skid row

American  

[roh] / roʊ /

noun

1. an area of cheap barrooms and run-down hotels, frequented by alcoholics and vagrants.

---

skid row British  

/ rəʊ /

noun

1. slang a dilapidated section of a city inhabited by vagrants, etc

---

skid row Idioms  

1. A squalid district inhabited by derelicts and vagrants; also, a life of impoverished dissipation. For example, That part of town is our skid row, or His drinking was getting so bad we thought he was headed for skid row. This expression originated in the lumber industry, where it signified a road or track made of logs laid crosswise over which logs were slid. Around 1900 the name Skid Road was used for the part of a town frequented by loggers, which had many bars and brothels, and by the 1930s the variant skid row, with its current meaning, came into use.

---

Etymology

Origin of skid row

1930–35, earlier skid road an area of a town frequented by loggers, originally a skidway

Example Sentences

“On the Bowery,” the director Lionel Rogosin’s classic portrait of life on skid row, is not only a time capsule of a bygone New York, but also of a bygone form of documentary filmmaking.

From New York Times • May 30, 2024

In February, The Los Angeles Times reported that sanitation crews demolished an unofficial community-resource center in the city’s skid row in what officials called a regular cleanup.

From New York Times • May 10, 2023

“This is the county trying to get off by doing virtually nothing,” said Andy Bales, chief executive of the Union Rescue Mission in skid row.

From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 19, 2023

Carl Zephyr, a longtime skid row resident, said that a month ago, he noticed a friend staggering before collapsing on the sidewalk.

From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 7, 2023

I turned back toward them, astonished that even among skid row derelict joints they had “separate facilities.”

From "Black Like Me" by John Howard Griffin