History

Digging Up Vine Street In Search Of Old Skid Row

April 26, 2017 | by Steve Metraux

 

Franklin Square Park, 1955. Philip Spencer (left) of Friends Neighborhood Guild with Skid Row residents during the course of FNG’s tuberculosis outreach project. Photographer: Philip Taylor. | Image courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries

“An approach to Philadelphia not soon forgotten is on the beautiful [Benjamin Franklin] Bridge high over the river and the city, followed by Franklin Square–also known as ‘Bum’s Park.’ When a traveler sees a tree-filled square with hundreds of men reclining on park benches or lined up for soup and salvation across the street then he has arrived in Philadelphia.”

The Health and Welfare Council opened their 1952 report, What About Philadelphia’s Skid Row?, with this vignette of a motorist’s first impression upon entering Philadelphia. Coming off the bridge from New Jersey, cars would land on Vine Street at 6th Street, with Franklin Square taking up the southern side of the block and the Sunday Breakfast Mission sitting on the northwest corner. This was the gateway to Skid Row and, for the next three blocks, Vine Street was its main drag.

Generally speaking, skid row denoted an area, present in larger mid-20th century American cities, that originated as a district of itinerant and near indigent workingmen. As this population aged and dwindled after World War II, these areas retained signature amenities like cheap hotels, religious missions, and bars, all ensconced by seediness and decay. Skid Row also took on human dimensions as a symbol of alcoholism and failure, and it provided a cautionary tale on the wages of sin. Most people on Skid Row were, strictly speaking, in housing. The homelessness endemic to this area manifested itself more as a form of cultural and social alienation. Because of this, both the public and the social scientist held an outsized fascination with Skid Row, where, in the words of sociologist Theodore Caplow, “for the price of a subway ride, you can enter a country where the accepted principles of social interaction do not apply.”

In Philadelphia, Skid Row’s origins trace back to the 1890s, when contemporary accounts began referring to a “homeless man area” in the Race and Vine Streets vicinity. However, this area–north-south from Arch to Callowhill Streets and east-west from 6th to 11th Streets–already had four other defining identities. The most colorful of these was the Tenderloin, Philadelphia’s vice district, which, by the 1950s, had largely moved elsewhere. Philadelphia newspapers would still use the terms “Skid Row” and “Tenderloin” interchangeably. In contrast, Chinatown, centered at 9th and Race Streets, was a neighborhood on the rise that overlapped with Skid Row spatially, but maintained its distance socially.

Skid Row was also in Philadelphia’s rooming house district. After the initial wave of upper-class flight to the streetcar suburbs in the late 19th century, this area’s housing stock was subdivided and became attractive to both workingmen and white collar workers of both genders. As the housing stock aged and deteriorated, its tenants became more uniformly poor. Finally, Skid Row blended into a transition zone containing a variety of non-residential uses: downtown-type commercial storefronts south of Vine Street and light industrial plants to the north.

The Down-and-Out District

The first newspaper references to a “Skid Row” in Philadelphia occurred in 1949. By then, the first steps towards the eventual wholesale demolition of the area were already underway. Coming off the Benjamin Franklin Bridge onto Vine Street was a notorious traffic bottleneck. In response, the City tore down the south-side streetscape going west from 7th Street to widen it in 1949, thereby taking the first steps towards an eventual Vine Street Expressway. During that period, two urban renewal plans each proposed to gut parts of Skid Row. However, further implementation of these projects would drag out over the next two decades.

Map of Philadelphia’s Skid Row, with selected amenities, from the Philadelphia Health and Welfare Council’s report What About Philadelphia’s Skid Row?, 1952. | Image courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries

Despite this looming existential threat, the rhythms of Skid Row continued through the 1950s. Franklin Square Park was the most visible manifestation of the area’s heartbeat. Jane Jacobs, in her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, described it as the park of “the homeless, the unemployed and the people of indigent leisure.” Jacobs continued, “If the weather permits, a day-long outdoor reception holds sway. The benches at the center of the reception are filled, with a voluble standing overflow milling about. Conversational groups continually form and dissolve into one another. The guests behave respectfully to one another and are courteous to interlopers too. Almost imperceptibly, like the hand of a clock, this raggle-taggle reception creeps around the circular pool at the center of the square. And indeed, it is the hand of a clock, for it is following the sun, staying in the warmth. When the sun goes down the clock stops; the reception is over until tomorrow.”

