How LA’s Skid Row Really Got Its Name

If “Skid Row” comes from “Skid Road” in logging communities, the reader might understandably ask, “What logging communities in Los Angeles, exactly?” Seattle, however — couched in the forest-saturated Pacific Northwest — makes the perfect home for roads where logs once skidded. The Seattle Times says that logs from the Pacific Northwest used to make their way into Seattle proper and toward its waterfront along the Puget Sound. Seattle, if the reader remembers, is a hilly place with lots of up and down slopes. While debate about the actual road that inspired the name remains — either Washington Street, First Avenue, or Yesler Way — everyone agrees that logs used to be greased to help them slide along roads better. Hence: Skid Road. American History says that Seattle’s function as a lumber supplier started as far back as the 1850s.

Almanac says that the term “Skid Road,” over time, came to be synonymous with cheap neighborhoods and dilapidated buildings. Presumably, this is because regions full of dragged timbre didn’t make the best residential or commercial areas. Depending on the frequency of the logs carried down the street — which likely began as unpaved paths — roads would have been extremely chewed up. This is especially true given all of Seattle’s rain, which would have carried mud and grit everywhere. And so, by 1915 “Skid Road” took on the meaning of a generally battered, cheap, and unsavory part of town.