Palace Hotel

I went to the Palace Hotel seeking a room in the year 2000. Any place was better than the Monterey Motel. I had been reading ads for the Palace and other SRO's ever since arriving in Long Beach in 1994. Did not know about Single Room Occupancy hotels until, oh, 2004, via a now defunct website. The weekly rental used to make renting a room more affordable than renting an apartment.

After my car died in 1999, I may have started checking out some of them. Turned down: only for men, at one downtown. The person at the Palace also told me I should not bother, would not like it, had to share bathroom with men who lived on floor where available room was. I said I could live with that. No longer remember if I insisted on being shown room; vaguely recall filling out an application.

I am backdating this post, if you read the blog, you will see that I am now going through paper clutter. Too bad I did not write what I intended to write when I clipped the two tiny parts of a Press-Telegram article, because now memory of the article is long gone. Anyway...

I met Jack Smith at 2nd Saturday Art Walk Change Please art exhibit. If I do not have a link to my article on the event on sidebar under Help Wanted will recitfy it when I finish this post. I do have links to a couple of Mr. Smith's videos featuring Al D who I knew well from the streets in 2004/2005.

Mr. Smith was featured in the article about something he told me he was working on in 2006: turning the Palace Hotel into shelter for homeless youth. Actually the piece of the article I have stated: "which shelters foster youths after they turn 18". Smith is quoted in the article as saying "I've always looked at the homeless as people who needed a home, not always as people who need services, and that has gone against the viewpoint of the homeless industry."

I agree with Smith as would many of my homeless peers, especially the working ones. At that time, in 2004, having a place to stay off the streets, I may have found gainful employment. Trying to look for a job while living on the streets was impossible for me to do. I tried.

I wrote about all of that on this blog, sorry you missed it and even more sorry that I took it off line, then copied it to disc, then deleted the Notepad documents, now that the same F-drive that put them on the DVDs no longer reads them. All that writing! All that editing! All those memories, likely lost in the recess of my mind. Does it matter? Probably not; just thought the grandkids might want to hear granny's tale of living on the streets.

What I get from these bits of paper is that Jack Smith was running for a district office seat whenever it was I clipped them.