Alcohol and Drugs

Homeless, Skid Row, and Alcohol

The classic case of homelessness is the solitary drinking man. He was viewed either with fear and revulsion (his lack of connection to kith and kin appeared to be linked to a lack of both control and a sense of responsibility), or he was viewed more positively as the romantic “traveling man” of Depression-era fame, who had given up his attachment to the material world of schedules and obligations (Glasser, 1994). Historically, homeless men were often assumed to be inhabitants of the skid rows of U.S. cities, neighborhoods that contained cheap lodging for transients and the marginally employed. The term comes from “skid road,” a road along which logs were skidded, probably in Seattle, Washington, where cheap rooms were available to lumberjacks in the early twentieth century (Cohen and Sokolovsky, 1989). Much of the single-room occupancy (SRO) housing in skid rows was torn down in the urban renewal programs of the 1960s and 1970s and in the process of gentrification of the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1970, utilizing participant observation and methods from linguistic anthropology, James Spradley documented the broad array of adaptive strategies used by men on the streets of skid row in [Page 8]Seattle, Washington. He also sought to figure out why men who spent time in the “drunk tank” of the local jails immediately returned to drinking upon their release. Spradley followed the life of skid row resident William R. Tanner, a literate man of fortynine who was arrested for public drunkenness nine times in the course of the year and served nearly 200 days in jail on drunk charges. At the end of one of his drunk-tank sojourns, Tanner wrote a letter to Spradley, which gave him insight into the futility of the drunk tank as a cure for alcoholism as well as the title of his book, You Owe Yourself a Drunk. (Mr. Tanner said that after thirty days in jail, “you owe yourself a drunk.”)

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