Talk:Skid row

Band versus location

WHat is there apart from the band? -- Tarquin

23 Skidoo. The intersection of 23rd and East Yesler in Seattle. AKA Skid Row, Skid Road. I remember my Mom telling me back in the late 1950's. When we were driving past, there was a black man with no legs on a creeper pushing himself about. I had never seen a black man and certainly not one without legs. Sorry, just an anecdote. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:243:C501:F300:B1B4:9037:D1D0:6A3D (talk) 19:28, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

The original meaning of the term -- the place where logs roll down a hill and into the water for lumberjacks to move them down to the mill. Or the second meaning of the term -- the bad part of town. -- Zoe

That would be skid row. --mav

This is the same as red dwarf(stellar object)/Red Dwarf (television)(scifi sitcom) and quantum leap(physics term)/Quantum Leap(scifi drama). --mav

I don't see that at all. Skid Row would have two capital letters no matter what the context. -- Zoe

Why? The other contexts are not proper nouns but just regular nouns. --mav

They're place names. -- Zoe

You misunderstand - they are place name types. For example one can talk about the skid row in Los Angeles (note lower case). But the proper name of the place would be Los Angles Skid Row, not just Skid Row. --mav

I disagree, but I'm not going to press it since we haven't had to deal with it up to this time. I'm sure it WILL come up. So, what about the original one, in Seattle? -- Zoe

IMO opinion when somebody writes Skid Row (note caps) they almost always are talking about the band. Therefore dominant usage wins. The name of the skid row in Seattle would be Seattle's Skid Row in the same way as there is a San Francisco's China Town. Make a disambiguation block at the top of this page. --mav

Mav is right, "Skid Row" is the title or formal name of a spacific place, while "skid row" is a type of place that could be named something else. Jake b 04:13, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

I have never heard of the band.. sorry. For me the dominant usage is the run-down area and the Little Shop of Horrors song! Zargulon 08:51, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

I concur with Zargulon and Zoe, and I disagree with mav. Yes, skid row refers to the generic concept of a run-down area for homeless people, but Skid Row in caps, as used by most journalists, usually refers to a well-known particular Skid Row. The largest and most well-known Skid Row is Skid Row in Los Angeles. The band is obscure, as are most metal bands, due to the fact that most of them lack street cred, as opposed to people with genuine issues to sing about, like 50 Cent. It's true that the band is the first thing that comes up on Google under "skid row," but most of those Web sites (including the band's own Web site) would fail to qualify as reliable sources as to its popularity or notability.

As a better measure of the band's notability, I ran a search on the 46 million articles in InfoTrac OneFile, which your local public library should have access to unless your local library is a total joke (most English-speaking North American public libraries have InfoTrac access). Nearly all the 2,114 hits were about Skid Rows (with capitalization) in Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and New York. And we're talking about articles in well-established publications, like U.S. News and World Report, Time, Newsweek, Variety, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, etc. If this Skid Row band is getting any media coverage, it must be in metal-specific magazines so tiny that they aren't even carried by InfoTrac (which carries the full text of every major magazine in North America back to 1980 plus most smaller ones). --Coolcaesar 07:21, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

Skid Row, the band.

Skid Row is also a band, consisting of Johnny Solinger (vocals) Rachel Bolan (bass) Snake Sabo (guitars) Scotti Hill (guitars) and Rob Hammersmith (drums). Classified as 80's hairmetal, but also loved by every genre from classical rock, to punk.

The Real Skid Row is located in Downtown Los Angeles

You can read the hell we go through at http://Robertocarbajal.itgo.com Hope to never see you there.

