skid row, n. — Green’s Dictionary of Slang

skid row n.

also skid, skid road

[late 19C logging jargon skid road, a prepared track with greased skids over which logs were hauled towards the river that would float them down to the sawmill; by late 19C (poss. earlier, the orig. ‘skid road’ was Yesler’s Way in Seattle, Wash., constructed 1852) the sense had extended to describe a low-class district of drinking and gambling houses, which grew up around the terminuses of skid roads and was extended into sl. to mean that part of a town where loggers spent their free time or lived when they were out of work. It was the latter meaning, with its added implication of a man, rather than a log, who was ‘skidding downhill’ economically that dominated usage by the 1930s, when skid road became skid row; hence the use of row to denote the concentration of certain businesses or occupations in certain urban streets, e.g. Hollywood’s Poverty Row, the area where the cheaper studios congregated]

1. (also the Skid, the skid row) the centre, in any town or city, for down-and-outs, alcoholics, tramps and other poor or homeless individuals.

1925		K. Mullen ‘Westernisms’ in AS I:3 151: ‘Skid-road’ is another word from the lumber industry. It has come to apply to any street where the ‘working stiff’ hangs out.
1927		‘Jargon of the Und.’ in DN V 462: Skid row, The lowest strata of the underworld.
[1928		Survey 1 Aug. 457/2: He then drifted into that part of the city called the skid-road, and heard a man speaking from a box [DA]].
1930		G. Milburn ‘The Timber-Beast’s Lament’ in Hobo’s Hornbook 115: For I’ve blowed the rest on skid-roads / Of a hundred gyppo towns.
1936		K. Mackenzie Living Rough 93: I’ll beat it down to skid road and get a bowl of stew.
1942		C. Himes ‘Lunching at the Ritzmore’ in Coll. Stories (1990) 16: Here, a short walk up from ‘Skid Row’, [...] is haven for men of all races, all creeds, all nationalities.
1943		W. Guthrie Bound for Glory (1969) 341: Skid Row, one of the skiddiest of all Skid Rows [...] We moved along the Skid looking in at the bars.
1955		‘Blackie’ Audett Rap Sheet 17: When I got out on the street I seen I was down on the skid row – cheap flophouses, pawnshops and pool halls.
1965		Samuel E Wallace Skid Row 13: Skid row is a phenomenon peculiar to the United States. It is that run-down area in almost every American city where the homeless can and do live. It is that collection of saloons, pawn shops, cheap restaurants, second-hand shops, barber colleges, all-night movies, missions, flop houses and dilapidated hotels which caters specifically to the needs of the down-and-outer, the bum, the alcoholic, the drifter.
1967		Ottowa Citizen (Ontario, Can.) 9 Dec. 63/4: The Winnipeg skid is he best stemming ground [...] skid-wise landlords rent rooms for $1 weekly. On the Vancouver skid [...] living is easy.
1978		P. Theroux Picture Palace 100: The guy’s a mess – he’s dead, skid-row by the sea.
1984		C. White Life and Times of Little Richard 97: We were able to help a lot of people on the skid row.
1991		D. Widgery Some Lives! 139: The East End is London’s traditional Skid Row.
1998		L. Stringer Grand Central Winter (1999) 191: Twenty years ago [...] I had rented my first Manhattan apartment on the Lower East Side, just a few blocks shy of the Bowery (then known as Skid Row).
2006		Age (Melbourne) 6 Jan. 🌐 A fat-gut and a face that had got off skid row twice.
2009		(con. 1960s) J. Ellroy Blood’s a Rover 19: He found Wendell Durfee on L.A. skid row and killed him.
2011		Times Review 30 Apr. 3/1: A schizophrenic classical musician living rough on Skid Row in LA.

2. attrib. use of sense 1.

1938		E. Hoffman Price ‘Revolt of the Damned’ in Double-Action Gang 🌐 June He was a Skid Row bum.
1940		Amer. Mercury Dec. 412: Most of the skid-road bars provide either a floor show with a few hard-bitten bosom-heavers or a hill-billy band [DA].
1948		Sun (Baltimore) 18 Sept. 3/2: Salisbury was a skid-row alcoholic when he was committed to Eloise.
1953		T. Runyon In For Life 36: He and a Skid Row hustler were parked in a country road.
1961		Kerouac letter 23 Oct. in Charters II (1999) 314: Novel covers story from skid row hotel Mars of first getaway, to finding you in woods.
1972		C. Bukowski Erections, Ejaculations etc. 110: I [...] walked over to my skidrow court thinking about what mistake I was making.
1975		J. Wambaugh Choirboys (1976) 294: Locked in the cruel embrace of a tattooed merchant seaman in some skid row flophouse.
1980		J. McClure Spike Island (1981) 229: If you split off these drunks, the Skid Row types, what are you left with?
1993		T. Jones Pugilist at Rest 135: He had knocked some jack roller’s eye out [...] in a skid-row street fight and got ten years.
1999		Indep. Information 11–17 Sept. 6: Pieced together on a skid-row budget.
2002		J. Lerner You Got Nothing Coming 32: Fuck you, Skell! We unnerstan’ that you ain’t nothing but a punk-ass, skid-row motherfucker.
2011		E. Beetner ‘Zed’s Dead, Baby’ in Pulp Ink [ebook] Pete looks more prep school than skid row, but once the demon rock gets a hold of you, all bets are off.
2024		J. Meades Empty Wigs (t/s) 331: ‘Don’t think of yourself as a smuggler. Such a skid row word. I prefer courier’.

3. a dead end for one’s career.

1977		(con. 1949) J.G. Dunne True Confessions (1979) 76: The supervisors saw the coroner’s office as a skid row for doctors and out-of-work embalmers.
1978		R. De Christoforo Grease 53: Not that I thought for a minute that I would wind up on skid row. That’s not me. Basically, when the chips are down, I’m a survivor.

4. (US drugs) the convalescent ward of a drug rehabilitation hospital.

1959

Murtagh & Harris Who Live In Shadow (1960) 35: I stayed in the shooting gallery about a week. And then they sent me to ‘skid row.’ I guess you’d call it the convalescent ward.

5. a down-and-out alcoholic.

1980

J. McClure Spike Island (1981) 230: In any case, the D-and-Ds tend not to be the Skid Rows, the regulars.