As the sun set, some would have crossed the street and queued up in the line outside of the Sunday Breakfast Mission. The “Sunday B” was one of three missions on Vine Street, along with the Galilee Mission, on the corner of Darien Street, and the Salvation Army Harbor Light Center, on the corner of 8th Street. There were at least five smaller missions located just off Vine Street as well. The goal of these missions was to provide shelter, meals, and material aid as the means to “save souls.” Such evangelism was the predominant form of outreach and rehabilitation available on Skid Row in the 1950s. According to Martin Walsh, director of the John 5:24 Mission at 324 North 2nd Street during this period, “no person could be rehabilitated unless he was ‘saved’.” Others took a more entrepreneurial approach to this work. Robert Fraser, known as “Philadelphia’s Blind Singing Evangelist,” was the director of the Fraser Radio Gospel Mission at 153 North 9th Street in the 1950s. He once claimed that the “greatest opportunity to win souls for Christ is centered at the mission.”

The big three Vine Street missions were venerable Skid Row cornerstones, each with large, plain, solid buildings that reflected the gravity of their Protestant evangelism. Missions represented the lowest economic rung of Skid Row lodging, most appealing when lacking the money for any other kind of “flop”. They would typically offer a free meal and dormitory bed for up to a week each month and then charge 15 or 20 cent a night afterwards (the equivalent of $1.50 to $2.00 today). An additional price of this aid was mandatory attendance at a religious service, and lights out was at 9PM. Such religious and personal structure was enough to keep many away and led to the derisive terms of “mission stiff” for the regular habitué and “nose dive” for the act of feigning a religious conversion for a night’s accommodation at a mission. Despite such derision, a 1961 Temple University study found that 25 percent of Philadelphia’s Skid Row population spent the previous night in a mission.

Cars coming off the Benjamin Franklin Bridge at 6th and Vine Streets, 1952. Left to right: Sunday Breakfast Mission and Rubin’s Employment Service. Franklin Square is off photo to the left. Photographer: Elwood P. Smith | Image courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries

Several doors down from the Sunday B was the Central Hotel at 623 Vine Street. In the early 1950s, Chuck Perry, a caseworker for the Friends Neighborhood Guild, compiled a neighborhood inventory of missions and hotels. Of the Central Hotel, he reported “73 stalls and a dormitory with 32 beds. Rents are 40 cents and fifty cents a night, $1.75 per week for a dormitory, $2.50 a week for a stall. Stalls have padlocks. Clients frequently complain about the heat and facilities. Few of the stalls have windows. Lighting, ventilation, sanitation have been particularly bad, but landlord has recently done some remodeling, in conjunction with fire-proofing ordered by the fire marshal. The lobby of the hotel is dirty and untidy and poorly lighted. Clients have reported a great deal of petty thievery. No recipient has been refused admittance regardless of his appearance or manner. Tenants are frequently drunk and disorderly and liquor is consumed quite openly. Several clients advise that the clerk makes a sizable profit from the sale of liquor on Sunday [and] lends money at exorbitant rates.”

Perry’s inventory includes six other similar hotels on, or just off of, Vine Street between 6th and 9th Streets. A 1954 report by Perry’s colleague at FNG, Philip Spencer, counted “15 men’s hotels, generally called ‘flop houses,’ and four rooming houses advertised as hotels [in Skid Row]. They are two to four stories high and house 35 to 225 men. They charge 35 to 60 cents a night for a bed.” The quality of these hotels varied, but reformers shared the concerns related to health, safety, and clientele that Perry noted in his description.

The hotels’ owners resisted efforts to shut them down. In 1950, Coroner Joseph Ominsky appealed to a judge to close the Phillips Hotel at 151 North 9th Street after 17 men died there over a six month period. “It’s a rat trap, a firetrap, a medieval torture chamber,” Ominsky charged.

“I’ll admit the place isn’t up to par, but what can you do?” responded owner Philip Rappaport. The hotel stayed open. One source of the hotels’ resilience may have been an active Skid Row vote; at least two hotel owners were party committeemen and two hotels–the Golden on 730 Race Street and the Hiway on 812 Vine Street–were polling places in the 1953 election. It was only after a 1962 fire killed three residents of the North 8th Street Hotel at 148 North 8th Street that a campaign led by City Council President Paul D’Ortona succeeded in closing three hotels.

