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Chapter Seven - City on the Skids
- University of Missouri Press
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Chapter Seven City on the Skids But what has happened to Market Street the skid row of my adolescent years? Where are the tattoo parlors, novelty stores, hock shops—brass knucks in a dusty window—the seedy pitch men— (“This museum shows all kinds social disease and self abuse. Young boys need it special”—Two boys standing there can’t make up their mind whether to go in or not—One said later “I wonder what was in that lousy museum?”)—Where are the old junkies hawking and spitting on street corners under the gas lights? —william s. BurrOughs, “St. Louis Return” D 81 ESPITE THE EFFoRTS oF PRoGRESSIVE ERA REFoRMERS, the problem of footloose and lawless men and boys continued, and in some ways intensified, in the first three decades of the twentieth century . Recognizing the problem, the St. Louis Provident Association, the Salvation Army, and the St. Vincent De Paul Society cooperated in 1925 to create the Central Bureau for Transient Men, which in 1926 became the Central Bureau for Transient and Homeless Men. The Bureau for Men offered social services to indigent men, but also tried hard to clear vagrants from St. Louis’s streets by reporting men who broke the local laws against begging. Although its primary focus was on adult males, the Bureau for Men developed special programs to deal with the wandering boys (under the age of twenty-one) who joined the ranks of the homeless.1 In the early twentieth century, St. Louis, along with many other American cities, including New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Denver, had a well-defined section known as “Skid Row,” where homeless men and boys congregated. The term skid row originated in the late nineteenth century to describe urban communities made up mostly of men and boys who were skidding on a downhill slide of bad luck, unemployment or seasonal employment, and poverty, like the logs in a logging camp skidding 82 THE DEAD END KIDS oF ST. LoUIS down a trail toward the sawmill: that trail was called the “skid road.” There were women, including prostitutes, on Skid Row, but they were a tiny minority of the residents. In American cities, Skid Row areas were well-known places where bars, pawn shops, and seedy rooming houses catered to men and boys who wandered the country searching for work, adventure, pleasure, or a place to hide. In St. Louis, male transients turned Market Street between Union Station and the river into a shabby and menacing wasteland.2 Skid Row’s inhabitants tended to fall into three general categories: the hobo, the tramp, and the bum. Recent social scientists have defined a hobo as a migratory worker who went from job to job across a wide geographical area. Tramps, on the other hand, were migratory nonworkers, who eked out a living by begging, stealing, or engaging in con games. Bums were stationary nonworkers, who often became permanent residents of a particular Skid Row and stereotypically suffered from alcoholism. Within Skid Row, these men helped and supported each other, forming a cohesive community and sharing a set of values and norms that defied those of mainstream society.3 Psychologists and sociologists have offered many explanations of why particular individuals ended up on Skid Row, but certainly the rapid growth in these areas had to be connected to social and economic conditions . Psychological explanations include chemical dependency, emotional immaturity, lack of a nurturing and supportive family, and failure to adjust to the demands of “normal” adult life. Sociological explanations include unemployment and poor housing. The primary factor in the growth of Skid Row communities in the years leading up to the Great Depression was the enormous demand for temporary male labor in fields, orchards, construction sites, railroad yards, and lumber camps around the nation.4 The expansion of Skid Row in St. Louis came at a time when the city was trying hard to beautify its streets and clean up its image. In 1901, Mayor Rolla Wells supported a group of amendments to the city’s charter with the purpose of sprucing up the city for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, originally planned for 1903, but held in 1904. During this feverish period, a distinguished group of planners and architects created a wide boulevard connecting several of the city’s parks with Forest Park, the site of the elaborate fair. On a single day, September 15, 1904, more than four hundred thousand people came through the turnstiles to view the spectacle of...