CITIES: Hallelujah Time for Bums

Along Manhattan’s Bowery last week, sad-eyed, dirt-dappled bums lazed in the sun that reaches their curbs and benches now that the Third Avenue elevated has been torn down. Along San Francisco’s Mission Street, the “lumbermen”—beggars on crutches—whined for nickels and dimes, counted up daily takes that often reached $45. Along Chicago’s West Madison Street “20% California muscatel” sold briskly at 40¢ a pint to “winos,” while around Baltimore’s Market Place the “smokehounds” with red-stained hands laboriously strained alcohol through handkerchiefs from the wax in cans of Sterno (29¢ a can, cut-rate) and gulped the pinkish alcohol after lining their stomachs with milk. Along the nation’s Skid Rows* prosperity was waxing. U.S. bums, in short, never had it so good.

Axes for Taxes. From city to city, the Skid Row habitués are finding just about everything they have the urge to wish for, i.e., a place to live in unpressured alcoholic freedom, a place eventually to die in peaceful alcoholic stupor. Food and board are cheap: 50¢ a night for a flop; two fried eggs, coffee, toast, mush and potatoes for a quarter. Money is adequate: handouts in these generous times are fat; pharmaceutical companies buy blood for $5 a pint if the donor appears sober; relief checks and unemployment compensation are punctual. If all else fails, a day’s dishwashing will net $8, and $8 is enough for a week’s luxurious living in a civilization where showers are free, haircuts and shaves cost nothing at a barber college, the missions hand out meals and lodging without so much of the old emphasis on “ear-banging” (a pre-meal religious service).

But in the midst of national plenty, the bums have come to sense new municipal flies in their bleary ointment. The same blissful prosperity has also brought the bright-eyed vision of urban redevelopment experts, the crash of demolition hammers and the thunder of falling brick. In many U.S. cities Skid Row is marked for extinction to make space for shining (and more taxworthy) office buildings or glassy, classy apartment houses. Kansas City’s Skid Row has fallen to an expressway. City planners in Denver have their eye on Larimer Street, and Los Angeles is midway in a civic cleanup on most of East Fifth Street’s Skid Row.

Atomized Bums. Last week civic planners got an urgent plea to think about the bums before the city beautiful. It came from Wilbert L. Hindman, chairman of the Los Angeles Welfare Planning Council’s Committee on Skid Row, a professor of business administration at the University of Southern California and member of the National Committee on the Homeless and Institutional Alcoholic. “Skid Row,” said he, “is a very healthy institution. It has sprung up spontaneously to meet the demands of the homeless ones—the men who have resigned from society. It is not something that was dreamed up by a group of armchair planners without any real notion of the needs. It has resisted change for more than a century. It is meeting certain needs and meeting them well.” Dr. Hindman’s solution: let Skid Row stand. “Before we do any tampering, we ought to understand what the needs are that Skid Row is filling, and then determine if we can meet those needs in a better way.”

The cops generally agree. Demolishing the bum areas would—as Dr. Hindman expresses it—”atomize” the bums; i.e., scatter them into dozens of unmanageable pockets. Hindman’s solution: do away with Skid Row by first preserving it, then by concentrating the best talents of all welfare agencies in rehabilitating the people involved. “Skid Row cannot be destroyed,” he said. “It must destroy itself.”

* The term evolves not from citizenry on the skids but from the fact that Seattle’s saloons, dives and bums thrived, around 1850, on a downhill thoroughfare called Skid Road—so named because oxen skidded logs along the road from the forest to the sawmill at water’s edge.