The anxiety was almost palpable along Los Angeles' Skid Row on Wednesday night of last week. Businessmen who work in the gleaming new office towers near by hurried home along the Harbor Freeway. Frightened winos and derelicts crowded the dilapidated missions or dozed uneasily on hardwood chairs in the shelter of neighborhood chapels. Liquor sales were off, and the drab streets, lined with pawnshops, surplus-clothing stores and aging apartment hotels, were uncommonly empty. In the past eight weeks, seven middle-aged men, most of them down-and-outers, had been found in doorways, alleyways...
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