Chicago Skid Row

When nineteenth-century Seattle lumberman Henry Yesler skidded logs to his waterfront sawmill, he rolled them down an inclined street lined with lodging houses, taverns, restaurants, brothels, pawnshops, and other stores. This original “Skid Road” later gave rise to the pejorative slang term “skid row,” referring to any place in a U.S. city where drunkenness and social pathology were said to concentrate. One current dictionary definition: “a district of cheap saloons and flophouses frequented by vagrants and alcoholics.”

This stereotype exaggerates one dimension of residential life among single working men while obscuring other important features that made these communities viable resources for the single working poor between 1870 and 1930. America's skid row lodging house districts emerged in the industrial cities that also served as railway hubs. New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle all harbored diverse lodging house districts. The largest and most prosperous developed in Chicago. There, at the peak of its rail activity, 2,840 miles of steam railway switched and sorted freight cars linking the city to 44,000 shipping [Page 59]points in forty-four states. Alice Solenberger estimated that as many as 50,000 men inhabited Chicago's lodging house district in 1911. The men lived in thousands of hotel dwellings arrayed along three streets: Madison to the west, Clark to the north, and State to the south.