Skid Row Los Angeles

Hoping to provide relief for tourists, shoppers and the homeless, the City Council backed Tuesday a contract worth $750 million to install at least 150 self-cleaning toilets and 2,500 bus shelters on streets throughout Los Angeles.

Bobby Livingston couldn't sleep. The indoor quiet was unnerving, the softness of his mattress all wrong. For weeks after moving into Room 216 at the Senator Hotel, he found comfort only on a hard tile floor that felt reassuringly like the pavement. Horses and dogs flitted across the ceiling of his room, but he described the visions as familiar and untroubling, like the voices in his head. Sometimes the dead visited him full-bodied -- long-gone family from the red clay roads of South Carolina -- and he asked Jesus why he wasn't yet among them.

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.

Cheerful Christmas carols, red-suited Santas and shiny new toys brought smiles to thousands of children and their families as they crowded the downtown Los Angeles area Sunday for annual food and toy giveaways. More than 10,000 children from downtown and surrounding neighborhoods flocked to the Fred Jordan Mission for its 32nd annual event, billed as skid row's largest Christmas toy party. More than 450 volunteers readied themselves with sacks stuffed with Legos, Barbies and other dolls, remote-controlled cars, skateboards, puzzles, books, soccer balls and other goodies.

A respected skid row facility that provides shelter and counseling to homeless people became a site for drug dealing, leading to a double homicide inside the Lamp Lodge earlier this year, according to police detectives and court records. Los Angeles Police Department detectives allege that dealers sold rock cocaine and heroin out of the Lamp Lodge for months, a practice that ended after one of the alleged drug dealers and another man were shot to death there in April. Lamp officials said claims of widespread drug dealing at the facility are overblown.

A paraplegic man wearing a soiled hospital gown and a broken colostomy bag was found crawling in a gutter in skid row in Los Angeles on Thursday after allegedly being dumped in the street by a Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center van, police said. The incident, witnessed by more than two dozen people, was described by police as a particularly outrageous case of "homeless dumping" that has plagued the downtown area. "I can't think of anything colder than that," said LAPD Det.

A UCLA study found that the city's year-old Safer City Initiative to clean up skid row has reduced crime but that few additional social services have been initiated. "There have been unintended consequences that have negatively impacted the homeless and mentally disabled people, with unpaid citations for jaywalking leading to people going to jail and a focus on small-quantity drug buys ending up with ordinary addicts being sent to state prison," said author Gary Blasi, a UCLA law professor.

The Volunteers of America readmitted residents to its Women and Couples Shelter on Skid Row in Los Angeles Tuesday, ending a one-day lockout that was part of an effort to shut down its operations. According to an agreement between the nonprofit agency and the Inner City Law Center, representing about 20 residents who suddenly found themselves homeless on Monday, the residents will stay at the shelter at 611 E. 5th St. while VOA helps them find other housing.

"A drug-addict lady had a baby in the lobby," Pablo is saying. "She didn't even know she was having a baby. People been found in their rooms dead from ODs. The night before last, somebody got stabbed in the street." Pablo sits with his wife and year-old daughter in what used to be an opulent hotel suite. They have been here more than a year, paying $325 a month for a room with no kitchen and no bathroom mirror. A strip of wood nailed outside the front door is meant to keep the rats out.

Check-in at the Cecil Hotel had to wait a few minutes because Kerri Torrance, the clerk working the graveyard shift one night in November, had to deal with a heist. A man staying on the 10th floor had called down to report that a woman had grabbed his money and bolted. After the woman dashed through the lobby and burst out the front doors onto Main Street, Torrance called police while a handful of guests waited. "She's right out there . . . you see . . . well . . .

Craby Joe's bar was known as a dive for cheap, bottom-shelf liquor and peeling faux-wood on downtown's South Main Street. It closed two years ago after it was made famous by author Charles Bukowski and infamous by former Los Angeles City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo, whose office called the place a magnet for "rock cocaine sales." If Craby Joe's reflected a troubled old downtown, a developer is proposing a bar at the site that would reflect the gentrified downtown of lofts, boutique hotels and night life.

A respected skid row facility that provides shelter and counseling to homeless people became a site for drug dealing, leading to a double homicide inside the Lamp Lodge earlier this year, according to police detectives and court records. Los Angeles Police Department detectives allege that dealers sold rock cocaine and heroin out of the Lamp Lodge for months, a practice that ended after one of the alleged drug dealers and another man were shot to death there in April. Lamp officials said claims of widespread drug dealing at the facility are overblown.

Steve Richardson, who goes by the name "Gen. Dogon" on the streets of L.A.'s skid row, is the kind of person federal regulators had in mind when they created the digital-television transition's subsidy. Richardson's job at a civil rights group leaves him with barely enough money for food. He can't afford a converter box to keep his antenna-equipped TV working on June 12, when stations across the country turn off their analog signals and start broadcasting solely in digital.

The trappings of the lives of Krystle Marage and her three daughters are not unusual. There are hairbrushes and loofah sponges; Game Boys and skateboards; school books and Bibles; clothes, clothes and more clothes. These days, they have to fit it all inside four trash cans, which sit alongside 500 others in a dank warehouse, around the corner from a frozen fish distributor and a cheap hotel. Marage, 46, grew up on a pig-and-chicken farm in Belize.

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.

Los Angeles police officers face significant restrictions on how they search and detain people under a settlement announced Thursday in a long-running case involving the rights of the homeless on skid row. The agreement comes 18 months after a federal judge found that the Los Angeles Police Department was unconstitutionally searching homeless people in the skid row area as part of Chief William J. Bratton's crackdown on downtown crime.

The Los Angeles city attorney's office filed false-imprisonment and dependent-care-endangerment charges against hospital giant Kaiser Permanente on Wednesday, the first criminal prosecution of a medical center accused of "dumping" patients on skid row. The charges stem from an incident earlier this year when a 63-year-old patient from Kaiser Permanente's Bellflower hospital was videotaped as she left a taxi in gown and socks, and then wandered skid row streets.

Bobby Livingston couldn't sleep. The indoor quiet was unnerving, the softness of his mattress all wrong. For weeks after moving into Room 216 at the Senator Hotel, he found comfort only on a hard tile floor that felt reassuringly like the pavement. Horses and dogs flitted across the ceiling of his room, but he described the visions as familiar and untroubling, like the voices in his head. Sometimes the dead visited him full-bodied -- long-gone family from the red clay roads of South Carolina -- and he asked Jesus why he wasn't yet among them.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has vetoed a $96,000 contract for outside legal help to defend the city against allegations that it discriminates against the disabled on skid row. It marks only the fourth veto the mayor has issued since taking office in 2005.

It's the smell you notice first: not the usual scent for this part of downtown, more accustomed to overflowing trash cans, sour urine and the stench of people who have spent too long sleeping on L.A.'s streets. Instead, it's sweet and green, with a tinge of lavender -- and it comes from the vegetable garden that residents of the Rainbow Apartments planted last week in a most unlikely place: attached to a cinder-block wall of a parking lot off San Julian Street in the heart of skid row.