Here's the opening of LA Weekly style editor Linda Immediato's cover story last week on the Canadian building on skid row. I've never read so many of my favorite key words rammed together! It warms the heart: hookers, abuelas, action, storefronts, crumbling, shit, raw, dirty, scraps, hand-to-mouth, functioning drug addicts, benders, male crack whores, paranoid, delusional, imagined conspiracy, swishing:
The hookers downtown don’t look anything like they do in movies. No fishnets or pushup bras. They are in their 50s and 60s and look like little grandmas — which is why they’ve become known as the abuelas. They dress like secretaries and keep bankers’ hours, working days to cash in on a little lunch and rush-hour action. For years, they were fixtures at the perpetually C-rated greasy spoon known as El Trouble but whose real name nobody seems to recall. It was part of the Canadian, a building on Skid Row’s Main and Winston streets, which also held a XXX movie theater, an adult bookstore, a few empty storefronts and, on its two top floors, a collection of crumbling lofts. The Canadian used to be called the Birdhouse, because pigeons had come through broken windows to roost in a few of the vacated lofts; they covered the floors with bird shit and flapped their wings through the wide hallways.
By 1996 only three people were living in the building.
That same year, the owners began to advertise for tenants to fill the lofts. The raw spaces were dirty, most of the fixtures were broken, there was no heat or gas, and bathrooms and showers were in the hallways. The people who moved in were starving artists picking up the scraps from the boom and bust of downtown's earlier art-loft era in the '80s and early '90s. Living an often overly romanticized hand-to-mouth existence, struggling from painting to painting, freelance job to freelance job, no sign of a steady paycheck in sight, they came for one reason: cheap rent. At first, there were a few residents, basically functioning drug addicts, who were able to hold on to a job, at least for a little while, between benders. One, from a wealthy Santa Barbara family, was a severe alcoholic with a crack addiction, habits made worse by a slight mental illness. He’d often pass out in the hallways or hang from the banisters. Occasionally he brought home male crack whores. Then there was the bona fide nut case — he was paranoid, delusional and occasionally aggressive, particularly toward the female residents. He’d corner them in hallways when no one was around or while they were in towels, skin still wet, fresh out of the shared bathroom showers, to interrogate them about some imagined conspiracy. In his calmer moments, he'd show up in the doorways of male residents, swishing red wine around in a wineglass and making small talk in an attempt to gain allies so that he wouldn’t get kicked out of the building.
Read the rest here, "Exiles on Main Street." Also in last week's edition, my dispatch from a santeria drumming in Whittier for the orisha Oshun, "Oshun's Fruit." It might freak you out a little.
* Photo of Canadian residents Liz McGrath and Morgan Slade by Kevin Scanlon.