Despite often deplorable conditions, the flophouses housed roughly forty percent of the Skid Row population on a given night. Spencer reflects that “the men choose to stay at the hotels for various reasons; they want a bed off of the street or out of the cold. They have limited financial resources; they like to live near bars. They have friends who stay at the hotels; they want a place where they can live and perhaps away from folks who have rejected them. They may want an independent life; they want to be with men like themselves, or they are used to living in the area.”

600 Block Vine Street between Marshall and 7th Streets, 1969. Left to right: McGarry’s Loan Office, various rooming houses, and the Central Hotel. Photographer: Jack Tinney | Image courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries

A step up from the flophouses were the numerous rooming houses that took up the remaining structures on the 600 block of Vine Street and dotted the surrounding area. Most tenants paid rent from old age pensions and wages, while others paid with welfare stipends. Landlords often lived on the premises and also appeared to be of modest means, like Mrs. James Allison at 625 Vine Street, where, in the words of Perry, the “house and furnishings are old but in good repair and very clean; house is well run, orderly, quiet. About six rooms on second floor and third floor rent for approximately $3.50 a week, including heat and light. The rooms are furnished.”

Other rooming houses were run by absentee landlords, who were more inclined to have problematic properties. The house next door to Mrs. Allison, at 627 Vine Street, was operated by Max Borasky, owner of the Central Hotel and several other nearby properties. Perry described 627 Vine as a “three floor house. Very dirty and in extremely bad repair. Insects around. Three small apartments on the first floor. About eight rooms on the second floors. A few of the rooms have gas hot plates which are primarily intended for heating water, since hot water is not provided in the bathrooms. Clients frequently complain about lack of heat.” Weekly rent there was $6 for an apartment and $3 or $4 dollars for a room.

The most notorious area slumlord was Jacob Rubin, dubbed the “Mayor of Rubinville” by the Philadelphia Inquirer by virtue of his owning upwards of 50 residential properties, three bars, and Rubin’s Employment Service at 531 Vine Street. In 1960, Rubin was appointed constable of this area, meaning that he had the authority to evict his own tenants.

Only five percent of the Skid Row population failed to find lodging on any given night. Sleeping outdoors or “carrying the flag” risked arrest for vagrancy and spending the night at in lock up at either the Philadelphia House of Correction or the 6th District’s police station. This station, located just off Vine Street on 11th and Winter Streets, is one of the few Skid Row structures still standing today.

Hockshops, Canned Heat, and Sneaky Pete

Down Vine Street on the corner of 7th Street was McGarry’s Loan Office. Pawnshops and second hand clothing stores were common features on Skid Row. Nothing of value lasted long there before being either stolen, sold, or hocked. A rooming house and a small, unnamed hotel occupied the slice of land between 7th and Franklin Streets. This hotel, according to Perry’s notes, “preferably caters to clients of Russian and Jewish origin.” Across Franklin Street, a hulking Hertz car rental garage dominated the rest of the 700 block. At the end of this block was another hotel, the St. Louis. These properties were all on the street’s north side. The most notable structure on the barren southern side of this block was the Lyceum Theater at 720-726 Vine Street, razed in 1933. Around the corner on 8th Street between Race and Vine, were three more grand, Tenderloin-era theaters, all in substantial decline. Forepaugh’s at 255 North 8th Street was screening movies up until 1955 and was demolished five years later. Further south on 8th Street block were the Gayety and the Bijou, razed in 1953 and 1967, respectively.

On the 800 block of Vine Street, among the longest standing storefronts, was Brady’s Grill, a typical Skid Row bar that survived through the 1960s behind an uninviting façade and a nondescript sign. In Skid Row bars, “Sneaky Pete” wine was 15 cents a glass, but the advice given to a reporter for a local newspaper at the time was to never drink from a glass unless you have to. Reporters’ accounts noted the distinct lack of both sociability and attention to interior décor. These were places for drinking, where, depending on available cash, patrons either would slam drinks or nurse them to maximize the time they would be able to remain inside. In 1970, reporter Bill Speers wrote how, in the area bars “almost every rule in the Liquor Control Board handbook is being violated. First off, the bars are dirty. In the bar next to the Gem [Green Lantern bar on 9th Street just south of Vine], the brightest item in the place is the owner’s 1969-70 liquor license. In addition to serving visibly intoxicated persons, they also sell on credit. Wine quarts are sold over the counter and merchandise—no questions asked—accepted in lieu of money. The back of one bar looks like a pawn shop.”

