Word: skid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sperry's dominance of the booming boat-shoe market is not unchallenged, however. The Timberland Co., a family-owned business that operates out of a former mill in Newmarket, N.H., is aggressively going after the no-skid business...
Seymour Krelboin, a nebbishy lad who works in Mushnik's Skid Row Flower Shop, is in love with Mr. Mushnik's daughter Audrey. By crossing a butterwort with a Venus's-flytrap, Seymour creates a new plant type, which he calls Audrey Jr. and which, it happens, feeds on human blood. As it feeds, it grows, until it has spread over the entire store. Soon the notoriety of Audrey Jr. brings the little shop more business than it can handle. But there is a catch in this Faustian bargain: Seymour must oblige the plant's noisy...
...problem was posed by the local Community Redevelopment Agency as part of its attempt to restore downtown economic health by bravely attacking Skid Row, a nearby slum of roughly 10,000 to 15,000 people that is a sort of sunlit version of Charles Dickens' London. The $25 million plan called for making the slum more livable with new housing, rehabilitation, social programs and two parks. Skid Row bums, the theory went, could be dissuaded from wandering downtown by being given patches of grass and benches to sleep on, a shelter for keeping dry, toilets, and freedom from harassment...
...haven" concept was pioneered in 1980 by the Sixth Street People's Park in the South of Market section of San Francisco, but Wino Park, as it is locally known, is hardly a community asset. Skid Row Park is-or at least promises to be. Graffiti on a wall and sprawling drunks are never a pleasant sight. But despite them, youngsters in Skid Row Park use the basketball court, and smaller children play in the sandbox. Most of the neighborhood-illegal Mexican immigrants, destitute transients, the elderly and other community residents-seem to take equal pride in the place...
...plan Skid Row Park, POD held two workshops. In the first, some 45 community residents, social workers, bums and police officers roughed out designs with such makeshift materials as paper cups, ice cream sticks and colored paper. In the second, a similar group scrutinized POD's preliminary proposal and suggested refinements...