strawberries blazing rocks in the midday sun

Dying to Get Off Skid Row

Downtown can be a last chance... or the last stop
By SAM SLOVICK
LA Weekly
Wednesday, August 2, 2006 - 11:30 am

“They’re so broken down,” Angela tells me. “Roaches in the cereal bowl. No bath for a month.” Last week she walked into a room with a man whose foot was falling off.

“Decomposing flesh. Foot was five times the size it was supposed to be, with maggots crawling out of it. He was like, ‘What are you guys doing here?’”

“As far as being able to help and not harm her, I don’t even know if getting clean is the right advice. She’s very, very old. There’s a couple old ladies down here like that. I’m not talking about alcohol. Nothing’s more upsetting than watching a 70-year-old lady smoking crack at 8 o’clock in the morning.”

"Fantastic! But when will I look out my window and not see septuagenarian strawberries (female who trades sex for crack or money) blazing rocks in the midday sun on my block?"



The article opens at the Baltimore Hotel, an SRO building.

Single Room Occupancy (SRO) Housing Corporation was established in February 1984. It is a private, non-profit, community-based organization which is dedicated to building a healthy community for homeless and very low-income individuals in Los Angeles' Central City East neighborhood--more commonly known as "Skid Row". SRO Housing Corporation pursues its mission of community revitalization by providing clean, safe and affordable housing, managing public space, and administering needed social support services.

To achieve this goal, SRO Housing Corporation strives to preserve the existing turn-of-the-century, single-room-occupancy hotels in downtown Los Angeles. It purchases these hotels and completely renovates and refurbishes them as well as constructs new ones.
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I'll have to sift for information on "Fireproof" hotels. Were hotels fire prone at some point?