This isn't a pissing contest as to which Skid Row is the "real" one. LA's may be horrendous, but until you've seen East Hastings Street Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (one of the two original Skid Roads, with Seattle's Yesler Way) don't presume that LA's is any worse. I've had visitors to the city from New York and Chicago express amazement at the highly-visible conditions in "our" Skid Road/Row. LA may have borrowed the name Skid Row, as have countless other cities across North America as the term is now idiomatic in English, as is its derivative "on the skids". But LA wasn't even a twinkle in Cecil B. deMille's eye when Vancouver's and Seattle's residents coined the name Skid Road for the back-end of their rough little settlements (1860s, roughly). And BTW the form "Skid Row" is decidedly a Britishism, as a "row" is a British term for a street lined by houses/rowhouses, or perhaps situated on a path along a hedgerow; its original form would appear to have been Skid Road, after the method of building "roads" out of logs to skid freight over the surface of; and the Skid Row adaptation of that is likely British Columbian in ultimate derivation because of the heavy British flavour of Vancouver's dialect, especially from 1885-1914 (the opening of the railway to WWI) when the city's 4/5 male population was decidedly British-majority, and among that overwhelmingly Scots. I can't see the "row" adaption emerging in American English by itself, except perhaps by consonantal laziness dropping the final 'd' off 'Road'.Skookum1 22:35, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

Sad how canadians will argue about anything to pretend their silly little country has any usefulness.Djgranados (talk) 06:46, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

And just to be clear, because nobody on this talk page has spelled it out; the caps version Skid Row, derived from Skid Road, was yes originally Yesler Way in Seattle and, near-simultaneously (dates are uncertain) it was what is now the 100 block East Hastings in Vancouver - still the "heart of darkness" in that city, and notoriously so as explained previously just above. Even Angelelos are shocked, but that's not the point. The real Skid Row/Road(s) were/are Yesler Way (although Pioneer Square-1st Ave @ Pine is "the skids" now) and, to this day, Hastings Street. The name comes from corduroy roads that logs were "skidded" on - dragged over, basically, or in the case of Yesler or Hastings, the slope would be used to roll them down. For some reason at both locations is where a lot of bars and hookers and "bachelors hall" SRO-type hotel accommodations concentrated, and set the model for elsewhere (no kidding); in the old days it was injured/retired loggers and miners mostly into booze, sometimes opium; now it's.....well, hell, I guess.Skookum1 06:39, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

That's interesting. I've always heard that the original Skid Row/Road was West Burnside in Portland, Oregon because it was the way the logs cut in the West Hills were skidded down to the Willamette. And the neighborhood below NW 14th was very raw as recently as 35 years ago, before Powell's Books was more than Just Another Used Book Store. I'll have to find some cites beyond pointing the incredulous to read Stewart Holbrook's numerous publications, or mentioning Portland's other claim to fame -- a seaport notorious for Shanghaiing sailors. -- llywrch 16:28, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

disambig

I'd prefer a disambig page for all the Skid Row related articles. I came here looking for the band (with both caps) and was redirected to this one with the small r. Let's just make the first page disambig since there are so many uses for the term. For some of the users here it's a certain street, but for me it's always been the band. *shrug* So let's disambig it. Mithridates 12:26, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

I completely disagree. Skid Row (heavy metal band) has way less hit results than this article of Skid Row. Even if you deduct the number of hits from Skid Row (heavy metal band) from Skid Row its still considerably more. Skid Row appears in many dictionaries including the Oxford English Dictionary. I would say an historic article with more popularity should take president over a popular culture article. The Disambig link is very clear at the top. Furthermore if you do a google test the search results are very clear as to which is the most talked about on the internet. Mkdw^talk 06:21, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Erg, let's see, the band gets its name from the concept of Skid Row, but that's not as important as the band itself? When a phrase meaning something becomes a name for a product, you know the end of the world has come....Must be a generational thing...no offense, Mithridates, but think about it; the primary meaning is what the band was meaning when they chose their name; as far as I've heard they haven't trademarked the phrase (?? perhaps in incorporation name, I guess, but...). Skid Row/Road means one certain thing to a whole bunch of people who've never heard of the band; but they have heard of the wrong side of the tracks, the place where the bums and the junkies call home, "the skids". I know the band had heard of it when they chose their name, if only as a common phrase and not for its history.Skookum1 06:27, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Vancouver BC vs Vancouver Wa.

