Word: skids
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...inhabitants of Skid Row have been type-cast by police and rescue missions as dirty, diseased, indolent, iniquitous and unreclaimable men. In fact, they deserve only a part of this broadside indictment. The Skid Rower's prin cipal crime against the prevailing values of U.S. society is his stubborn refusal to accept them. On the Bowery, investigators found that 55% of the inhabitants had never married, one-third had never voted, two-thirds claimed no close friend either on or off Skid Row. One in four, asked where he expected to be a year hence, predicted that he might...
Adaptation. The Skid Rower's steady collision with the law-mostly involving repeated arrests for drunkenness or vagrancy-is misleading. He is peaceful to the point of passivity. Most of Skid Row's crime statistics are due either to zealous police sweeping public drunks off the pavement, or to "hawks"-the area's name for predators who come in from the outside, frequently to relieve a drunkard of his freshly cashed welfare check. His lengthy arrest record, says Sociologist Wallace, can actually be construed as "a fairly stable adaptation [to] a society that is willing to support...
Changing economics of urban life have doomed these passive protesters. In a time of full employment and of increased welfare benefits at every government level, it is no longer so necessary for psychological dropouts to take up the Skid Row life. "Skid Rowers don't last long," says Chicago's VanderKooi. "The community has to recruit to survive. Yet only the West Coast Skids seem to be attracting any younger men-drawn, in part, by the area's hospitable climate and by the availability of harvesttime jobs." The median age of Bowery residents today...
...Skid Row's inhabitants thought of themselves as protesters in any formal way; probably most accepted society's verdict on them as tired, aimless drifters. Yet implicitly they did protest-and reject-the prevailing values of a work-oriented middle-class society. Their unstated message concerned failure: their own, and that of society, which failed to heed the gentle rebuke of the Skid Rower's isolation. Today's dropouts, however, are activists, whose purpose is not to shun the Establishment but to challenge and change it. The men on Skid Row would never understand that...
...term is a tribute to Seattle's Yesler Way. Down this greased slope, in the old logging days, slithered the cut logs on their way to Puget Sound. The lumberjacks themselves, living and brawling in work shacks on either side of Yesler Way, called their community "Skid...