821-831 Vine Street, 1964. From left, Jerry’s restaurant, the Francis Hotel, the Victory luncheonette, and (all the way at the end) the Galilee Mission were all present in the early 1950s. Photographer: Dr. Brian H. Davies | Photo courtesy of Matt Davies

In 1958, sociologist Earl Rubington counted 23 liquor outlets and a state-run liquor store in the Skid Row area. Based on this figure he calculated the per capita booze outlet rate to have been about four times that of the overall city. The bars were mostly on the numbered streets, particularly on 8th and 9th Streets between Race and Vine. The only time these bars garnered attention was in the wake of either criminal activity or police raids for underage drinking or serving visibly intoxicated patrons. On one night in 1964, police arrested bartenders at three bars on one entire block at 238, 248, and 251 North 8th Street. The drinkers didn’t get a break either, as the HWC report tallied 8,739 Skid Row arrests for drunkenness in 1950 alone, one quarter of all such arrests in Philadelphia that year. While there were only two accounts of bars actually located on Vine Street in the 1950s, Skid Row’s most notorious purveyor of alcohol operated out of a cigar store at the corner of 8th and Vine Streets. In 1965, Max Feinberg received a manslaughter conviction for selling the Sterno, a heating fuel containing 54 percent wood alcohol (known as “canned heat”) that led to the poisoning deaths of 35 Skid Row residents in a one-month period.

Another longtime fixture of the 800 block of Vine Street was Jerry’s Restaurant, which, according to Hoag Levins in a Philadelphia Inquirer article from 1969, “offered a lima bean soup special for 25 cents and what is probably the last of the 10-cent cups of coffee in town.” Hotels and rooming houses did not provide cooking facilities, and, thus, cheap restaurants were a Skid Row necessity. The Busy Bee, just off Vine Street on 263 North 9th Street, offered a menu with a choice of 25-cent plates (1947 prices) that included lamb stew, scrapple and egg, and Boston beans. The Liberty luncheonette was also on the 800 block of Vine Street.

Between the Salvation Army and Galilee missions on the 800 block of Vine Street was the Matt Talbot House, the only Catholic presence on Skid Row until St. John’s Hospice opened in 1963 at 12th and Race Streets. Matt Talbot House ministered to alcoholics and operated a thrift store for financial support. Four hotels–the Hiway, the Frances, the Clover, and the Gem–were all either on or just off of this block. 

Although Skid Row’s boundary stretched west to 11th Street, the district’s physical imprint upon Vine Street effectively ended at 9th Street. One exception was Teasley’s flyer distribution service on the corner of 11th Street. This “muzzling” work, along with the Rubin’s Employment Service on the 500 block of Vine Street, provided temporary labor opportunities preferred by Skid Row men. Beyond this, much of the 900 block of Vine Street was the site of the Holy Redeemer Church and School, a key Chinatown institution that sidestepped the Expressway construction after a protracted campaign saved it from demolition. Otherwise, many of the buildings on these blocks were warehouses, dry cleaners, and clothing manufacturing enterprises.

Corner of 8th and Vine Streets, looking north, 1973. Photographer: James A. Craig | Image courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries

The early 1950s marked both the heyday of Philadelphia’s Skid Row and, with the demolition of Vine Street’s southern streetscape, the first visible indicator of its demise. In addition to plans for the Vine Street Expressway, the Skid Row segment of Vine Street was the dividing line between two urban renewal areas–Franklin Square to the north and Independence Hall to the south. This sense of marked time reinforced Skid Row’s endemic sense of fatalism and decline. Landlords pleaded the futility of making improvements in the face of imminent demolition, and social workers fretted about where the men would relocate when the wrecking ball finally swung. The progress of these urban renewal projects could be measured by Skid Row’s population decline; gradual at first, from 3,000 in 1952 to 2,857 in 1960, and more rapidly after that, to 800 in 1969 and to 300 in 1975. Skid Row’s official end came in 1976, when the last remaining Skid Row hotel, the Darien on 323 North Darien Street, came down.

The Vine Street Expressway, completed in 1991, has erased all traces of Philadelphia’s Skid Row Vine Street with the exception of Franklin Square. Any argument in favor of preserving the signature flophouses and fire traps of Skid Row is now a hypothetical one. Nonetheless, Skid Row’s absence still resonates. Homelessness has proliferated in its wake. Today it is much more visible, less geographically contained, and doubtlessly more prolific following the destruction of a large swath of the rooming house and hotel stock in and around Skid Row, which allowed many to maintain an anonymous, independent livelihood. At this point, if one were to commemorate Skid Row, it would be best to simply take a seat in Franklin Square, where it is still possible to follow the sun around the fountain and watch cars make their descent into the city.