It does not seem to me that the discussion about the origins of "Vancouver" are particularily relevant to the definition of "skid road". It is fine to have a link from the first (or all) "Vancouver"s to the article about that city. Vancouver Washington (a smallish city across the Columbia River from Portland Oregon) does not add any content to this article.

  steve --129.128.25.4 06:47, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Well actually the origins of the phrase is more important in an encyclopedic sense. As per WP:NOT if this article was simply a definition it would be deleted on site. "Wikipedia is not a dictionary." Vancouver, Washington adds a huge amount to this article as its likely the place of origin for the term. An encyclopedia article about a single phrase is usually primarily about its term, usage, and relevence to contemporary times. I couldn't see any other direction this article could go with out being either deleted or off-topic. Mkdw^talk 11:12, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm amazed no Canadian has seen this thread. Vancouver, Washington has nothing to do with this word; IIRC, 19th-century Vancouver was surrounded by farmland, & the nearest mills on that side of the Columbia would have been in either Camas/Washougal or Kelso. The Vancouver referred to in the article is the much larger city -- and major Canadian seaport -- far to the north of this suburb of Portland. Someone needs to keep this embarassing confusion out of the article. -- llywrch 16:34, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Tidying

I removed the Vancouver, Washington reference which ahd snuck its way in here, and have tried to tidy up the place/logic references, although still much to be done to keep the article from rambling back and forth; as with many articles esp re the Pacific Northwest there's a tendency for Americans (ahem) to overbuild their sections or as in the VAncouver WA case start adding out-of-context items (which is obviously why the confusion re Vancouver WA as had been added). In ref to one item I don't have time to either find a cite (or a cite-fix for, 'cause I think it's wrong):

Murray Cromwell Morgan, in his 1952 book "Skid Road", described how the loggers spent the summers in the mountains cutting down trees and how the winter snow and mud hampered operations. The out-of-work loggers would hang out on Skid Road hoping to find work and would often run out of money, sleep on the streets, and beg for food or money. This is where the connection between the operation of skidding logs and being poor and unemployed originated.

No; on what is now Hastings Street it was because of a concentration of bordellos, bars, loggers employment services, and other amenities for the working population; the begging thing didn't come along until the Depressions of the 1900s-10s and was accelerated in the 1930s; until the Great War that area had been part of a vibrant downtown, and as those of us old enough to remember remained so until the 1960s; "skid row/road" then applied more to areas north of it, towards the water; the whole of the area had been skid roads, by the way, in the logging sense. It had begun its decay into SROs and the attached bars (because of BC liquor licensing for hotels) as the shift from loggers and miners coming in looking for a place to drink and slut and sleep slacked off and also because the area where injured/retired loggers and other workers would settle because of the SROs; the specific association of Skid Row with Hastings is a later development, although supposedly it was the skid road there that cause the word to be coined (although as noted, again, skid roads were the norm in everywhere but Gastown which was built on boardwalks, if anything); not sure what citation to use here other than Major Matthews (see Gastown refs section) and other main Vancouver histories; Cromwell Morgan's logic is off to me; recounting the past in terms of current paradigms never works, and his analysis is particularly shallow, and misses the hobo jungles of the '30s completely (which spanned the area along the CPR cut, which now diagonal alspace —Preceding unsigned comment added by Skookum1 (talk • contribs) 18:19, 27 July 2007

First, did you finish writing your post, Skookum1?

Second, some of those facts must be wrong -- or incomplete. Setting aside where the term "Skid Row" originated, William Speidel in his Sons of the Profits (an irreverent history of the making of Seattle) furnishes proof that "Skid Row" was applied to Yesler Street by 1880 (p. 300). That would mean if the term originated in Vancouver, then it was before 1880 -- not the 1st decade of the 20th century. There was a settlement in the Vancouver (as in BC) area at least as the early as 1860s, so Speidel's reference does not exclude the word from originating in Vancouver. But it needs more evidence to prove. -- llywrch 05:17, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

I've done my best to clear up the mess. Doubtless more could be done, but I think the article is now unembarrassing. - Jmabel | Talk 02:23, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

