is to be reduced to plasma is $4 the land of opportunity. in California and a little more in the East. There are a few women on Skid Row, for A blood donor is generally limited to five a variety of reasons. Perhaps one explanation is bleedings a year, but a man can go broke a lot that the weaker sex is made of sterner stuff. more than five times during 12 long months. Another more obvious argument is that society Records are kept, but identification is a just won’t allow a woman to sleep in the gutter. I haphazard thing on Skid Row. Arms are saw a cripple fall and split his face wide open in examined for recent punctures and in Los front of Chicago’s Haymarket Theater and the Angeles each donor has the fingers of his left box-office lady didn’t pause a second in the job hand painted with a compound which is not of applying her lipstick. But let a woman doze off visible unless the hand is placed under a blue in a hallway and the police station switchboard fluorescent lamp. lt takes about eight weeks for lights up like a Christmas tree. Almost invariably this solution to disappear completely. I watched the calls are from indignant females. one bank turn away 32 men within two hours The female Skid Row consists, when the lamp showed telltale blue on their obviously, of the bordellos of the land. But the fingers. Recently, however, a Skid Row chemist inmates therein rarely wind up in the gutters. discovered a solution that erases the stain within The mortality rate among prostitutes is high. But minutes. so, too, is the marriage rate. And when a girl Clear-blooded alcoholics from Skid Row finds she has to call quits to such a career she make up the largest part of the nation’s donor can always go home. population. But their contributions mix easily with those from church groups giving blood for Few Women Among the “Down” charity, or from young men who need the price of a few gallons of gas for an evening date, and Traveling from New York to California from other young men who need money to buy and back, I saw four out-and-out Skid Row mike for their babies. The blood banks in Los drunks of the opposite sex. I don’t know how Angeles normally hit peak production just before many thousands of alcoholic men I saw. The lncome Tax Day. professional phrase for a bum who has dropped Pensions account for a large, if not the to the sidewalk is “down.” I saw at least 500 largest, portion of income. Most pensioners do males who were down during a month in the not draw enough to allow better living standards. jungle, but just two females. The steel and concrete jungle is heavily I did see perhaPs 50 women who populated with remittance men drawing small obviously lived on Skid Row. There are no monthly checks from relatives and with Army flophouses available to them, so they live in tiny and Navy pensioners. The retired servicemen rooms. They are pensioners or beggars. A few are usually as drunk as anybody in the bar- shelters for women do exist, but they are room, but they are invariably immaculate. expensive and the tenants are subject to One of the most extraordinary seminars I expulsion if, after a l}-hour day of selling ever heard started in a Bowery saloon when one pencils, they so befoul themselves as to have a old gentleman complained of his rheumatism couple of glasses of beer. and said, “l can go up to the Old Soldiers Home. Although Skid Row is almost completely But I don’t want to do that yet.” He went on to free of sex, and few females are ever seen on it, say, “There’s a law you know. No soldier of women are a perpetual topic of conversation at Uncle Sam can be a Public charge.” the bars and over the tables in the flophouse

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lobbies. Almost all Skid Row bums insist that likely he is to appear as an alcoholic.” Siblings women put them where they are. At first I are brothers or sisters. shrugged off that theory as an alibi. After a So much for Mama who is, after all, a month of closer listening, however, I would woman. The most frequently recurring episode suggest that any error is in the direction of in the Skid Row story goes like this. The Hotel understatement. ln addition to the bums who are McCoy is the Grand Hotel of Chicago’s foul certain that women put them on Skid Row, there Madison Street Skid Row. lt has 800 rooms are others who unmistakably were driven there divided among three floors, each cubicle by women and don’t realize it. measuring roughly four feet by six feet. Rates To clear up that last statement first: are 60 cents a day except for the rare rooms Policemen all over the country told me to look with windows. With ventilation the price jumps to for the derelict who had been the “youngest 75 cents. son.” He was not hard to find. He was, in fact, A handsome automobile halted before everywhere. He was the boy who had stayed the McCoy and one of the two ladies in it daintily home with Mother while the older brothers went hailed a policeman. out and got themselves set in business. When “Officer,” she said, “we’re afraid to go in Mother died, the youngest was finally forced into there but we would like to see Mr. John Jones. a competitive world. Perhaps he started at the Would you ask him to come out?” age of forty-about 22 years too late. The policeman entered and the clerk He stands alone, bereft of his mother’s pointed out Mr. Jones who was quietly reading a comfort and with a tight silver cord still tied comic book and enjoying a chew of tobacco. around his hands and his brains. Whisky, he “Jones,” said the policeman in the courtly soon discovers, erases his fear, his confusion, manner of all Chicago cops, “there’s a couple of and his humiliation. Soon he is on Skid Row. babes out there in a big car. They want to see Quite frequently he is supported by checks from you.” his older brothers who ask only that he stay to Jones, being on Skid Row and being in hell away from them. the presence of the law, cowered. “Do I have to He himself believes that he’s on Skid go out?” Row because he couldn’t get along with his “Nope. But they’re real rich looking kids. family back in Des Moines. He’s there, of Furs and everything.” course, because his mother didn’t give him the “ls there a redheaded old woman with same break she gave his brothers. them, Officer?” “No. Just the two young ones.” “Too Much Mama” MaY Harm Son Jones smiled and got up. “Okay. Let’s go. Those are my daughters. But if that A slight variation of the youngest son redheaded old bag of a mother of theirs is along, who stayed home with Mama is the case of the l’m running right back in here.” only son who did the same thing. Jones, Skid Row bum but Proud father, The Yale Plan Clinic is in the throes of went out to meet his daughters. He was one of conducting a survey which is not yet nearly the vast army of men who have fled a nagging complete. But the figures which have so far wife for the delights of an all-make Skid Row flop been compiled carry a tremendous impact. Mark and some peace and quiet. Keller of the Yale Group has made the following None of the men I met admlffed his life statement on the basis of what has been learned had been blighted by a maiden who spurned his so far: offer of matrimony. Nor did any charge infidelity “We are making a study on the subject. lt on the part of their wives. is not yet complete but we now have statistics But the doting mother, and the nagging indicating that 40 per cent of alcoholics are wife must take the blame for thousands who either ‘only children’ or ‘youngest.’ Also, the seek escape on Skid Row. Liquor, too, plays a more siblings older than the subject, the more heavy role here, of course, and no woman can be criticized for objecting if her husband is

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perpetually plastered. But, like the chicken and What steps are being taken to wipe out Skid Rowthe egg, it would be interesting to know which U.S.A.? Next week’s installment exposes the came first. inadequacies of our programs to help the unfortunate men who are America’s living dead

Source: Collier’s, August 27 , 1949