Making Downtown More Livable : Central City Project Develops Feeling of Community

The scene in the lobby of the Huntington Hotel on Main Street in downtown L.A. where the Central City Hotel Project was holding its first resource fair one recent afternoon:

Perhaps 30 people milled around in this cavernous, high vault of a room that despite the clean, fresh look of the cream-colored walls has a gaping hole in the peeling ceiling, exposing several feet of old rafters. Years of grime have dulled several prints that hang high, their subjects barely discernable--the Grand Canal in Venice, the good ships Nina, Pinta and the Santa Maria, sylvan scenes.

Just inside the door several vacant-looking people stood at an area set aside by counters and chicken wire bearing the sign “Agnes Variety Store and Food Market.” They made their selections of toilet articles, canned soups, bananas, individual packets of cereal and candy. At the other end of the room, just beside the fire door leading to the private rooms, the clerk and manager were conducting business behind another caged area and more chicken wire. Hand-lettered signs warned about alcohol, cooking in rooms, loitering.

Where the Action Was

On one side of a low partition, the lobby has been turned into a sitting room and this is where the action was.

A pool table had been piled high with raw vegetables, dips, bagels, doughnuts, sliced melon, cartons of oranges and tangerines. People stood around it or sat on overstuffed furniture that seemed to offer as much peril as comfort. A few picked up literature at the card table covered with English and Spanish language pamphlets on diabetes, scabies, head lice, AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases.

It was a mixed group assembled there--young, fresh-faced graduate students, conservatively dressed older bureaucrats and professionals, and the regulars of the Huntington, people with rather marginal relationships to mainstream society.

Among them were old people, a few transvestites, several who were obviously hallucinating, others who looked poor, worn out, wrecked, and those who just seemed down on their luck.

One man sat by himself at a card table, wolfing down enormous quantities of food from the buffet. A young woman sat on the edge of a sofa, talking to no one and frequently bursting into gales of knowing laughter. An elderly white woman held an infant black girl on her lap, casually chatting with the baby’s mother, while another old woman, furious at the activity, kept changing her seat, ranting that “no one is doing a thing for the Lord.”

Others chatted a little awkwardly, one young man, having eyed the buffet for quite some time, affecting a blase tone as he headed toward it, saying, “Well, I’ll give it a try.”

Asked About Jobs

Not all the talk was of food. As the hotel residents mingled with their visitors, one man asked about jobs; a woman asked whether she could take a part-time job caring for an invalid without endangering her SSI payments; an old man asked why his Social Security check had not gone up when he’d heard other people’s had.

Teddy Stevens, 81, wearing a fedora and felt slippers burst open at the toes, visited with a stranger. A resident of the hotel for the past 32 years, he went through the litany of what Medicare did not pay for, summing it up, “I’ve had it for 17 years and they haven’t paid nothing yet.”

Not exactly tea at the Ritz, but all things are relative, and among those who have known the Huntington in recent years, the little gathering in the lobby offered a degree of cheer and conviviality that would have been unthinkable a year ago and still borders on the miraculous.

The Central City Hotel Project is a long title for a simple, and simply human, idea--developing a feeling of community among the residents, especially the elderly poor, who live in the single room occupancy hotels of the business area.

After a year of gradual, weekly interaction between graduate students from the California School of Professional Psychology and the hotel residents, representatives from services such as Veterans Administration, Social Security, the county’s Department of Social Services, the Skid Row Mental Health Project, the YMCA, the Angelus Plaza had been invited to come by, meet the residents, and break the ice that often keeps people from using services designed for them.

“Alice Callaghan got us into all this,” Judith Hardin, a psychologist who coordinates the school’s community-clinical program, said of the project’s beginnings. About two years ago, Callaghan, who runs Las Familias del Pueblo, a center on Skid Row that works with Latino families, told Hardin of her concern about the fear and isolation that characterized the life style of most of the elderly in the downtown area.

Loosely Defined Grant

Callaghan described the needs, suggested the project and helped the school obtain a loosely defined grant of $35,000 from Arco that would enable them to operate in hotel lobbies, developing a range of service programs and social events.

The Huntington, a huge, 260-room labyrinthian building, with a high proportion of elderly residents was chosen as the initial site. For all its shortcomings, its management agreed to let the outsiders come in and expressed an interest in improving the quality of life at the hotel.

