Los Angeles Poverty Department///LAPD

Our visit to LAPD marked the first time I’d be to Skid Row in a while. Two summers ago, I was a teachers assistant for a visual arts class at InnerCity Arts, which is a few blocks further into the district and is a site I found myself mentally referring back to frequently during the reading and the fieldtrip. InnerCity is in an area of Skid Row that is even more dominated by warehouses and Single Room Occupancy hotels: it reeks of urine on hot summer days and the sidewalks are covered in flies and drug paraphernalia. It was extremely fascinating to me to observe the differences between not only Downtown and Skid Row, but also the different blocks of Skid Row. As some other people have voiced, I was also marginally confused as to the presentation of the program. I absolutely did value the stories as they were presented in the performances; however I suppose I thought that (due to the intimate scale of the visit), we would be having a more straightforward session of testimonials, etc. Ultimately, I think that our experiences at LAPD may require more of a long-term mental decoding than that which we perceived initially. The process of viewing and considering the LAPD’s skits mirrors the rampant perception of the Skid Row area versus the (according to LAPD) actual reality. As the skits progressed, I felt an increase in my personal connections to the situations and emotions being so rawly portrayed and it was through this theatrical “outlet” (which, frankly, is not so much an “outlet” as it is a component of life) that I truly valued the time spent at LAPD.