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About the Author

Steve Metraux Over his career, Steve Metraux has done extensive research on homelessness and related topics. He is currently on faculty at the University of Delaware, and has called West Philadelphia “home” since 1995. He has spent the quarter century since then exploring Philadelphia, mostly through morning runs, and walks and bicycle rides with his three children. More information about him is available at www.stephenmetraux.com

24 Comments:

  1. See my Hidden City pieces “The Life And Death Of Callowhill,” “A Rich Past And Possible Green Future For Spring Garden Street,” “Obliterated,” “The Cheapest Place Of Entertainment In The World,” “Poor Little Willow Street,” and “Running Away With The Circus At 10th And Callowhill” for more on this most interesting part of Philadelphia.

  2. Mary Sweeten says:

    Don’t know if this is an issue with the Temple collection or what — it would be nice to credit the publication these pictures came from, as well as the photographers…without the Bulletin and the Daily News paying their salaries, we wouldn’t have these kinds of great visual records from Jack TInney and Elwood Smith (respectively).

  3. Lorraine says:

    I remember as a kid taking the route 47 bus home and, seeing what we used to call the Vine street bulbs and, the old flop houses. In this I rarely saw a female in this area but,always wondered how many of these people walked away from their families and, high paying jobs at the time.

    Thanks for showing the true history of Center city Philadelphia now I guess Kensington will be the next place in fifty years to be written as the next skid row. Kensington section is worse than Vine street ever was.

    1. Davis says:

      I’m dubious that any walked away from “high paying jobs” – more likely they were already poor with no prospects.

      1. Angie says:

        Some may have had high paying jobs. The photo from the early 50s was not even 10 years after WW2. I’m sure PTSD, depression, and alcoholism caught up with many vets who were doing well financially back in the day.

        1. Roy Tillery says:

          I was born and raised at 9th and Carlton in 1938and have good and bad memories of the area

  4. Lee says:

    I published a book how to con your way out of skid row !

  5. Jim Clark says:

    When I lived in California (near the Bay Area) I volunteered at a homeless shelter for 10 years. I can not recall any one there saying that they were happy to be there. Sometimes it was the individual’s fault. sometimes it was not. An interesting fact, in that 10 years I met 3 PHd’s!

  6. Mark says:

    I remember movie nights during the summer in Holy Redeemer’s parking lot, late 60’s. We would get fries from Jerry’s restaurant. I think they were 25 cents. He would dump them in a paper bag, add ketchup and shake it up. We would tear the bag open to eat and sit and watch the movie. As the aroma wafted across the parking lot more and more kids got up to get their own orders. Later our parents would scream at us for going to Jerry’s because the bums were “going to kidnap you!”.

  7. Art Alexion says:

    Thanks for the fascinating article.

    Urban renewal is not the sole reason for the changes described though. It is not mentioned that the closing of state mental hospitals and the “least restrictive environment” doctrine changed the face of homelessness in the city. The article notes that less than 5% of the skid row population slept outdoors instead of a hotel or flop. Many of those currently homeless and living in the streets are driven (by choice or involuntarily) from shelters and such by their mental illness. And many of the vagrancy laws that drove the people to the hotels and such were invalidated by the Supreme Court.

  8. Aidan J says:

    There is a modern day skid row reminiscent of this article. On 13th street between Vine and Callowhill there is a Sunday Breakfast Club that I believe continues to give out free meals. On this block and the alleys that surround it there are almost always a large number of homeless people. It doesn’t help that the main tenant on the block is a storage facility.

  9. Anthony Orlando says:

    Very interesting article , my family & I have a business at 7th& Callowhill and never knew this history of skid row.
    Our physical address is 621-659 Callowhill so very curious what use to sit on our half of block that most likely was taken down with the rest of skid row .

  10. Phillip Schearer says:

    As a child I had no direct contact with Philly’s Skid Row, but I grew up knowing a lot about it thanks to my Uncle Hxxxx. An alcoholic from youth, he used to carry (so he said) a pistol to guard beer trucks during Prohibition. At least one long stay in the Veterans Hospital in South Philly did no good. Eventually he settled into a routine when every Monday morning he would walk 20 miles from his flop house to our home in the suburbs to do manual labor in my father’s business. During the week he slept on a cot in the basement, occasionally nipping at the cooking sherry. Friday he would get paid, walk back to Skid Row, and stay drunk the weekend until Monday morning when the sad cycle would repeat. At the end he was found frozen in an abandoned building on Front street, requiring a week defrosting to fit in a coffin. What a waste of a life.

