Word: skid
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Like most inner-city open space, the new 15,000-sq.-ft. Skid Row Park, just east of downtown Los Angeles, is littered with drunks and derelicts. But no one minds. The place was designed for them. The designers of the park, a Los Angeles firm called POD, Inc. (Process Oriented Design), have won an award from the American Society of Landscape Architects for their thoughtful and straightforward approach to a tough urban problem-combining a community park with a haven for bums...
...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...
...track, and on the turns you can see almost a quarter of the course. The public address system keeps up a faster commentary than any ABC announcer. On television, the cars seem to glide through the turns, accelerating smoothly into the straightaways. But the roaring machines actually skid through each turn and make sickening little sideways hops towards the wall No one was injured in this year's race, but it's easy to see how Gordon Smylie's car lost traction in a turn during qualifying. Medics used four separate ambulances to pick up the pieces...