To Llywrch: Vancouver's beginnings are in the mid-1860s with the foundation of the Hastings Mill, which was moved from Brockton Point (where currents made docking difficult for ships) to the north end of Dunlevy, and "officially" Gastown was born on September 1, 1867, when Gassy Jack Deighton rowed around into the inlet to found his bar at what is now Maple Tree Square at Carrall and Water/Powell. Other entrepreneurs quickly followed and the "town" was in its beginnings by the spring of 1868; the townsite formally wasn't laid out until about 1870 when it was dubbed "Granville, B.I." (Burrard Inlet, a designation shared by Moodyville and Barnet and a few other spots) by the post office and the govt survey crews; Hastings Street from Carrall to Cambie was part of the townsite, and it was the location of the original bordellos - rough cabins and tents in the woods; the low hill from what is now Main Street down to Carrall was not a surveyed road, but the "skid road" in question, and that's still the core of the hard-core. But yes, when the term came into use is not known specifically, and it may be that Seattle's usage is older, and became translated to Gastown/Vancouver's equivalent; Granville/Gastown mushroomed in the early 1880s and the extended streets beyond the townsite (all six blocks of it) were created around that time, including Hastings east of Carrall (Carrall is the 00-block between East and West Hastings); so it's hard to say exactly if Seattle is first or Vancouver is, unless maybe there's a provenance in early provincial newspapers (most published in Victoria and New Westminster; most likely the term might show up in the New Westminster paper(s)). Might be a chicken-and-egg thing, or the usage might have been "in common" at the time, i.e. the loggers knew both towns, and the term might have evolved in parallel; in Gastown's case the jurisdiction of the erstwhile constable's powers didn't go past the townsite, or there was little reason/initiative to do so, so the 00-block and 100-block East, the skid road (then still largely forest on both sides) became the new concentration of sin; not that Gastown itself wasn't - mostly saloons, y'see - but the dicier stuff, including gambling and whores, seems to have been relocated to East Hastings (not named as such yet, pre-1885) from the 100-200 block West when the townsite was laid out, or at any rate got higher airs about itself; later they moved to Dupont Street (now East Pender), which in the 1890s became Chinatown (until the 1885-86 winter riots Gastown had been entirely mixed; the Chinese went at first to the southeast corner of False Creek in the wake of the riots - an area still called China Creek, at least to people long-time in the area (roughly Broadway and Clark area) and they moved into Dupont Street, which was mostly the bordellos which had had to move again farther away from Gastown's new self-conscious respectability. In either case, Seattle or Vancouver, it's decidedly a Pacific Northwest-origin term.Skookum1 (talk) 20:40, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Wooden Block Road

I first stayed in Vancouver in the early 1960. I remember walking down Water St to what I thought was Powell St, but after checking on Google Maps it may well have been Alexander St. Parts of the asphalt were wore away, and underneath were wooden brick like blocks. I assumed at the time this was the previous road covering. And I have a foggy recollection of there still being a Sawmill across the railway track. Someone in Vancouver should check this out with the City Zarcom (talk) 07:49, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Where is Ramsey

Could whoever added the "Ramsey" para tell us where it is (!) Hugo999 (talk) 08:52, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

1956 doc by Allan King - Skid Row

Allan King, a notable Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentarist, just died on June 15, 2009, and the CBC has a "Remembering Allan King" section of its archives up and running; one of the items, a documentary from 1956 titled "Skid Row", focuses on Vancouver's Skid Row/ aka the Downtown East Side....not sure where to fit it in the article/refs....some of its footage/content might be interesting because it's from a time when Gastown was still very much part of Skid Row...haven't watched it in full yet....Skookum1 (talk) 18:58, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

Are they really "homeless" and "transient"?

See the LA section. Consider that some people want to move the poor people away but the argument against that is that the poor people LIVE there. Maybe they don't own property but does that make them "homeless"? We can say downtown is their "home" and they are not "transient" because they don't want to go anywhere else. Some of them say they don't want to be in shelters; like urban nomads in tents.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.85.14.106 (talk) 23:05, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

You'd have to find some substantial evidence to change the definition or wording, as homeless and/or transient as described by the American Heritage Dictionary, and Oxford English Dictionary, don't including any reference to "urban nomads". Personally I've never heard of that term being used to describe a living choice with in the homeless community. Perhaps you could try writing the article Urban nomad and see if it sticks, otherwise I'd say this is close to original research. Mkdw^talk 18:09, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

Skidmore

Is it just coincidence that Portland, Oregon's skid row is around Skidmore Fountain?