The plan was for six graduate students to work in the hotel, largely unsupervised, combining the experience with their research projects. Things did not get off to a good start. For some students the operative phase of the program began and ended on the same day. The hotel--with a history, familiar to the area, of rape, muggings and knifings, prostitution, vandalism and burglary, drug deals made from a basket lowered from the upstairs dealer to clients in a parking lot--was just too frightening to the uninitiated. And the residents, many of them mentally ill and untreated, antisocial, were just too intimidating in their profound isolation.

It limped along, Hardin and project director, Regina Chace said last week, accomplishing little, until the decision was made to give it more structure. Last January Chace was hired as project director to provide students with some guidance. It no longer is related to credit or course work. Rather students are provided a stipend for this extra work and Hardin helps them integrate it into what they are learning at school.

They decided to have students work in the hotel at the same time or at least in pairs. They took self-defense training, had a seminar with police, met with people familiar with the environment. Mike Chimali, the hotel manager who was hired after the program started, made a room available to them where they could do intake and referral work or simply have coffee with the residents.

Chace knows the building and its inhabitants well by now. She moves through it comfortably, has a good working relationship with Chimali, whom she credits with having done much to clean the hotel up and improve the atmosphere over the last year, and has an easy, fond, familiarity with many of the residents.

Horror Stories

Her horror stories sound like ancient history, but they date back only to the early days of the project: The elderly who simply refused to leave their rooms for anything. Or those who would sit in the lobby, staring straight ahead, refusing to speak to anyone.

Of the man who had sat in the lobby for several days, running a razor blade back and forth over his face, unable to walk or talk, screaming if approached or touched, Chace can now say she was able to get a site visit from Skid Row Mental Health Project worker who made an assessment, called an ambulance and had the man committed for care. He is back now, under care and doing well, she said.

They found another man upstairs in his room. He had painted the room, the carpet, the bed, the curtains, the windows, everything. There was a logic to it from his point of view, she discovered. He was “roachproofing” the place and could leave no inch uncovered. They are working with him.

On Fridays, the five students’ regular day at the hotel, there are bingo games, videos, snacks. It has finally reached the point, she said, where residents will point out people in need of help to them, and best of all, visit, socialize and keep an eye out for each other, when project members are not there. They kid around. They even, she said, exchange birthday cards.

Now the emphasis is on creating an outreach program among the service agencies, especially those related to health needs. Thus the resource fair.

“We need a whole refocusing,” Chace said of the current system. “It’s structured now so that to receive services you have to go there. There are many who cannot,” she said, telling of one elderly woman, clearly delusional, whom she brought to a clinic, where the old woman was chided, “Why haven’t you come? I keep telling you to come.”

“Or,” she said, “going to Social Security where you are expected to come stand in line and fill out papers like everyone else. A schizophrenic can’t even stand in line . . . It’s like we have to reframe the whole problem in our thinking.”

Outreach Programs

Some agencies, such as the Skid Row Mental Health Project have begun outreach programs or rounds, and will come if asked to check on certain individual situations. Staff from the project were at last week’s gathering and one assessment was being made on the spot, Chace said, indicating with her head a conversation that was taking place between a resident and psychologist Dan Sherman of the project.

This was no resource fair where people line up at booths and arms themselves with literature, appointments and referrals. In fact, little business got done, but Chace was pleased with it. One young man with a history of mental illness whom Chace thinks is employable met a worker from the Department of Rehabilitation who arranged an appointment for him. A few questions about Social Security checks got answered.

“I wanted it to be low-keyed,” she said. “Mainly quite a few people from both sides made connections here.”

The whole program is a model that all concerned would like to see replicated in other hotels.

“When the grant runs out sometime next year,” Chace said, “we’ll try to submit other proposals . . . We’re trying to bring in volunteers, retired professionals, maybe elderly helping other elderly. We want to create a situation to keep this going if we don’t get funded. We don’t want it all to depend on us.”

Looking back over the last year, Judith Hardin commented how hard it was to describe changes that “seem so minor but are significant,” finding herself almost at a loss to detail them.

“It’s just that, the first time I went there, there was not a soul talking to another soul. I went back a year and a half later and met with the students. While we talked at least half a dozen residents dropped in to say ‘hi.’ Before, Teddy (Stevens) used to wait all day for a phone call from his daughter. Now he collects stuff for us, saves the Downtown News for us, drops in and visits all the time,” she said.

“It’s neighborly. Who knows where that will lead? We hope it will spread.”