Skid Row
So yesterday I got to chat for 45 minutes about Skid Row.
A producer from a widely listened to podcast contacted me and asked me to provide more “background information” on the work that I had done on Skid Row. For those of you who have read older posts on this occasional blog, you’ll know that this is a sideline to my work on homelessness that periodically preoccupies me and that I have written a bit about. Instead of linking to the pieces that are available online, I’ll just say google my last name and “Skid Row” and you should be able to find the pieces that I have written pretty easily.
My interest in Skid Row started when I came to Philadelphia for graduate school and I was walking around Independence Mall. Looking past Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell I saw all of the large squat solid buildings surrounding the mall, products of mid-20th century urban architecture, and saw urban renewal writ large. What, I wondered, was here before the area was cleared and redeveloped? The answer was Skid Row.
This transformation became the topic of my first article published in a peer review journal. For a long time Skid Row for me was the road less traveled, the direction in which I could have taken my budding academic career but chose not to. Instead I have focused on looking at homelessness in more contemporary and policy-relevant contexts, involving how homelessness sits at the nexus of various services systems and informed largely by administrative data.
About five years ago I had some time and started scouring local archives and online newspaper collections, and spent time looking for anybody and anything that may still exist that could inform what it was like to be on Skid Row in the post-World War II era. I found enough to keep me going, and I liken the process to one of historic archaeology, in which I dig up historical, metaphorical bones and try to piece together what I find into a viable skeleton. The story of Skid Row is largely the story of its inhabitants, an extremely poor and marginalized population of aging white men, often with a penchant for alcohol, and of the geography, set in declining, post-industrial areas with older buildings converted to uses – flophouses, rescue missions, bars and the like – that catered to the aforementioned population. History is not kind to preserving artifacts and accounts from marginalized populations. In digging up Philadelphia’s Skid Row, I’d find a vertebrae here or a femur which made for a very partial skeleton, and I fill in the gaps with my own inferences and observations. I enjoy this work, and if my day job ever slows down I fantasize of putting a book together around this.
This little sideline is a somewhat obscure one, with a limited audience, so I was pleasantly surprised when the producer contacted me. They were getting background for a show on the impacts of urban freeways upon the neighborhoods that they were built upon. I prattled on for a good bit about Skid Row and the impact that the Vine Street Expressway had on it, and they seemed interested, asked good questions, and obviously read the stuff I had written on it. An old professors dream (albeit a modest one). I don’t know the extent they will use the material that I went over, if at all, but it was fun way to spend part of an afternoon.