If not, being close to Seattle, Vancouver, etc some mention should be made of this location as well. 166.205.143.106 (talk) 03:52, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

"The only legal safe injection site in Canada"?

This claim strikes me as being possibly outdated or inaccurate, but I'm not entirely sure. afaik, there are several such sites across Canada, including in my city of Ottawa. They are completely legal, and hand out free needles and other sterilized injection/cooking gear. Am I missing something or does the article need to be updated? 75.119.244.162 (talk) 01:45, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

It's probably outdated. This article hasn't been revamped in a long time. Mkdw^talk 05:48, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Verifiable

The article is in need of verifiable and reliable sources. Over the years, the article has had numerous additions that are either factually inaccurate, or possibly accurate, but not recognized by reliable sources. The name has been challenged as having been applied and originating to multiple cities. To avoid further content disputes, and original research, I would like to see the article trimmed down to information that has solid reliable sources across all sections. The worst so far are Vancouver, Chicago, Philly, and the trivia section. I have gone ahead and removed unreferenced trivia information and prose sentences that have had citation needed templates on them since 2009. I have also added new CN templates to where it is required and will look to remove those after an appropriate amount of time. As such an article re-write can start with the available verifiable information and then proceed to being expanding with the addition of new reliable sources. Mkdw^talk 01:54, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

• Why have references for New York's inclusion been systematically deleted? There was an inclusion from 2007 that included the use of the term in a play Little Shop of Horrors that was deleted. Why would that have occurred? Are the little brains attempting to assert themselves? Stevenmitchell (talk) 01:03, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

• • "...little brains attempting to assert themselves?" Oh Wikipedians, sometimes you are really are those people, aren't you? 98.232.26.108 (talk) 14:37, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

I want to bring attention to a sentence in the second paragraph:

   Its current sense appears to have originated in the Pacific Northwest.[3]

The term Pacific Northwest is **never** used in Canada as a term for South Western BC. This sentence deprecates Vancouver's most certain historical contributions to the term Skid Row. Also, the reference ([3]) needs to be accessed with a Seattle library card. This needs to be more properly cited with a more broadly (if not universally) available source. --Jrgracey (talk) 04:57, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

ProQuest Newsstand and ProQuest Historical Newsstand are already available at most metropolitan public libraries in the United States as well as most academic libraries. --Coolcaesar (talk) 06:46, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

Slum?

Do "skid row" and "slum" have a different shades of meaning, or connotations? If so, that should be explained in the article.

The article slum says that "skid row" and "slum" are often used interchangeably. Does that mean "not always"? Is there an example where only one of the two words is appropriate?

-- Austrian (talk) 21:25, 27 September 2015 (UTC)

In my experience, "skid row" can (but not necessarily always) refer to one specific street. I don't think the word "slum" has that single-street option, except by accident. Skid row can mean the primary street of a slum area, or it can mean slum-like conditions in general, or it can (as in "he ended up on skid row") refer literally or metaphorically to a person's current living conditions.

I don't have written citations to back this up with, but I'll see if I can find any. TooManyFingers (talk) 03:38, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

US-centric?

Clearly, as no other places are discussed. Yet the phenomonen and the moniker are universal in the English-speaking world. >SerialNumber54129^{...speculates} 14:24, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

Actually, if the term is well-known elsewhere, it's merely yet another example of American cultural hegemony. Which is not notable in and of itself. Unless you have any evidence that the term is actually used to describe any neighborhood outside of the United States or Canada, I'm getting rid of that unnecessary "globalize" tag. --Coolcaesar (talk) 03:39, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

Hearing no objections, I'm pulling out that unnecessary "globalize" tag and revising the geographical scope of the article. Having visited six continents and followed the international news media regularly for over 20 years, I'm quite certain at this point that it's a North American term. --Coolcaesar (talk) 04:04, 16 March 2018 (UTC)