skid row
3
7.7
- noun
- /skɪd roʊ/
:
barrio marginal
- If we think about Brother Africa who was murdered on Skid Row, then don't we need things like, what if we had housing for Brother Africa?
- skid row homelessness
I used to volunteer on Skid Row, really.
- I used to volunteer on Skid Row, really.
- My best friend of all time is on Skid Row, has been there for four years.
- I've, I had not really felt very scared in homeless areas like Skid Row.
- And I make a point of running through Skid Row on purpose because I want to see what's going on there.
- What what is it about Skid Row that I mean, why is it such a condensed?
- You go down to Skid Row and you see what some of the Alcoholics really look like.
- And he literally went to Skid Row and he started helping people who were homeless winos.
Examples
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You go down to Skid Row and you see what some of the Alcoholics really look like.
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As a place of refuge and a collective way of life for the downtrodden, skid row thus became both a coherent social place within the urban landscape and a cohesive symbolic construct.
Academic text (1995) -
My best friend of all time is on Skid Row, has been there for four years.
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You know, my dad used to walk me down to skid row once a month.
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I used to volunteer on Skid Row, really.
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And I make a point of running through Skid Row on purpose because I want to see what's going on there.
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The homeless who lived on skid row were united in principles, conditions, relationships, interests, and sense of place.
Academic text (1995) -
Los Angeles has the ignominious distinction of being the homeless capital of the nation, and skid row is ground zero of the crisis.
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They put locks on the trash cans in the surrounding districts so people wouldn't leave Skid Row to come scavenge for food.
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The area known as skid row is filled with many people facing homelessness and poverty.
Synonyms
∞
6.4
A place where people live without a home in a city
77
3.0
A poor part of a city with crowded, run-down houses and few services
6
7.0
An area of a city where very poor people live in small rough houses
2
2.7
A poor part of a city where many people live in small, crowded houses
A rough part of town with bars where loggers gather
How Run-down
Surface Forms
Morphology
skid + row
The sense 'an area of a city where many homeless or poor people live' is not derivable from the literal meanings of 'skid' (to slide) and 'row' (a line or street); the phrase is historically lexicalized (from 'skid road') and functions as an idiom. This language-specific, conventionalized meaning would not be predictable to a B1 learner who only knows the constituent words.
Etymology
The noun skid row may come from old 'skid roads' used to move logs, where skid meant sliding logs and row meant a street. Those streets had many cheap bars and rooms where poor, jobless workers stayed, so skid row now means 'an area of a city where many homeless or poor people live'.