Skid Row

The searchers carved skid row into quadrants and advanced in small groups, aiming flashlights into the cold. They moved between nylon tents and cardboard lean-tos in the Toy District, where junkies had stripped the streetlights and left whole blocks in darkness. They roused the human bundles scattered around the tumbledown hotels and freshly painted lofts on Main Street, wasted faces blinking into their flashlights. They looked in the eastern section called the Bottoms, around the big missions and flea traps, and around the neighborhood's forbidding eastern edge, a zone of industrial warehouses and razor wire known as the Low Bottoms, where even now, hours before daylight, the crack trade was brisk.

Police in downtown Los Angeles have seen cellphone thefts soar as smartphones like the iPhone become easily turned into pay-as-you-go phones. In the first quarter of this year, thefts of cellphones increased 32% in the downtown area. In the one-mile-square area of skid row, the increase is even more pronounced, said Los Angeles Police Lt. Paul Vernon. Individuals reported 54 cellphones taken in crimes within skid row in the first three months of 2012, compared with 115 during all of 2011.

The number of people who died on downtown L.A.'s skid row has declined by 36% in the last four years, according to city records, the latest sign of major changes on what for decades has been the city's epicenter of homelessness and drug-dealing. Excluding murders and suicides, 60 people died in the skid row area in 2008, according to Los Angeles Police Department statistics. In 2005, there were 94 such deaths.

Carol Schatz, a leading advocate for downtown business owners, says in her April 9 Times Op-Ed article that a federal judge's ruling to uphold the property rights of skid row's homeless residents enables homelessness. I am a homeless enabler. My organization, Los Angeles Catholic Worker, has been publicly accused by police and the business community of being homeless enablers because we provide food -- more than 5,000 meals weekly. We provide blankets, raincoats and heavy blue tarps for shelter.

As evening falls, a dazed woman with a gangrenous thumb spreads a blanket over a row of plastic crates to make a bed on the urine-soaked sidewalk. As many as 10 people are camping along this stretch of pavement on 6th Street in downtown Los Angeles. Their belongings - tents, sleeping bags, shopping carts, a leather chair, at least two microwaves and piles of clothing - nearly cover the concrete. Rats scuttle in the gutter. A bony man lights up a crack pipe. Scenes like these had all but disappeared several years ago when the Safer City Initiative brought 50 additional police officers to the 50 gritty blocks known as skid row. Crime rates dropped, homeless encampments were cleared and the street population shrank.

He is an aggressive panhandler, with a grizzled beard, matted hair, dirty T-shirt. In his battered wheelchair he pushes himself backward, moving at lightning speed with the grace and agility of a star athlete. I have never been fond of Bob. He boldly stops traffic at the intersection holding cars hostage with horns blaring until he receives his ransom. When Bob comes to our soup kitchen he always goes to the head of the line. I resent his preferential treatment, because I suspect that he may not actually be physically disabled.

Skid row may be known for its devastating poverty and homelessness, but the Festival for All Skid Row Artists will underline a different aspect of the downtown community — its artistic potential. Lots of neighborhood artists (those who live and work there) will participate in visual art, music and spoken word as well as a documentation project meant to preserve the neighborhood's creativity. Gladys Park, 6th Street and Gladys Avenue, L.A. noon-4 p.m. Fri. and Sat. Free. lapovertydept.org.

It ought to be easy to decide whom to root for in a feud between these two guys: the crusading cop, champion of clean streets and quiet nights, and the drug-dealing ex-con, hell-bent on living outside the law. But when skid row is your vantage point, it's not as simple as it sounds. Last week I went on a ride along with Deon Joseph, the LAPD's lead officer in skid row, which harbors more homeless people than any other neighborhood in the nation. In my column I mentioned Joseph's effort to get rid of a collection of tents parked on a block of San Julian Street, across from the Union Rescue Mission.

Last weekend I paid visits to struggling San Fernando Valley families in need of Christmas charity . They were crammed into crowded houses and consigned to shabby garages. They skimped on meals and slept on beds with no sheets. This weekend, I took a step further down the economic ladder and spent Saturday night on a skid row sidewalk outside the Union Rescue Mission in downtown Los Angeles. Inside, hundreds of people, most of them homeless, were finishing dinner and settling on folding cots.

The plates were foam, the gravy in plastic pitchers and the disposable tablecloths brightly colored. The scorching sun beat down, and live gospel music blared from the makeshift stage. Sikhs passed out bags of fresh produce alongside Lutherans giving out hand-knit wool caps and wooden crosses. So went Thanksgiving on skid row, where more than 2,000 people -- homeless, jobless or just down on their luck -- lined up at the Fred Jordan Mission in downtown Los Angeles for a free feast of turkey legs, sweet potatoes, rolls, cranberry sauce and pie. Across Southern California, from a Hollywood comedy club to a hockey arena in Orange County, thousands turned up for free Thanksgiving meals.