    (BTW, the author of the 1969 article cited is Hoag LEVINS, not Livins.)

    1. James J. Marlowe II says:

      I am so very sorry about your uncle. This is a really, really sad story. May he rest in peace.

  11. Peter Woodall says:

    Thank you for the correction Phillip–the article has been updated.

  12. LaSalle says:

    Thank you, Phillip Schearer, for your story!

    1. Peggy says:

      Hi, I lived at 320 N. 8th Street for a few years back then. We were a family of 7 living in a one bedroom rooming house. My dad moved there while my sister’s and I lived with my grandmother. Once she passed we came to stay with him. Meet a lot of the men who lived in Skid Row and also did recitals and things of that nature at Sunday Breakfast during Christmas. There was at that time I believe four families who raised children there.

  13. Roy tillery says:

    I was bored and raised in skid of phila during the late fifties and sixties being ..colored
    I experienced little racism and roam the area and enjoyed most of people
    We had folks from all over the world and we all got along ..that schools were
    Good …lots of kids spent summers at camp happy in the far northeast of Philly
    Sure thier were lots of bums I knew and fed a few..ate hot dogs at Jerry,s
    When to the movies on 8th st. I went away to USAF but I always found my way back
    To philly that has changed so much…

  14. Bill Baker says:

    Where could I find what stood at 433 N. Franklin St.? That address is on the death certificate of a very distant cousin who apparently was down on his luck.

    Thanks.

    1. Steve Metraux says:

      A newspapers.com search on the address associates it with Arthur Rubin, who was a Republican Committeeman in the Skid Row area during the 1950s. He shares a surname with Jacob Rubin, who I mention in this article as the most notorious slumlord in the Callowhill area, and whose office was on 422 N. 7th St. Assuming the Rubins were related, your relative may have rented from them.

      Hope this is helpful and not too belated.

      1. THOMAS J. AUGUSTINE says:

        Hello Mr. Metraux,

        I worked at the Police Admin. Building, at 8th & Race st. for 20 years. I joined the Police Dept. in 1967 and worked various assignments around the city. I went to the PAB in 1985 and retired in. Do you have any info on the Atlanta Hotel, 11th & Spring Garden Sts. My biological father lived there in 1963. He was an alcoholic and died at Hahnemann in June of 63. I hope you can help me, Thank You, Thomas Augustine

        1. James J. Marlowe II says:

          Mr. Augustine: You might want to try the national archives. It has hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pictures and articles and descriptions and things online. I hope this helps. Best of luck.

  15. Mike V. says:

    When I was a kid in the 1970’s, we would come off the ramp from I-95 and drive south on 2nd St. under the Ben Franklin bridge. There were several streets of old, small row homes along that stretch below Callowhill that my parents referred to as Skid Row. Some of those streets are gone now, replaced by the Vine St. Expressway; but I recall it being full of homeless men drinking out in the open. By the mid-1980’s they had largely disappeared even before the Expressway was built. That area is several blocks east of the Skid Row you are talking about. Is this where these men went when they were displaced as the old Skid Row was demolished?

  16. Roderick L Wells says:

    If this thread is still open, I’d like to say I lived on Vine Street in 1963/1964. I was 19. I worked as a ‘muzzler’at Cassidy/Richlar at the corner of 5th and Vine. It was a ‘shape-up’ room, small and unheated, where skid row residents would gather to be put on the advertising-folder delivery trucks which usually crossed the Ben Franklin into the richer suburbs north and west to place the flyers on the doors of suburban homes. My fellow workers were all alcoholics with one or two recovering exceptions. I ate at Jerry’s restaurant, where a substantial diner menu offered food at prices so cheap if you had a dollar you could eat three times. I also frequented Max’s store where is wife, a red-haired doll who dressed in that fifties, sixties sense of sexuality, much like Al Bundy’s wife in ‘Married With Children’. When the sterno deaths occurred two of the guys were occasional workers at Cassidy/Richlar.It was a hard life for all. But there were moments when, as in the Camus Sysyphus, we found the joy misery can offer.

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