A federal judge last year issued a preliminary injunction against the city of Los Angeles, effectively allowing anyone in the area around skid row to store personal belongings - including mattresses, overflowing plastic bags and shopping carts - on the sidewalks. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez was intended to protect the possessions of homeless and street people, and to prevent them from being mistaken for garbage and removed from the public sidewalks. As a predictable - if unintended - consequence of that ruling, hundreds of people have transformed the streets of skid row and surrounding neighborhoods into their personal storage facilities.

Jay, a homeless man sleeping near a Hollywood freeway onramp, awoke to the voices of police Friday morning. Los Angeles Police Department officers Julie Nony and Paula Davidson had rooted out an encampment of nine transients — including Jay — who were sleeping along the Highland Avenue onramp to Highway 101. Nony and Davidson were part of a team of roughly two dozen officers and sheriff's deputies who fanned out across Hollywood, trudging...

As evening falls, a dazed woman with a gangrenous thumb spreads a blanket over a row of plastic crates to make a bed on the urine-soaked sidewalk. As many as 10 people are camping along this stretch of pavement on 6th Street in downtown Los Angeles. Their belongings - tents, sleeping bags, shopping carts, a leather chair, at least two microwaves and piles of clothing - nearly cover the concrete. Rats scuttle in the gutter. A bony man lights up a crack pipe. Scenes like these had all but disappeared several years ago when the Safer City Initiative brought 50 additional police officers to the 50 gritty blocks known as skid row. Crime rates dropped, homeless encampments were cleared and the street population shrank.

City Atty. Carmen Trutanich is a man of his word. OK, perhaps not when it comes to his campaign promise to serve out his full term, but certainly when it involves the city's homeless policies. Last June, his office vowed to appeal a preliminary injunction by a federal court that temporarily barred the city's Bureau of Street Services and police from seizing or destroying the unattended property of homeless people in downtown's skid row neighborhood. This month, he followed through, asking the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the injunction on the grounds that the city's homeless are in effect using the sidewalks as "their own public storage area.

Lionel Rogosin's 1956 film "On the Bowery" is a time capsule in at least two senses: a portrait of a hand-to-mouth existence of a once-notorious New York City thoroughfare, as well as a glimpse into a largely forgotten byway of American documentary film. The milelong stretch of Lower Manhattan known as the Bowery was a thriving entertainment district in the 19th century. But by the time of Rogosin's indelible chronicle — which Milestone Films is issuing in a two-disc DVD this week, in both standard and Blu-ray editions — the neighborhood had long been in decline.

A skid row hotel notorious for being one of the worst drug-trafficking locales in Los Angeles has been transformed through a $28-million makeover into housing for low-income residents. SRO Housing Corp. bought the Ford Hotel in 2008 and renovated it. It now contains 150 studio units with kitchenettes and full bathrooms - an upgrade from the communal restrooms of the past. Residents have access to computers, a television lounge and a private tiled courtyard The Ford was built in 1925 as a six-story residence hotel with 295 units.

The hard-core Occupy L.A. crowd is still at it, even though its encampment is gone. Protesters marched through downtown this weekend and rallied Monday at City Hall. But the hard-luck Occupy L.A. contingent is back to life as it was before — sleeping on cardboard pallets on filthy streets and crowding skid row shelters for meals. It's impossible to know how many Occupy L.A. protesters came from the ranks of skid row homeless. The skid row folks were considered a management issue in the tent-city enclave, running off more genteel protesters with rough language and raucous behavior.

Los Angeles police officer Deon Joseph followed a trail of discarded paper plates and half-eaten macaroni down 6th Street and around the corner into San Pedro Street. There he found his targets: members of a church group, heads bowed in prayer after serving lunch to a long line of homeless people. Dozens of groups from across the Southland converge on downtown Los Angeles every week to hand out food and clothing in skid row, which has been called the homeless capital of the nation.

The concert stage for the Operation Skid Row festival was set up on Gladys Avenue between 5th and 6th, in the heart of downtown L.A.'s homeless district. As a white SUV turned onto Gladys, a murmur rippled through the crowd, turning into a roar as the hip-hop legend, elder statesman and co-organizer of the event, Public Enemy's Chuck D, exited the vehicle. The goal of the free show Sunday was twofold: for hip-hop artists to perform gratis for skid row residents, and to spotlight the economic and political plight of L.A.'s homeless.

The U.S. Supreme Court has let stand a ruling that overturned murder convictions in two slayings tied to the so-called "Skid Row Stabber," who was thought to be responsible for the killing of as many as 10 homeless men in downtown Los Angeles in the late 1970s. After a lengthy trial in 1984, Bobby Joe Maxwell was convicted of two murders and sentenced to life in prison. Last year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals set aside his convictions because a key witness for the prosecution, a jailhouse informant named Sidney Storch, had been exposed as a "habitual liar.